In the 1960s, Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt said; “nobody wants a 1/4″ drill, they want a 1/4″ hole”. This single sentence is one of the clearest examples illustrating the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory. The underlying message is; nobody wants to interface with a product, they want to get a job done. Let’s unpack what it might mean in a hypothetical scenario.
In a typical drill manufacturing enterprise, the levers pulled to address market demands are usually focused on product attributes that make a drill bit more effective. The enterprise might research adding a brad point in the center, so the bit doesn’t wander, sharp points on the perimeter to make a cleaner cut, shorten the bit to fit in tighter spaces or longer to reach more places, or changing the geometry of the flutes to eject chips more effectively in deeper holes. The manufacturer has many options to improve their product, but how do they know where to invest their innovation resources?
The drill maker needs to understand what job the customer hired their drill to perform. Only when they learn their customer’s desired outcome and the struggles keeping them from reaching that outcome will they know what attribute of the drill would help the customer achieve their objective cheaper, faster, or more accurately.
To start, the company should narrow their innovation scope by defining the market to focus on. To define a market, we must know who the customer is, and their job to be done. Here, we might define our market as homeowners hanging artwork.
I’m not sure anyone wants a quarter inch hole in their wall for the sake of having a hole in the wall. In this market, the hole becomes a solution rather than an outcome. As a rule, a customer job is devoid of solution. Solutions impose unnecessary constraints. Drilling a hole assumes you will put a screw or other piece of hardware in the hole to hold up the artwork. Solutions that don’t require a hole might include driving a nail, sticking adhesive hooks to the wall, or adding a picture rail to your room’s trim, among others. Exploring the latter solutions would not be in scope if drilling a hole is a constraint.
We then need to find out what job the customer is hiring this hole for and create a job statement. When writing a job statement, it should always start with a verb. Through customer interviews, we can ask “what will a quarter inch hole help you accomplish”? Let’s assume the customer describes their primary job as “hanging framed artwork” since we defined our hypothetical market as such.
As we conduct interviews, we look for related jobs. After analyzing the customer insights, we determine the needs by order of importance are; hang the artwork so the pieces align along a level line (functional), make sure each piece hangs plumb (functional), space the pieces equally (functional), create a pleasing pattern on the wall (emotional), enjoy my living space (emotional), and impress houseguests with my diverse collection of artwork (social). Note that these are each separate jobs. Job statements do not combine more than one job into a single statement.
The next series of questions might revolve around the struggles encountered when hanging artwork on the wall. Customers may state the wires on the back of the frames are not always the same distance from the top of the frame. If they use a laser level to drill all the holes in perfect horizontal alignment, the tops of the frames might not line up because of the variation in the wire lengths. They now have a choice to make; adjust the wire or “move” the hole. Other struggles might include hanging artwork plumb, then coming back later to find it crooked, or difficulty calculating where the artwork should be placed to create a proportional and pleasing pattern.
Interview questions should uncover the progress our customer is trying to make rather than drill down into our product’s attributes (pun intended). Knowing the customer’s struggles can lead a drill manufacturer to explore solutions outside their usual scope, such as an adhesive strip, making it easier to move the hook without damaging the wall if the customer makes a mistake.
Would this be the ultimate solution? If the customer needs to move the adhesive strip, there is still struggle involved. First, there is the financial pain of a wasted a strip. Second, there is time involved to remove the strip and recalibrate the location. Finally, there’s no guarantee subsequent attempts would be any more accurate than the first.
Once these struggles and their importance to the customer are identified, the solutions become easier to visualize. In fact almost obvious. What if we could create an adjustable hangar? If you make an error placing the hangar, could you have a simple adjustment to move it up/down or left/right? It might appeal to the customer based on their struggles to align the artwork.
It’s reasonable to assume mechanical adjustments would add complexity and expense. A simpler solution would be ‘hook and loop’ (think Velcro® brand) adhesive strips. The frame and the wall each receive one adhesive strip with the hook and loop facing each other. After hanging the artwork, a customer can “peel” the frame from the wall, reposition it, and apply it back to the wall without removing the adhesive strip from either the wall nor the frame. It’s a simple and inexpensive way to reduce the customer’s struggle. Notice I didn’t say “eliminate the customer’s struggle”. We haven’t eliminated the need to reposition the artwork if the customer makes an error, but we have made it faster and cheaper.
Should we consider a complementary service component to improve the accuracy of hanging artwork? There are times a customer’s outcome is easier to achieve when a product is supplemented by a service. One of the customer’s jobs we uncovered was to create a pleasing aesthetic pattern. This can be more difficult than it sounds. As a homeowner who has hung artwork in the past, I can say first-hand that the spacing of artwork is not driven by the center of the frames, but the gaps between them. Uncovering a “workaround” the customer invents is a sure sign of struggle. My workaround was to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that calculates the location of nail holes based on the number of art pieces, the width of the frames, and the length of the wall. What if a phone app could calculate the optimal placement of the framed art, output exact location measurements, and show you the result through augmented reality? Is this a service that would supplement the product and drive usage?
What if we created a laser unit that projected lines on the wall that perfectly located each piece of art? A typical homeowner would not purchase this due to expense, but what about a new business model allowing it to be rented or borrowed from the retailer selling the solution? Sold to interior decorators? There are questions of usability, viability, desirability, and feasibility that must be resolved before investigating this option. Not to mention a new series of interviews of retailers and interior decorators.
What does this insight mean for a drill manufacturer? They just found out the drill is not a relevant player in solving the customer’s job. The customer doesn’t need a better drill bit, they need a better way to reduce the time and reduce the errors hanging artwork. Unless they come up with an adjustable hole, no attribute of a drill bit will help the customer make progress on the struggles uncovered in the interviews. Investing development resources on drill bits for this market would be losing proposition. They can consider diversifying and produce a placement calculator app or adjustable picture hangers, but do their core competencies allow them to enter this market without excessive upskilling or capital investment? If the answer is no, they might consider a partnership or acquisition. More likely though, they will define a different market the company serves and look for opportunities to solve customer problems in that market.
This is an oversimplified example of an innovation effort meant to illustrate the basics of Jobs to be Done theory. There are other activities such as prioritizing jobs, creating desired outcome statements, creating a job map, and assessing the business model before transitioning to the ideation and prototyping stages.