What is more important: implementing innovations faster or capturing a larger share of the market? To what extent are the research costs linked to the company’s profit growth? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions. But it is crucial for any company to listen to its customers and establish effective communication with the consumers.
The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) methodology offers a unique perspective on the product creation process, focusing on the tasks the customers seek to accomplish rather than simply on the desired features of the goods or services. In the first Article of this series, we discussed the methodology and how you can use this tool to formulate your own hypotheses.
In this Article, we’ll explain why listening to the customers’ voice and understanding their needs is more important than simply creating another “Killer app”.
Next, we’ll provide the examples of when large companies and market pioneers ignored the existing works. And we’ll explain how the unexpected success of these companies can be explained using the Jobs to be Done methodology.
I want to save money when buying the goods
This is a perfectly understandable desire shared by most buyers. One of the most obvious solutions is the wholesale market. Once there, you can agree with other buyers to buy the desired item together. Surprisingly, however, a globally recognized and commercially successful digital implementation of this idea didn’t emerge until the fall of 2015, when Chinese entrepreneur Huang Zheng launched the group purchase platform Pinduoduo.
This platform combines the elements of social media and e-commerce, allowing the users to shop together with the friends and family to receive significant discounts and special offers. The main idea is that the users can form the groups for joint purchases and thus reduce the final cost of the goods.
This focus on existing — and, most important, previously overlooked — user needs (jobs) has enabled the company to experience explosive growth. Spending on fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in China fell by 0.9% year-over-year during the third quarter of 2023. But in the same quarter, Pinduoduo recorded 314% jump in revenue from the transactions to nearly $4 billion, representing 90% annual growth.
I want to make my daily life easier
The goal is formulated very simply, as they say. What is this about and why is it worded exactly this way? Because otherwise, the end of the paragraph wouldn’t make sense. Rare article on customer experience goes without mentioning Apple. The Strategyn blog emphasizes that it is precisely this approach that allows the company’s products to remain popular and avoid adding the features that are unnecessary for the customer.
The first Apple device to make the customers’ lives easier was the personal computer. This is perhaps the universal product as a JTBD example, because it can perform a vast number of the tasks for the customer.
In 2007, the company launched iPhone, creating the smartphone market. It’s important to note here that Internet-communicators existed before, but it was iPhone that best performed the related tasks: typing the text for emails on its screen is much more convenient than on the small-keyed QWERTY keyboards of smartphones.
Do you remember that our JTBD is still “I want to make my daily life easier”? And have you heard of ChatGPT? We still need to communicate and send the messages to other people. But artificial intelligence can now do this for us, generating well-written text and saving a lot of time.
And AI being developed by Apple will also be able to understand what’s happening on your smartphone screen. For example, when a user is browsing a website and decides to call a store, all he will need to do is to tell Siri: “Call this store”. In turn, the assistant will read the screen content by taking a screenshot, identify the store’s phone number in the image and make the call. It might seem that Apple is entering the AI market much later than OpenAI. But the Company also entered the PC and mobile phone markets at a late stage and then achieved tremendous success.
Conclusion
Jobs to be Done is a powerful tool that helps you to see beyond the obvious and explore the customers’ underlying needs. By applying this approach, the companies can not only improve their existing products and services but also discover new directions for innovation and growth. As you can see, even large and innovative companies often overlook and ignore really existing customer needs (jobs). Ultimately, the successful products are those that best align with the actual “jobs” the customers are trying to accomplish.
