Jobs to Be Done: why people hire your product
Lesson 2 of the course starts with one sentence: nobody wants your product, they hire it to get a job done. That is Jobs to Be Done in one line. And Anthony Ulwick is one of the people who turned this idea into a real method.
His book Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice (2016) is the deep dive behind that lesson. Its not the easiest read, but it changes how you look at products.
The job is the unit of analysis
The core idea: dont look at the customer (age, company size, persona) and dont look at your product. Look at the job the customer is trying to get done. The job is stable over time, the solutions change.
People did not want a CD, a MP3 player or Spotify. They wanted to listen to music. The job stayed the same, only the product they hired for it changed. If you understand the job, you understand where the next product will come from.
The milkshake story we use in the course is from Clayton Christensen, who made the idea famous. Ulwick worked on JTBD long before and made it systematic, with his method called Outcome-Driven Innovation.
The job map
Ulwick breaks every job down into steps, the job map. Roughly: define what you need, locate the inputs, prepare, confirm you are ready, execute, monitor, modify if something goes wrong, and conclude.
Why is this useful? Because at every step there is something that can be faster, more reliable or less annoying. And that is where products win.
Desired outcomes
For each step, customers have desired outcomes. Ulwick writes them in a fixed format, a direction plus a metric plus the object, like "minimize the time it takes to collect open payments".
Then you ask customers how important each outcome is and how satisfied they are with their current solution. Outcomes that are very important but badly served today are your opportunities. Outcomes that are already well served are not worth to compete on.
How it connects to the course
Lesson 2 uses a light version of this. When does it show up? What are they trying to get done? So they can what? What do they hire today instead? These four questions are the job, the outcome and the current solution, in a form you can fill in five minutes.
And lesson 3, how bad is the pain, is basically the question how underserved the job is. A blocking pain is an important outcome that is very badly served. That is why it points to PLG: people search for a fix on their own.
Who should read it
Everyone who builds a product and is not 100% sure what problem they really solve. Its more of a method book than a story book, so take your time with it. If you do the exercises with real customers, it pays back many times.