The following excerpt is transcribed from the Zoom event that took place on 8 October 2020.

Key points

• Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework that facilitates a human-centered approach to understanding people’s everyday behaviours and actions in relation to task-based goals.
• The greatest advantage of JTBD is that it provides a method to take a view of the world through your customer to empathise with their needs and desires. This prevents you from allowing brand, product or service bias to cloud your understanding of your users and customers.

 

Speaker

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix.

Jim is the author of three books: Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020).

 

What is ‘Jobs To Be Done’ (JTBD)?

When thinking about people in relation to products, it is easy for organisations to regard people as just a consumer of their products and services. Strategic objectives of an organisation then become embedded in drivers such as ‘more product sales’ or ‘increase in brand awareness’ without understanding what the role of said product or service performs in their life.  

JTBD, instead, serves as a means to focus on the actual goal the customer is trying to achieve, by understanding their world view. As well as the basic steps to achieve a said outcome. Technology solutions, methods and even the brand itself are taken out of the equation, eg a sales journey or shopping cart journey flow.

 

The five elements: A simplified framework

1. Job Performer (who?)
2. Main Job (what?)
3. Process (how?/ the steps of performing that main job)
4. Outcomes/Needs (of getting the job done)
5. Circumstances (when?/where?)

This framework can help to filter and categorise signals from the outside world to document a ‘true’ understanding of users and customers. Questions like ‘What is the main job?’, and ‘What are the people trying to do?’ can be answered – adding structure and sense to information. This information can then be categorised and used to construct a bigger picture to influence strategic decisions.

 

Future proof your thinking

The greatest advantage of JTBD is that it provides a way to future proof your thinking by ensuring the longevity of your research. A first-principles approach of separating technology and preconceived methods to understand people’s fundamental needs and desires in their own environment reveals truths and consistencies in behaviours. The method or platform to achieve the desired outcome may change, the job itself will remain.

What is the difference between a Journey Map and a Job Map?

JK – The Customer Journey Map is a story of a “go-to-market strategy”, therefore it’s often full of assumptions and biases from an organisation’s perspective. The story that a Journey Map typically tells is – “I have an offering, and the people over there are the consumers of my offering. And I want to tell that story.”

A Job Map throws all that away and says – “The person over there has their own goals and their own workflow. And I want to understand that job independent of me.”So, a journey map and a Job Map have completely different perspectives on the world. It’s a different view, and you need both. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but a Job Map will give you a different view of the world. You’re asking, “How can we help people and what are they actually trying to get done?”

How do you apply the JTBD framework to multiple groups or users of one service participating at different points?

JK –The first thing you have to do is scope out a Jobs Landscape, and you have to categorise them and then evaluate by asking – “Who do you want to have it?’, ‘Who do you want to innovate for?’, and ‘Where do you want to innovate?’ 

The answers to those questions can help you zero in on a single job, but very often you have an interlocking set of related jobs. So, there might be a landscape of a couple of jobs that you might create similarly, but significantly different Job Maps for. I call that your “Jobs Landscape”.

How have you created an impact at MURAL from your domain of Customer Experience?

JK – I was employee #12 at MURAL, so I pretty much built up the entire customer experience and customer success team from scratch. So, I think my impact is there.

As you see from my books, I used to be in a design and innovation space, and I’m not a customer experience or customer success person. And I think the way that I’ve impacted MURAL is that I brought subject matter expertise and a certain authenticity to the table first, then I was a customer success manager and account manager second.

How do you avoid people getting too creative with dreaming up requirements?

JK – I do the research, if you go out and actually do the research, and you talk to people and say – ‘What problems do you have?’, ‘What’s the hardest thing for you to do?’, ‘What are the steps that you do?’, ‘What else is involved?’, ‘What are the circumstances?’- You’re going to find something that is often overlooked.

We can just make it up, but you don’t make up Jobs To Be Done. You would have known that from your research, the hot spot that you want to focus on. The requirement is trying to solve that specific pain point somebody has, and you find those through research.

Can you tell us about the trends and patterns you have observed since the pandemic, from the perspective of Saas platform?

JK – I’ve been talking about remote collaboration and remote creative collaboration for a long time. We believe we have a solution that can actually help people, help teams stay together, and help people do things like remote Design Sprints.

Before the pandemic, I had people telling me that a remote Design Sprint couldn’t be done because it is a multi-day event and very creative, visual and interactive. Nobody is saying that anymore. So, a lot of the mission and the messaging that I had been trying to build up over the past five years, is suddenly relevant in a new way, and that was really exciting for me.

When the pandemic hit, people were suddenly thrown into remote situations and the relevance of MURAL was back. So, we believe we have a solution, the insight and the knowledge to help people and we still want to help people.

On the other side of the coin, the demand and the market has fundamentally changed, and our company has changed a lot because of that. I’m learning so much from everybody now working remotely and it’s fascinating for me to see how inventive people have been, and how they’re able to keep their teams and cultures together. It’s all possible.

What are the challenges you’ve overcome and the wins you’ve experienced working with distributed teams in a decentralised organisation (MURAL)?

JK – I’ve worked remotely for most of my career for more than 15 years, and it’s one of the reasons why I went to MURAL because I wanted to keep that lifestyle. MURAL really brought together my interest in remote collaboration and creative disciplines like design together, because that’s what MURAL is all about. 

Right now, I have a team of about 30 people that report up to me, and we span nine time zones, from California to Europe, and South America. We’ve met on occasions, pre-COVID, for trips and things like that, but we’ve never worked together.

So, we’ve had to, out of necessity, figure out how to form a team and a team culture remotely, and we make space for imagination. What I mean by that is, in our agendas, we’ll take time to do things or to get to know each other personally. We’ll use MURAL or other functions to just have fun together before we get into the serious work. Serious play has really helped us stay together. Of course, MURAL plays a huge role, but we also use Slack and Zoom. Having a command of the different channels of communication and being able to use those effectively has kept the team together.

Further reading

• Designing Web Navigation, by Jim Kalbach
• Mapping Experiences, by Jim Kalbach
• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, by Jim Kalbach
• The Platform Revolution, by Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary

To see all our speaker Future Of Now book recommendations click here.

 

More about Jim Kalbach

• experiencinginformation.com
• Twitter – @jimkalbach
• LinkedIn linkedin.com/kalbach
• JTBD Toolkit – www.Jtbdtoolkit.com