431: How to use Jobs-to-be-Done rankings – with Doug Stone

The steps in ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done—for product managers

We have talked a few times about Jobs-to-be-Done in past episodes. It is a customer discovery tool for uncovering the unmet needs of customers—the tasks they want to complete or objectives they want to achieve. When using this approach, we may find the customer has multiple Jobs-to-be-Done and each job has a variety of attributes. We then need to know what is most important to tackle first. Our guest has an approach for ranking and valuing jobs to be done.

His name is Doug Stone. He is an expert at leading human-centric innovation and product design projects. His work has informed over $1 billion in revenue growth for Fortune 100 companies. He has a Masters of Product Design and Development from Northwestern University and teaches Innovation Strategy internationally.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[6:03] Can you give an example illustrating why ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done is important?

We did a project for a large quick-service restaurant about breakfast and came back with 20-25 unmet needs a quick-service breakfast can satisfy. After testing them and understanding which brands a consumer would want to satisfy each job, we found the second most important job to be done in quick-service breakfast was owned by a competitor, and it had to do with feeling strong, competent, and capable. My client’s brand attributes were more around wholesomeness, fun, and casualness. It was important to have those additional criteria around the Jobs-to-be-Done. We recommended the first five most important Jobs-to-be-Done, and as a grouping they aligned with their brand accurately. They developed communications and promotional ideas and reversed a three-year decline in their books. The grouping of Jobs-to-be-Done from the marketplace is really influenced by the brand the company has and what’s most important to consumers.

As another example, we were working with health insurance companies. We collected Jobs-to-be-Done that people wanted in healthcare. That collection process grabbed jobs that health insurance companies are responsible for and jobs healthcare providers are responsible for. We had to pull those jobs apart. We asked consumers, “Which brand do you want to solve this?” One of our health insurance clients had a very different brand characteristic from most health insurance companies. We asked, “Do you want a health insurance company to solve this?” For certain jobs, consumers said no. Then we asked, “Do you want this specific health insurance brand to solve it?” and consumers said yes. That gave us a good understanding of what to bring into ideation and how to show a deep partnership between the health insurance company and the healthcare provider that was very believable for the client.

[10:32] Take us through your Jobs-to-be-Done ranking and valuing approach.

When you do qualitative interviews to get the Jobs-to-be-Done, use a cognitive framework to organize the discussion guide. For example, a financial services company told us their consumers wanted control. Control is too high level of an unmet need for a Job-to-be-Done. When you look at control theory from a cognitive perspective, it has three components: a point a reference, sensitivity to that point of reference, and real and imagined levers that people pull to get closer to or further from that point of reference. We used that cognitive model in the discussion guide.

Once you have a transcript, pull out pieces of the transcript that have to do with people’s actions, the reasons they’re doing things, and the tensions they feel.

Go through a diverge-converge process. We’ve been able to use artificial intelligence to do much of this, but currently we do this as a workshop with clients. Arrange the actions, reasons,