Anthony W. Ulwick

THE CORE FUNCTIONAL JOB-TO-BE-DONE

People buy products and services to get a job done. The job the end user is trying to get done is the core functional job. A deep understanding of the core functional job enables a company to create product or service offerings that get the job done significantly better than competing solutions.

The core functional job is defined in a single statement, such as “cut a piece of wood in a straight line”, “pass on life lessons to children”, or “monitor a patient’s vital signs”. How a company should go about and define the core functional job is discussed in Chapter 4.

The core functional job is the anchor around which all other needs are defined. It is defined first, then the emotional, related and consumption chain jobs are defined relative to the core functional job. For example, if the core functional

job were defined as “pass on life lessons to children”, then we would seek to discover the customer’s emotional and related jobs as they are trying to “pass on life lessons to children”.
All other jobs are in the context executing the core job.

Companies routinely want to know the functional jobs that customers are trying to get done for two reasons: (1) so they can discover new jobs to address (or new markets to target), and (2) to define a market they are already serving in a new way so they can use Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to discover how to serve it better. While the first activity requires a company to discover multiple functional jobs a customer is trying to get done, the latter requires a clear definition of just one functional job.

Market selection, the more complex scenario, is defined as the process of deciding what new markets a company should enter to establish attractive new revenue streams. To execute this process a company should first pick the customers (job executors) it would like to target and then determine all the functional jobs those customers are trying to get done. Next, through quantitative research, a company can determine which of those jobs are most important and least satisfied and will make the most attractive markets to target for growth. This exercise is critical for startups and established companies who are making investment decisions that will drive their growth.

While new market discovery is important, we usually find ourselves helping companies’ better position their existing offerings and creating new products and services in core markets they have been entrenched in for years. So more often then not, we find ourselves trying to figure out the core functional job(s) an existing customer is trying to get done.
While this is generally not too complicated, it can be when
the offering is a platform-level solution.

More specifically, in an existing market where a company’s offering has many applications or purposes, it is more difficult to determine the core functional job(s) the customer is trying to get done. In situations like that, we employ qualitative research methods to uncover all the reasons a customer may use the offering and then use quantitative research and factor analysis to group together like attributes and discover the core jobs customers are trying to get done. This approach has proven effective in banking (where banks are a solution that are used to get many jobs done) and social media, an industry where the top players offer platform-level solutions that are used for hundreds of purposes.

When defined correctly, a functional Job-to-be-Done has three unique and extremely valuable characteristics:

First, a job is stable; it doesn’t change over time. It’s the delivery vehicle or the technology that changes. Take the music industry, for example. Over the years people have used many products to help them “listen to music” (the Job-

to-be-Done). This has included record players, tape and cassette players, compact disc players, MP3s and streaming services. Through this decades-long evolution of drastically changing technology platforms, the Job-to-be-Done has remained the same. The job is a stable focal point around which to create customer value.

Second, a job has no geographical boundaries. People who live in the USA, France, UK, Germany, South Korea, China, Russia, Brazil and Australia have many jobs in common that they are trying to get done. The solutions they use to get those jobs done may vary dramatically from geography to geography, but the jobs are the same. The degree to which the customer’s desired outcomes are underserved may also vary by geography, depending on the solutions they use, but their collective set of desired outcomes are the same. Consequently, knowledge of the Job-to-be- Done in one geography can be leveraged globally.

Third, a job is solution agnostic. The Job-to-be-Done does not care if your company provides product, software, or service offerings. The job has no solution boundaries. This means that a deep understanding of the job will inform the creation of a solution that combines hardware, software and service components. It also informs a digitalization strategy—ways to use technology to get a job done better.