Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”

Companies are still failing to understand their customers, which seems really strange, because we have all of these data recordings that let companies know who they are and what they are doing. The important thing to remember when it comes to this, is that people are all still people and still do things for different reasons than others. Just because someone looks similar because of customer similarities, does not mean you have both of those customers figured out.

Key Takeaways:

Data is often structured to show correlations that don’t get at why customers do things.
Jobs-to-be-done theory focuses instead on what the customer is hoping to accomplish with the product.
Jobs have social and emotional dimensions that may be just as important as the function dimension.

“Many firms have established structured, disciplined innovation processes and brought in highly skilled talent to run them.”