Buyer Personas are often used by companies to help their team understand who their customers are. If you are selling washing up liquid, it’s helpful to understand the personality traits of the people buying your product. It means that your packaging, your pricing and your advertising is more likely to resonate with them.
But when you are building a software product, it’s less helpful. Knowing the person buying your SaaS is a female in her mid-thirties who cares about the environment or a male in his mid-fifties who’s worried about his pension won’t help your product developers build a better product. But understanding the job they are hiring the product to do, will. SaaS products are less matched to people and more matched to problems. Yes, you may need to focus on a different message when talking to a CFO vs a VP of Marketing, but this isn’t based on the fact that the CFO is a woman who likes gardening and the VP is a man who goes mountain-biking, but rather because a CFO needs to demonstrate ROI and a Marketing person needs to increase lead-flow (for example).
Jobs To Be Done has an application for sales and marketing, but today I’m talking entirely about product innovation.
Quick Reminder of what Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) is
Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) or just ‘Jobs’ is a framework that focuses on understanding the functional and emotional "jobs" that users hire a SaaS product to accomplish. Instead of solely focusing on features, JTBD emphasises identifying the problems users seek to solve and the goals they aim to achieve by using the software. JTBD in SaaS helps shift the focus from product-centric development to a user-centric approach, driving innovation and delivering solutions that align more closely with desired outcomes.
The danger of focusing on the Product, rather than the People
At my old agency, we once had a client who believed that his product wasn’t getting the traction he needed because he didn’t have ‘badges’ that he could award people based on their activity. Against our advice, he paid us to create a badge system which, when launched, had precisely zero impact on the level of user engagement. Why? Because he was focusing on product-centric improvements, rather than Jobs.
Think about it. What is the Job that people are hiring Instagram to do? Is it, ‘upload a picture from my phone’? Or is it ‘share a moment in my life with the world’? The first is a product-centric view, the second is a Jobs view. It could also be argued that the first is an easier thing to come up with improvements for than the second.
You may be thinking, ‘so what, this is all semantics, surely’. But the thing is, if your primary focus is on improving product features (which is obviously important) and not on understanding Jobs, you miss out on the potential for product breakthroughs. And if you want a really clichéd example of this it’s the old Henry Ford’s “Faster Horse” story (which I obviously don’t need to repeat). Had an entrepreneur at the turn of the 20th Century been looking at the challenge from a product-centric perspective, they may have thought about breeding faster horses, or perhaps some horseshoe related innovation. But looking at it through a Jobs lens, the focus becomes more about transporting people conveniently from their current location to their desired destination, without being restricted to an equine-based solution.
Jobs theory allows you to think of the problem you are solving outside of any features your product may or may not have.
Reducing the steps taken to do the job is where the breakthroughs happen
Consider taxis before Uber. The steps you had to take to catch a cab went a bit like this:
Find out the best way to order a taxi (stand in the street and hail, call a cab firm, or get yourself to a taxi rank);
Get in the cab and tell the driver where you want to go;
Optionally - tell the driver which route you want them to take;
Arrive at your destination;
Check/confirm that you are being dropped off at the right place;
Find a means of payment;
Calculate the tip (optional);
Pay the cab driver (hope that they have change and don’t get grumpy about the fact you only have a 50 in your wallet);
Ask for a receipt;
Put the receipt in a safe place so you can refer to it later (for example, to claim as an expense).
There may be more steps, but I’ve come up with 10. Now, a product-centric approach would look at these steps and see if they could be improved. Maybe we could build more taxi ranks? Maybe we make it easier for people to have an account with us? Maybe the final fare is displayed on the meter with a suggested tip next to it? Maybe we give people a receipt wallet with our taxi firm’s number on it? These are all incremental improvements to the current ‘product’.
But a Jobs-focused approach would think about reducing those steps rather than just improving them. The Job is that someone wants to get from where they are now to somewhere else without driving themselves or catching public transport. So what steps could we eliminate altogether? Well, what if there was a way to avoid having to hail a cab? What if the fastest route was already worked out for you? What if you didn’t have to hand over any money to the cab driver at all and instead it was just deducted from your bank account? What if you could add a tip with one touch on your phone? What about generating a digital receipt that was automatically emailed to your accounts team? You’ve gone from 10 steps to 2 steps.
What about your product or idea?
If you can really dig into your customers’ Jobs and understand the steps that they take, then you can think creatively how you can reduce them. Digging into your customers’ Jobs means speaking to them specifically with JTBD in mind. Don’t just guess and don’t pitch your questions around your product. You need to get them to open up about what they actually do on a day-to-day basis. For example, someone I spoke to recently said that the fact that their data was siloed meant that he had to manually make updates across various products which was time consuming. I could have guessed that. But digging deeper he revealed that he felt that the leadership team didn’t view him as being ‘strategic’ because he was too busy manually updating things to look at the insights the data revealed. He told me he’d missed out on a promotion because of it.
Bingo! The Job isn’t just about data integration (even though that’s an important job to be aware of), the Job is also about finding insights from that data and presenting it to the wider team. If we then dig into the steps he takes to do that currently it might look like:
download data;
stick it into a spreadsheet;
list what wider business problems his company is prioritising;
think of the various ways he could analyse the data that might give the business some insights to better solve those problems;
create functions or pivot tables to find the answers that provide those insights;
create tables of graphs that illustrate those insights;
pull that into a report that explains the research:
come up with recommendations from the insights;
present it to management;
update the report periodically as data changes.
From here, you could innovate around reducing those steps. Maybe we look at a benchmarking tool that can highlight which areas fall short against others in their industry (demonstrating the strategic focus of the user to his bosses). Maybe we create a suite of report templates that are commonly used in that industry that could be switched on and off. Maybe we use AI to identify anomalies. Maybe there’s a forecasting tool that suggests the impact of improvements of a particular metric on the wider business.
Hopefully you can see that setting the stage like this can allow the team to think creatively about ways in which they can solve problems more efficiently for their customers without getting bogged down in the current product’s limitations.
As a side note, it’s worth noting that just because some steps could be eliminated, that doesn’t mean they should. It may be that an important part of their job is pulling data into a third party tool like Tableau or Power BI and doing their own analysis, they’ve just been slowed down by other steps in the process that have made that goal harder. The point is, this is a starting point - and you have to ultimately speak to your customers to unearth what’s really going on.
Recommendations
If you haven’t already, I would definitely swot up on Jobs-To-Be-Done theory. I might write something soon about how Jobs can be applied to sales and marketing, too. If you feel like this is something that would be useful for you and you’re struggling to get started, then let me know if I can help!