Anthony W. Ulwick

FINANCIAL DESIRED OUTCOMES

When buying a product or service, the purchase decision maker (buyer) uses a set of financial metrics to decide whether or not to buy product A or product B, or to buy from supplier A or supplier B. An understanding of the buyer’s financial needs informs the decisions that lead to product and business model innovation. It is not uncommon to find that buyers consider 40 to 80 financial outcomes (metrics) when making the purchase decision. A hospital administrator who is responsible for buying medical devices, for example, may be looking for products that “reduce the patient’s length of stay”, or “reduce morbidity rates”. These metrics have cost implications that drive the purchase decision.

In the case where the buyer is also the user, it is important to make sure the buyer is wearing the buyer's hat when describing the financial metrics used when making the purchase decision. Otherwise outcome statements regarding the core functional job may be uncovered instead.

Jobs-to-be-Done Theory unlocks the mystery that has for decades been clouding the understanding of customer needs. Knowing how to classify all the customer’s needs changes everything.

3.
THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE GROWTH STRATEGY MATRIX

Once a company knows all the customer’s needs, which of those needs are underserved and overserved, and what unique under-and overserved segments of customers exist, it must decide if and how it will target each segment. For example, managers would want to determine if they should

1. 
   add a new feature set to its existing offering, (ii) develop a new low cost offering, (iii) create a new platform-level solution that gets the job done significantly better, or do something else entirely.
   

A company must decide what strategy should be pursued to ensure it wins in the marketplace.

Over the course of many client engagements, we have employed Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to help create a strategy framework that (i) explains what causes new product and service offerings to win or fail in the marketplace, and (ii) helps to select the growth strategy that fits the situation and will ensure a win in the marketplace.

When we use Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to examine product successes and failures, we observe the same phenomenon time and time again: new products and services win in the marketplace if they help customers get a job