On day one, I visited a lot of different talks, one of them was “What is the ‘Jobs To Be Done’ framework and why should you care?” by Martina Klimesová. Looking back, this was a pretty biased talk about this framework, for beginners, still a great way to get to know the framework better. It actually got me so interested, that I joined her short workshop the next day, to try working with Jobs To Be Done myself.
In short, what is JTBD? The framework is based on the assumption, that people don’t simply buy products. They hire them, to get a job done, for example: People don’t want a drill, they want to hang a picture. The goal is to stop focusing on solutions. Depending, on the scope and context, there is hundreds of different jobs, a person wants or needs to do, to achieve a certain goal. But how do you get there?
The JTBD framework consists of five steps:
- Define the focus/scope of your project (start small)
- Talk to users – conduct interviews
- Analyse & Cluster your insight
- Define Jobs
- Create a Job Map
Defining the focus/ scope – During the workshop we focused on a small coffee stand, in front of a huge office building. The end goal was, to raise the profits of said stands to do that, we needed to conduct some research, to find out which jobs people need to do, on their way to work. Assuming, they would pass the coffee stand on their way to the office. So our focus was set, we wanted to analyse peoples “get to work routine”, from the moment they get up, to when they start work. In reality, you would base that decision, on business requirements, collected data or just gut feel.
Conducting Interviews – Next is to interview between six to twelve people, or better yet until you can see certain patterns repeating themselves. The focus of those interviews are the feeling of people, in a certain situation and their processes they go through, to achieve their end goal, in this case, getting form home to their workplace. Martina advised us, to take notes of our insights on sticky notes, since they were easy to rearrange in the later stages of the process. One Insight per sticky note. She even handed out a cheat sheet, to help with the process.
Analysis & Clustering – After conducting your interviews, you should end up with a bunch of sticky notes, with a lot of insights. The next step, is to cluster those insights in different groups, try to find a headline for each of the groups. For the coffee stand example those groups were: How people commute to work, what they eat, when they have their first coffee, how they deal with the weather and a few more, I can’t remember. Try to keep the clusters small and separate them into smaller groups, if they get too big.
Defining Jobs – After clustering your insights, try to find job statements for each cluster, this could be just one or multiple. The statements can be very specific like “Buying a coffee” to very abstract like “not feeling sleepy”. This is the hardest part of the process and it will take a while to get all the jobs down.
Creating a Job Map – This is the last part of the process and probably the most fun. After creating job statements and writing them down on sticky notes, now you put it all together. The goal is to create a timeline of jobs, people need to do to reach their end goal. The time line can be separated into multiple milestones, like “leaving the house”, “commuting to work” & “sitting down in the office”- You put down the sticky notes according to the point in time, the users have to fulfil them. Additionally you should separate abstract from specific jobs, you could create a scale, having the most abstract jobs at the top and the very specific ones at the bottom. This map should then be shared with your whole team.
If you want to know more, here is a link to the book Martina kept recommending (both during the workshop & her talk): https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Be-Done-Playbook-Organization/dp/1933820683
