To understand your audience learn their jobs to be done

Businesses live or die on making and selling products that people want to pay for, it’s that simple. Ensuring your latest product or experience delivers what consumers are looking for is part art and part science. It’s pivotal to put yourself in the shoes of your users or consumers and understand the need that your product fulfills for them. Too often large corporations get caught up in their own internal concepts of what they think might be of use, pouring millions of dollars into development only for a product to fail when it is released.

Small business owners can’t afford to make this kind of mistake, there’s much smaller room for error when your budgets aren’t in the millions. The good news though is two fold, firstly as a small business owner it’s much more likely that you are closer to your customers and secondly there is a simple technique you can use to help guide your development - it’s called Jobs To Be Done Theory.

Jobs To be Done Theory is one of the most important design approaches to understand as a business owner. It can be used in everything from physical product development to marketing and content creation. It’s based on the principle that people buy or use products and services to get ‘jobs’ done.

The theory itself is relatively simple. Every product or service we use is fulfilling one or more of three types of jobs; emotional jobs, functional jobs or social jobs. By gaining a deep understanding of the type of job users are trying to fulfill businesses can develop products or services that deliver on them better than their competition.

Let’s explore an example of how one product can actually deliver on each of these jobs depending upon the situation - coffee.

The functional job

It’s early, you’re tired and you have a functional job you need to fulfill - you want to wake up. Coffee delivers on this perfectly.

The emotional job

There is nothing quite like sitting in a cosy environment clasping a consoling cup of coffee in your hand, it immediately elicits a warm feeling that has been ingrained through that repeated experience over our lives.

The social job

A coffee shared is a coffee fulfilling a different job, a social one. The type of environment or experience changes when there’s a social job to be done - you might select a cafe with nice seats instead of a small to go spot. Next time you ask someone ‘would you like to go for a coffee?’ think about the place and location you choose.

Putting it into practice

By understanding the job that your customers or users are trying to do you can develop a product or experience that delivers on it. One of the developers of the theory Clay Christensen goes into more depth here. Let’s take a look at the three examples of the job coffee can do and think about how you could change your approach to deliver on them.

The Pick-me-up coffee

Knowing that this is your early morning crowd, and they're on their way to work, the job the coffee is doing is efficient caffeination, so you would optimize for that. Set up your coffee shop and interactions - especially with regulars – for maximum efficiency, like a friendly Formula One pitstop. If there are three options along their route to work, you want to be consistently the best at getting the morning job done, so build that promise into your comms. Any loyalty aspects to the transaction will have to be seamless and contact-free. App pre-ordering might help. This is when wait time has to be minimal so load your barista staffing. Any in-store messaging has to be at-a-glance readable. Wanna hook them for a lunch pre-order? Deals need to be in big type for tired eyes.

The consoling coffee

This is all about warmth and comfort. This is a table service coffee, where part of the job the coffee is doing is giving the user an excuse to linger. Encourage that and optimize for a soft upsell during the time they're with you. Give them time to take their time.

The Social coffee

The job the coffee is doing here is being part of a person-to-person connection. If you have any promos that encourage loyalty through one person paying for another person's coffee, this is the time to use them. Offer people 'phone boxes' to hide their devices and encourage mindfulness. How else can you become that place to go in the between-meal space for people to connect the right way?

Once you have a solid grasp of the theory you can use it to more effectively develop nearly anything that your audience may engage with, including content. Every time you engage with piece of content online you are doing so to deliver on a need, whether that need is to entertain you, keep you up to date, or give you something to share. Armed with the knowledge of why someone is looking to engage you can develop content that works for them. In this Ted Talk Buzzfeed’s Dao Nguyen explains how they leverage this approach to understand why content is being shared and further develop relevant content for those audiences.