Get More Traction for Your Product Using Jobs-To-Be-Done

The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory (by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School) says this: people don’t buy your product, they hire your product for a job.

Understand the job, understand why people switch to your product, and marketing your product will be much less of a guessing game.

This presentation was given on:
- April 7, 2017: hosted by Invest Ottawa
- May 25, 2017: hosted by Impact Hub Ottawa

Slides updated with narration. Links from the presentation are at:
http://pascallaliberte.me

Transcript

1. Get More Traction for Your Product Using Jobs-To-Be-Done by Pascal Laliberté
2. What You’ll Leave With • Knowledge about the theory of Jobs-to-be-done • A way to understand what causes people to purchase products • Ideas on improving your marketing messaging
3. An Intro to the Theory The Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory came out of Harvard by Professor Clayton Christensen. People don’t buy products, they hire products for a job. “ Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek from the Re-wired Group contributed ways to apply the theory in practice.
4. Milkshakes STORY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84LymEs67Y People were buying milkshakes from this fast food chain. The chain wanted to increase its sales and tried introducing different flavours. No big effect. They then realized that people were buying milkshakes on their way to work, in the morning!
5. Jobs To Be Done People don’t buy products, they hire products for a job. Can it be applied to my situation?
6. Jobs To Be Done People don’t buy products, they hire products for a job. Product Marketing
7. Product Marketing Your efforts are about getting your product to the buyers, and attracting your buyers to the product.
8. Product Traction ✖ Do this well, and you’ll get sales. Get a good product, and it’ll be used, and people will tell other people about it. You’ll get traction for your product.
9. Product Marketing Personas Target Market Positioning Differentiation Pricing Strategy Automation Lean Methods Industries There are many tactics you can use. All of them help at increasing your odds of a sale. In the end, they’re affecting a correlation.
10. Project management software EXAMPLE Let’s say you’re selling project management software. You understand the metallurgical industry well, and so you set out to create software for project managers in that industry. You put ads in the publications they read, you go to the same conferences. But it’s not selling.
11. Personas Target Market Positioning Differentiation Pricing Strategy Automation Lean Methods Industries Affecting a correlation So you target only the project managers and you try out different target markets
12. ? You thought your efforts got you most of the way there, but it’s missing some important details…
13. Causal Factors What situation caused the buyer to hire your product? There’s still a huge gap to bridge. The sale isn’t in the bag yet.
14. Basecamp STORY Basecamp sells project communication software (communication, because it’s a place where the decisions and next steps about a project are detailed). They built a product for themselves, and it sold well. But they noticed that people were buying their software for different reasons. Accountability: a place where they could point to for a decision, for who’s responsible for what task. More precisely, when the team went from 3 to 4 people, the mix of cobbled-together solutions no longer worked. So they sought a new solution for that job.
15. With that knowledge Basecamp changed their messaging. Here’s what they’re running now.
16. See how they’re explicit about describing the pain points? Messy email chains, bunch of apps
17. And the benefits in contrast…
18. They use the instead of… pattern
19. Deeper into the site, the same use of “instead of”, and highlighting a feature that solves that problem
20. The situation, not the buyer profile That’s the core of the Job-To-Be-Done idea. The persona helps understand the general context, but it’s the Job, the struggling moment, that tells you the real purchase driver. !! !
21. Basecamp is touting its features, but see how they’re connected to a specific pain point? In our project management software, let’s say you realize that some people are asking for features you don’t have. Although adding features might be helping you get these clients, you might be creating anxiety in the newcomers who see your project with a specific job in mind.
 “I don’t know if I’ll need these features” <turns around> Project management software EXAMPLE
22. Anxieties about
 the product Anxieties act as a brake in the purchase journey. They push people away from the purchase.
23. Your features might be creating anxiety Think twice about adding or touting a feature in your product. Instead of attracting someone new to your product, extra features might be pushing your buyers away.
24. Ebooks STORY I was interviewing this person who had bought two ebooks. It was in July, and in October, a seminar was coming up, and he wanted to get ready. So, the Job was “advance in my career”. Only it was difficult for him to make the decision. “They’re so expensive”. I thought that was curious. “How much” — “$16 each”. Even more curious. $32 for a tool for career advancement? That’s cheap! “Do you buy other books?” — “Yes, well I’m always looking for books to buy. When I see one, I’ll download the free sample on iBooks and that’s where I keep all my to-read books”. It’s not that the ebooks were expensive, it was that he didn’t know if he would have time to read them!
25. Price might not be the main anxiety Get the other anxieties taken care of (e.g. the amount of time to read that ebook), solve the Job-To-Be-Done really well, and charge a higher price. $
26. Anxieties about
 the product Attraction to the product Forces Attraction is another force affecting the buyer. That one pulls toward the purchase.
27. Emotions, rationality In the journey toward buying your product, your buyer will have a mix of rational and emotional reasons for progressing toward the purchase.
28. Anxieties about
 the product Attraction to the product Struggle of
 the moment Forces of Progress The buyer just wants progress on the Job she wants done. The “Struggle of the moment” force is the one that propels the buyer into action, to seek out a solution.
29. Winter Boots STORY A friend of mine bought some winter boots. $450 the pair! His story: he came from the States, moved to Toronto (where he didn’t need to think about winter so much), and now in Ottawa, and with winter coming, he needed something to prepare him for the cold. His career is booming, and he has other things on his mind, so he didn’t want to think about what shoes to wear, where to put his foot when he was out walking, he just wanted to hire someone who thought of winter so he didn’t have to. And he wanted to give his money to the company that made boots so that he didn’t have to think about winter again for another 4 years.
30. Anxieties about
 the product Attraction to the product Struggle of
 the moment Forces of Progress In the Winter Boots story, the Struggle was strong, the product solved the problem well, and the anxiety wasn’t so much about the price, but whether the boot would last 4 years.
31. Project management software EXAMPLE What would cause the project manager to hire your software? The struggle might not be that strongly felt. Also, she probably has tools that do just fine: email for asking for progress, Excel or a Gantt chart for projections, and meetings to status and accountability. More than that, a project management software might make her job more automated. Your software is competing against her sense of feeling useful!
32. Forces of Progress 1 2 3 4 Anxieties about
 the product Attraction to the product Struggle of
 the moment Habits of
 the present The fourth force is people’s habits and their mix of solutions. That’s the strongest gravity well pulling the buyer away from the purchase. That’s your real competition.
33. Your real competition A B C Habits Your product is competing not so much with other similar product offerings, but mostly with the person’s existing habits, or the person’s mix of cobbled-together solutions. Your real competitor is non-consumption. Solve the Job well, and find a bigger market share.
34. Hiring something Firing something else Buyers are firing something else when hiring your product. In the case of Project Management Software, they’re firing the use of emails threads and meetings.
35. Highrise STORY Highrise makes Customer Relationship Management software. It helps track conversations you have with people, and it helps notify you to do follow-ups. A profitable product, it now finds itself amongst heavy competitors. How should the product position itself? So Highrise conducted interviews with people who had purchased Highrise. They found three jobs from those interviews, but the main one: people who had a business doing art or consulting, who weren’t doing full-time sales, just needed a way to get more efficient at tracking their contacts and the next steps. No learning curve. Import my contacts, set it up, go back to doing my work.
36. This is their home page before changing their messaging based on the interview findings.
37. Here’s one variation they’re testing
38. Here’s another variation
39. The Journey The forces aren’t static for each individual. They’re dynamic, they change in time. Along with the Forces Diagram, the Timeline is a tool developed by the Re- Wired Group.
40. Pacemakers in India STORY This example is from the book “Competing Against Luck” from Clayton Christensen. There’s this company who wanted to sell their pacemakers in India. They weren’t selling that much so they investigated the problem. It turned out that in India, family members help pool the money for a family member in need, but timing was a problem. So the company created a product alongside the pacemaker — a financial product — a bridge loan, which would give time for the buyer to get the money from family members.
41. People hire more than your product They’re hiring the whole package. Like in the story of the Pacemakers in India, you can add extra things around your product to help with the main hire, and resolve anxieties.
42. Re- Cap • What’s the Job? • The situation, not the buyer • Struggle, Attraction, Anxieties, Habits
 (Forces of Progress) • Habits: Your real competition • They’re firing something else Jobs-To-Be-Done is a solid foundation
43. Jobs-To-Be-Done is a solid foundation Starting small Being intentional Betting on what doesn’t change Getting to the bottom of things Especially for those who share these values
44. Jobs-To-Be-Done is a solid foundation Starting small Being intentional Betting on what doesn’t change Getting to the bottom of things • What’s the Job? • The situation, not the buyer • Struggle, Attraction, Anxieties, Habits
 (Forces of Progress) • Habits: Your real competition • They’re firing something else You can apply these for selling anything Services Ideas Brand
45. Jobs-To-Be-Done is a solid foundation Starting small Being intentional Betting on what doesn’t change Getting to the bottom of things • What’s the Job? • The situation, not the buyer • Struggle, Attraction, Anxieties, Habits
 (Forces of Progress) • Habits: Your real competition • They’re firing something else You can apply these for selling anything Services Ideas Brand • Craft all the connected experiences
46. Next Steps • Each of your offerings: for which Jobs would people hire these? • Interview your users
 Good course offered by the Re-Wired Group • Milkshake video, book recommendations at
 pascallaliberte.me
47. Thank you Pascal Laliberté pascal@pascallaliberte.me http://pascallaliberte.me