JOBS

WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE TRYING TO GET DONE

IN THE LATE 1990s, Stephen led one of the world's first smartphone development projects. His team at Psion PLC combined the innards of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which Psion had originally invented in the 1980s, with telephony components from Motorola to create a device with a long list of features. The team was incredibly excited about all of the things the new device could do. You could even send a fax from your phone! But customers were confused, the technical complexity was overwhelming, and the device was quite costly.

Around the same time, a Canadian company called Research in Motion was taking a different approach, focusing on a simple hierarchy of jobs that people wanted to get done with a smartphone. Their product — the Blackberry — did far fewer things and was much less stylish. But it dominated the field for the next seven years — an eon in that industry.

The key to the Blackberry's success wasn't great technology or clever advertisements. It wasn't about getting the priorities of the customer right; Stephen's team had been diligent about asking people what they wanted ("Maps!" "Games!"). Rather, the Research in Motion effort triumphed because it looked at customers the right way, focusing on a single critical job to be done: keeping in touch through email.

Jobs help you to focus on what really matters, rather than trying to add on cool features that muddle the customer experience and make the product less compelling. It is a concept that Stephen really wished he had known about when he designed that device.

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN:

* Why to focus on jobs over past purchase behavior.

* How to win on both the functional and emotional levels.

* How understanding jobs can lead to the better design of products, services, and business models.

USING JOBS TO REDEFINE MARKETS AND CREATE OPPORTUNITIES

When thinking about how to launch a new product or bring in new customers, too many companies focus on what people are currently buying. They use existing purchase data to define their markets quite narrowly. They begin to think of themselves as booksellers and PC companies. Then when sales dip or management makes aggressive growth demands, they end up asking the wrong questions. How can we sell more books? How can we build a better PC? This tunnel-visioned approach to market definition creates a very small solution space, and it can blind companies to threats from untraditional sources.

Customers' jobs exist independently from what people are buying, making it essential to see the world from the customer's perspective rather than from the vantage of a company that happens to be selling something. As the late Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt famously told his students, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole."

Snapchat gives us a good example of a company that has eschewed industry trends in favor of a customer-centric perspective. Snapchat is particularly interesting because it shows how a company is attracting the notoriously fickle millennial demographic to steal market share in the social media/mobile messaging sphere — an arena that's barely old enough to be disrupted. To a casual observer familiar with the general direction of the industry, Snapchat shouldn't be successful. While Facebook is focusing on delivering enhanced search functionality that allows you to find fond memories among old posts, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat's messages makes that impossible. Instagram continues to add new filters and photo-editing capabilities, but Snapchat offers just a handful of filters and tools that are on par with the earliest versions of Microsoft Paint. Twitter opened a world where you can follow the musings of virtually anyone, yet Snapchat restricts you to the posts of added friends and a few preselected organizations.

Despite its apparent inferiority, Snapchat has already grown to reach 6 billion video views per day (just trailing Facebook's 8 billion), and it has a valuation of $16 billion. So what explains Snapchat's success? Rather than cramming its app with all of the features of its closest competitors, Snapchat has focused on satisfying a handful of emotional jobs that are important to its target users. Other social media apps have been criticized for creating an atmosphere of yearning in which users are bombarded with images of fun adventures and expensive vacations. Instead, Snapchat offers a way to document something closer to real life, allowing users to share moments and feelings without an expectation that their posts will be glamorous or that they'll look their best. Framed in this light, the lack of a "Like" button, the inability to search old photos, and the lack of ways to enhance what you're sharing all become advantages rather than drawbacks. Importantly for the company's target demographic, Snapchat also lets users feel like they're part of a chosen community that they helped build. With a younger user base and the ability to share with only selected friends, Snapchat offers a way for millennials to engage with a platform that isn't shared with their parents, extended family members, and employers. Snapchat isn't for everyone, and it doesn't try to be. Instead, its founders resisted the temptation to copy the competition, building an app that helps an identifiable user base satisfy a handful of important jobs really well.

WINNING ON THE FUNCTIONAL AND EMOTIONAL LEVELS

Customers have jobs that are both functional and emotional in nature, and companies need to design offerings that win on both levels. First consider the functional jobs. Although these can be more straightforward to satisfy than emotional ones, many companies get so excited about adding new functionality that they overlook the underlying jobs. In general, satisfying a customer's functional jobs requires...