Customer Experience Tip #15 - Understand Jobs to Be Done

Have a moment to put your product manager hat on?

Imagine your business is a product (which it practically is).

In its most simple form, what does your business help people accomplish?

What tasks does your business fix, solve, eliminate, streamline for someone?

Why is someone paying you?

Can you easily describe this in a sentence?

Do you know not only WHAT people buy – but WHY they buy it from YOU?

In my product management experience, one of the best frameworks I’ve used for developing new products is what’s called the Jobs to be Done Framework. Essentially, it’s a theory for helping you identify exactly what tasks or jobs people are struggling with that could result in an opportunity to create value.

So, I like to use this framework when thinking about new products, but I also LOVE to use it when evaluating current products or customer experiences.

Can you readily identify the JOBS someone needs to do in their daily life, then how your product or services makes that specific JOB delightful?

This is extremely helpful when defining customer needs, wants, desires, and also when determining if your product is a pain reliever or a gain creator (this greatly helps in how you market or position your product).

Go through the exercises here for your product or service.   

After you have a firm grasp on what jobs are actually being done by your potential customer – you can now define ways to DELIGHT at each critical touch point in their journey. 

This helps align your customer experience and customer journey with the core reason people are using your services.

In contrast, we want to avoid optimizing a specific part of the customer journey that may be orthogonal to results the customer desires. 

Be clear on the Jobs to Be Done!

Be clear on how you delight your customers while accomplishing those jobs!

Use our Customer Journey Map Exercise in our ebook to accelerate this process.

#designthinking

#jobstobedone

#customerexperience