Author: Jurgen Appelo

Why are we still talking about product backlogs and product roadmaps? Shouldn’t they be experience backlogs and experience roadmaps? Successful companies optimize their value streams around the Jobs-to-Be-Done and the experiences that they want customers to have.

The Segway Experience

Five years ago, I enjoyed a city tour with my two kids in Barcelona, on Segways. Riding around the city with the three of us and our city guide was a memorable experience. I remember it as a series of WOW moments. We saw many places in just a few hours, and a lot of people noticed us everywhere we went. That was cool.

The Segway was introduced in 2002 amidst much hype and fanfare. Inventor Dean Kamen, investor John Doerr, and innovator Steve Jobs believed this new vehicle would bring about a revolution more significant than the PC, maybe even bigger than the Internet!

They were wrong.

In the US, Segways didn’t fit into existing infrastructure because they were too fast for pedestrian sidewalks and too slow to participate in main traffic. They were also inconvenient because users couldn’t easily carry shopping bags with them, and leaving a 5000-dollar machine outside a store was also an issue. Worst of all, people felt embarrassed because they were standing out from the crowd. (For them, this was a WTF moment.) It seemed that famous investors and innovators like Doerr and Jobs had not imagined visibility to be a problem.

The Segway was not a total failure, though. The machine has found niche markets with tourist guides, park rangers, law enforcement, and airport personnel: the kinds of people who don’t go shopping and appreciate being visible.

From Products to Experience

Managers, entrepreneurs, and teams usually talk about products. They discuss product visions, product backlogs, product managers, product teams, product releases, and product roadmaps. Segway’s inventor, Dean Kamen, also thought he launched an innovative new product. However, he overlooked that products give customers an experience. In this case, it was a bad one.

My internet provider prides itself on offering the fastest Internet product, but my experience is that they have the worst customer service in the country. The local parcel delivery company offers a reliable service, but my experience is that they made me collect my packages from six different locations already. My accountant provides a quality product, but my experience is that they handle my account so late that I’ve already forgotten everything about last year’s transactions. And don’t get me started about the many SaaS subscriptions that waste my time by making me dig up my invoices out of the bowels of admin panels and account settings.

Even the best product can leave me with a bad experience. So, why are we even still talking about product backlogs and product roadmaps? Shouldn’t they be experience backlogs and experience roadmaps? A focus on just the product seems like sub-optimization to me. Customer Experience (CX) is more holistic than just product management. It should be our aim to eradicate all unhappiness with our business.

The Happiness Gap

As part of the work I did for Managing for Happiness, I read several books about happiness to understand better what makes people happier in their jobs. I found that I could condense the many hundreds of pages of stories and insights into a simple formula.

Happiness is closing the gap between your situation and your expectation by moving either point.

There are two ways to close the gap between your situation and your expectation. You can lower your expectations by learning to be happy with what you have (the green arrow). This is the lifestyle of Buddhist monks and the winning strategy for anyone who wants to remain happy in a long-term relationship.

The alternative is to become happier by improving your situation (the blue arrow). This is the unlimited fuel for entrepreneurship, continuous innovation, growing economies, and the hedonic treadmill. People always pursue something to make them happier, for a while, until they want the next thing.

For product creators worldwide, helping people close their many happiness gaps is what we refer to as the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD).

The Job-to-Be-Done

Earlier this week, I ordered a few pairs of non-skid socks because it’s far too easy to slip and fall in my house, and the pairs that I had have all disappeared to a parallel universe that’s overflowing with lost clothing. I expect the new socks will make me a bit happier until, they too, disappear.

Clayton Christensen (in Competing Against Luck) says that customers “hire” a product to close a gap between situation and expectation. They hire a snickers bar to silence a rumbling stomach between lunch and dinner. They hire a fitness app to see progress as a result of their daily workouts. They hire an Uber car to ensure that their friends get home safely after a party.

Various experts have come up with definitions for the Job-to-Be-Done:

• The progress that a customer desires to make in a particular circumstance. (Clayton Christensen)

• The process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her. (Alan Clement)

• A statement of what the customer is trying to achieve in a given situation. (Tony Ulwyck)

• The process of reaching objectives under given circumstances. (Jim Kalback)

I am not interested in picking sides. Each of these definitions makes sense to me. However, I find it odd that none of the JTBD experts seems to have made the connection with the science of happiness. In my opinion, there is practically no difference between Job-to-Be-Done and Gap-to-Be-Closed.

Needs versus Desires

A Job-to-Be-Done is rarely just a functional thing. Some experts say that there are emotional and social aspects to each job. I think that’s a bit too simplistic. When you dig into experience, a bit more is going on!

Sometimes, people want to get out of a current situation because it causes them pain or discomfort. They seek medicine to treat illnesses. They want water because they’re thirsty. They call their friends when they feel lonely. In such cases, closing the gap is based on a need to get rid of problems, struggles, and frustrations.

Other times, people want to get closer to an expectation because they anticipate a gain or convenience. They dress up to look better. They book a three-star restaurant because the food will be excellent. They go out with their friends because it will be fun. Closing the gap is based on a desire to go after opportunities, enjoyments, and successes.

The difference between needs and desires is shown on the vertical axis in my 25 Drives Grid. (If you look closely, you can see that about half of the drives on this grid are social.)

Activities versus Outcomes

The 25 Drives Grid also shows a horizontal axis of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

With intrinsic motivation, it’s the activity itself that we need or desire. Drinking coffee, watching television, and hiking in a natural park are intrinsically enjoyable activities. Some of the Alan Klement (in When Coffee and Kale Compete) refers to these as jobs-as-activities.

With extrinsic motivation, it is the outcome of an activity that we need or desire. There is little that’s satisfying about booking flight tickets, doing the laundry, or filing taxes, but we do these things to get results. Alan Klement calls them jobs-as-progress, but it might be better to refer to them as jobs-as-outcomes.

I believe it’s a mistake to assume that customers always aim for outcomes rather than activities. Granted, this is usually true for products such as medicine and transport. But when I paint the walls of my house, I enjoy the process of painting. I find it very satisfying to make an ugly wall beautiful and to do so myself. Hiring a professional painter will get me the same outcome, but I would not be equally happy. I would not be able to look at the walls and think, “I did that!”

Closing the happiness gap (progress) is a combination of doing activities and achieving outcomes. We find happiness in one or the other, or both.

Meaningful and Stable Jobs

As product designers, the challenge is to create experiences that make people happy by getting the job done and closing the gap. We don’t seek customers to sell our products; people hire products to have experiences.

You are not in the business of selling cookbooks. You help people have fun while cooking (an activity) and serve delightful dishes for their friends (an outcome). Your cookbook is just a means to an end. (Alternatively, the job could be to help someone make a colorful bookcase. I must admit that I hired several books just to improve the design of our living room.)

“The secret to building great products is not creating awesome features; it’s creating awesome users.” – Kathy Sierra

Jobs-to-Be-Done should be stable over time. For thousands of years, people have wanted to travel to family (the Job-to-Be-Done), but the available modes of transport have changed drastically throughout the ages. Likewise, people have always wanted to socialize with friends, cook food, stay healthy, and be entertained. But products that (temporarily) address those jobs replace each other all the time.

We must conclude that Jobs-to-Be-Done are solution-agnostic. They focus on needs, desires, activities, and outcomes. They never describe specific products.

Context Matters

In The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, Jim Kalback offers an overview of many Job-to-Be-Done definitions. If you go back to the few definitions of JTBD that I provided earlier, you see that each mentions “circumstance” or “situation”. That’s because context matters.

Sometimes, I want an Uber car. Sometimes, I use a bicycle. Sometimes, I use public transport. Other times, I prefer walking. It all depends on my mood, the weather, the city I’m in, the time I have available, the clothes I’m wearing, the things I’m carrying, the people I’m hanging out with, and so on, and so on.

When you design a customer experience around a product, what matters most is context, not demographics. It would be a mistake to try and create a new product specifically for “middle-aged, white men with master-level education and above-average disposable income”. That’s a demographic that rules out a relatively large portion of society. You will be much more effective when you describe your customers as “people who want to travel across the city and who value speed, convenience, and privacy.” That’s a Job-to-Be-Done. It effectively rules out walking, biking, and public transport, but it doesn’t rule out people!

Demographics can be helpful for advertising. For product design, focus on context.

Finding a Job-to-Be-Done

Those who follow me on social media may have noticed that I like coffee. In every city that I visit, I always want to know the best coffee places. However, if you watch what I do, you will sometimes find me going into a Starbuck, Espresso House, Coffee Fellows, Caffè Nero, Costa Coffee, or other coffee house chain. Why? Because they are often open until 9 or 10 pm and they have a place for me to sit and work for an hour or two. I have been to some of the trendiest barista cafes in the world where guests with computers were not even welcome!

In Design Thinking, they say you must empathize with your customers. In Lean Startup, they say you must get out of the building. The Job-to-Be-Done community agrees and says you must observe customers and talk with them about their needs, desires, context, and alternative solutions. Standard market research often doesn’t reveal the opportunities that are waiting for you to find. Customers say one thing, but they do something else. And customer data tells you what people do, but it doesn’t tell you why.

“No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it.” – Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Customers are usually not able to articulate their Job-to-Be-Done. They can talk endlessly about existing products and services and what they like and dislike about them. Even when they do describe their needs and desires, their actual behaviors can tell another story. It’s up to you to then dig deeper and figure out what drives them. It’s your job to identify a happiness gap that could be closed. And don’t forget to study the non-customers! What are their problems? What are their hopes? What have they tried? What have they considered?

I’m sure Costa Coffee can match my coffee orders with my credit card. How useful is that? It doesn’t tell them that I prefer a seat next to a power socket to charge my computer. Insights from customer interviews and observations are more like customer stories than customer statistics. To discover a Job-to-Be-Done that’s worth making a product for, put on your detective’s hat and find the patterns.

Conclusion

Jobs-to-Be-Done are quite relevant as a guiding force for an organization’s structure. Successful companies optimize their value streams around the Jobs-to-Be-Done and the experiences that they want customers to have. Your organization has a competitive advantage when it can quickly adapt to unique processes and structures to perform the customer’s job.

Form follows function. Therefore, the organizational structure follows the Jobs-to-Be-Done.

Closing the gap is the job. Doing the job is the value stream. When you validated a customer’s job, you found a crucial organizing principle for the internal structure of your business.

And now, I’ll have another coffee.

“Perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes.” – Clayton Christensen