Jobs To Be Done
The Milkshake Saga
Bob Moesta and his partner Rick Pedi had a problem.
This was mid 1990s Detroit and they had just started a niche consulting business. They were trying to help bakeries and snack food companies develop new products that people would predictably buy.
And they were stuck.
One of their clients, a fast food chain, could not figure out how to sell more milkshakes. They had spent months trying to figure out the problem and tried every trick in the book. They thought they had the demographics of a typical milkshake drinker downpat. They brought them in and asked them: “Can you tell us how we can improve our milkshakes so you’d buy more of them? Chunkier? Cheaper? Chocolatier?” The chain then took all that customer feedback and put in the recommendations that they thought would make customers happier. The result: Nada. The sales didn’t budge
Around the same time, the now famed Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen had just published his theory on disruptive innovations. Bob and Rick chanced upon it and they wanted to learn more. So they travelled to Harvard to meet the man.
At the time Clayton himself was wrestling with a dilemma. His theory of disruption could predict very clearly what established companies could do in the face of a disruptive threat..but the theory of disruption did not offer a clear and complete causal explanation of what a company should do offensively to be successful. Yea disrupting incumbents is cool and all but according to Christensen creating the right product or service to achieve that is less than 25 percent, if that. Knowing why companies fail is one thing..but what about the reverse..how should companies think about success?
Enter Milkshakes..
After hearing Bob and Ricks problem, Clayton suggested they park themselves in one of these restaurants and observe how people buy milkshakes..and to take note of what time they were buying milkshakes? What were they wearing? Were they alone? Did they buy any food with the milkshakes? Did they drink them at the restaurant or drive off?
After observing customers for days Bob and Rick began to notice patterns: A surprising number of milkshakes were sold before 9am to people who came to the restaurant alone. It was the only thing they bought..and they got into their cars and drove off with it. And there was a second cohort. In the late afternoon parents would stop by after picking up their kids for school for a quick pre dinner treat and some bonding time.
Observing this Clay and team realised that there were forces at play here beyond demographics or psychographics or what the market research was telling them. What they realised was that a job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to “hire” a milkshake
They asked people “Excuse me, but I have to sort out this puzzle. “What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?”
The question is comically clunky but the responses they got weren’t.
The early morning customers all had the same job. They had a long boring ride to work..they needed something to keep the ride interesting..and they needed to feel satiated until lunchtime. So the competition for this job aren’t just other milkshakes but things like bananas (but they’re gone to quickly and you’re hungry after a couple of minutes), bagels (but they’re messy and leave you with sticky fingers), doughnuts (but they’re also messy and leave you questioning your life choices) — For that particular job in that particular circumstance the milkshake was perfect and does the job way better than any of the competitors.
As the team studied these responses and the profiles of people who bought milkshakes they realised that what they had in common had nothing to do with their demographics but that they all shared something common that needed to be done.
The afternoon cohort of parents with kids was very different but the line of thinking was the same. The job was a quick treat and some bonding time. So the competition there is maybe a quick stop at a toy store or at the park. Now imagine you invite a dad to give customer feedback in a survey and you ask him “How can we improve this milkshake so you buy more of them?” What is the dad going to tell them? Would it be the same as the dad who just a few hours earlier was a busy morning commuter?
The ‘morning’ milkshake will have to be larger, more viscous and more breakfasty..something that would take a long time to suck down during a long commute. Perhaps they would have to be self-serve because these morning folks are busy and would have to grab and run. The ‘afternoon’ milkshake would have to be smaller and less viscous. If this fast food restaurant focused on improving milkshakes in a general way i.e thicker, sweeter, bigger they would have focused on the wrong unit of analysis. There is no one size fits all milkshake.
This is exactly what the fast-food chain did and milkshake sales ratched up
Here’s how Clay Christenten summed up the situation:
Companies that target their products at the circumstances in which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that launch predictably successful products. Put another way, the critical unit of analysis is the circumstance not the customer.
- Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution
Jobs and Innovation
True innovation lies not in just simply replicating past successes but imagining new ones. What this ‘Job Theory’ does is hack through all the correlation that customer data and surveys give you and provide a causal mechanism of customer behaviour. Or more importantly the underlying causal mechanism that determines the progress a consumer is trying to make in a particular circumstance. That’s what it comes down to progress towards a goal and the circumstances surrounding that progress. There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.
There are three dimensions to determining a job. There’s the functional or practical (i.e mow the lawn), the social i.e jobs that determine how customers want to be perceived by others (people don’t buy a rolex just to tell the time) and the emotional: i.e seeking a specific emotional state such as feeling safe, seeking peace of mind etc. Putting this into context with the milkshakes: functional or practical (“I’m hungry and I need something for breakfast”), social and emotional (“ I’m alone on a long, boring commute and want to entertain myself, but I’d be embarrassed if one of my colleagues caught me with a milk shake in my hand so early in the morning”).
When Netflix first started way back in the late 90s they were a DVD-in-the-mail business. You had to log into their website, select a movie and then wait a couple of days for a DVD to arrive in the mail. What’s the job here? And how was it better than Blockbuster? Well it wasn’t better than Blockbuster in the purely functional or practical sense (I want to watch a movie tonight, not in a couple of days). But at the time 40% of Blockbuster’s revenues was from customer late fees. So Netflix came in with a dvd in the mail model but with unlimited rentals and no due dates, late fees, shipping and handling fees. The job was that Netflix was home entertainment but with the peace of mind that’s ok if you did not return the dvd by a due date. Netflix was in the home entertainment + convenience + peace-of-mind business
And the Jobs theory explains itself with this iconic ad for Apple’s first ipod.
Conclusion
A tough lesson for businesses and especially startups is that customers rarely buy what the company thinks it sells. One of the most famous adages in marketing is that “people don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole” (attributed to Theordore Levitt). They don’t buy product categories and they don’t buy because of their demographics. A problem occurs in their life and they look for solutions. What we have been calling ‘jobs-to-be-done’ takes note of that problem and the situational context that surrounds it. In practice, seeing a job clearly and fully characterising it can be tricky. Jobs’ insights are fragile — they’re more like stories than statistics.
When we deconstruct customer situations into binary bits, such as “male/ female,” “large company/ small company,” “new customer/ existing customer,” we destroy meaning in the process. Jobs Theory is not primarily focused on “who” did something, or “what” they did — but on “why.” Understanding jobs is about clustering insights into a coherent picture, rather than segmenting down to finer and finer slices.
And as a final thought Jobs are timeless and Jobs transcend technologies.
As Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter said “Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company: Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time… Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
From the images below we can see that people are bored on public transport and they will do whatever they can to satiate that boredom…and as long as there has been public transport..there have been people who have been bored on public transport *
References
Competing Against Luck: The Story Of Innovation And Customer Choice by Clayton Christensen et al
The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen
- This section is from my notes of a workshop that run was run by Des Traynor, founder of intercom in 2013
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