TLDR: To build effectively, you need to emotionally detach from the solution space, focus on your customers, and get time to value as close to zero as possible.
The last few weeks I’ve been posting small excerpts from chapters of a handbook I’ve been writing for our founders at Antler, testing to see what resonates. Today’s piece is on the jobs to be done framework, and avoiding a very common mistake among founders.
“When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.” —Josh James
I’m not sure if that quote is true or false. Ultimately, I think what truly matters is execution.
The big mistake most founders make is they look at their competition, and they build analogous businesses with analogous features.
Humans are linear thinkers. We look around for inspiration and we create marginal improvements. For that reason, founders often fall prey to “more is better” and waste invaluable time and money by over-engineering a solution rather than investing that same time and money into deeply understanding the jobs to be done and the customers they serve before they build.
Jobs to be done (JTBD) framework
Before you build anything, your first job is to understand your customers and the market that you’re considering. We call this finding and defining the “jobs to be done” (JTBD). The JTBD framework is very similar to a first principles approach as it requires breaking down the problem and solution spaces to their fundamentals.
Defining the jobs to be done allows a simpler and more powerful understanding of what your customers are trying to accomplish and, in turn, how it can be solved.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, who teaches the JTBD framework, often shares the example of McDonald's milkshakes. When he was brought in to help evaluate how to sell more milkshakes, he needed to learn what the customers were truly trying to solve. By observing the customers and asking the right types of questions, you can learn an incredible amount and work toward developing unique insights. These unique insights are crucial, not only in building toward and finding product-market fit, but in demonstrating to investors how you know you will be right. One resource our founders love as they learn to develop these insights is The Mom Test.
Ultimately, after observing McDonald’s customers, Christensen found that the answer was not an intuitive one like improving the taste, cost, or nutritional value. Instead, he learned that the customers were “hiring” the milkshake most often in the morning to do a finite set of jobs such as:
Be a filling breakfast that helps customers remain full until lunch
Be accessible during a commute—specifically in a car while driving
Last long enough to occupy the driver for an average of 20 minutes in traffic
By detaching from the solution space and focusing on the customers and the problem space, McDonald’s was able to better understand the “features” they needed to develop, or in this case changes to the product.
When you identify these unique insights, your creativity can be unlocked, and now when asked “how can we sell more milkshakes?” you might answer non-intuitive innovations such as changing the viscosity, the size of the straw’s opening, and the shape or size of the cup. By understanding these criteria and adapting to them, the customer’s breakfast would be more filling, take longer to consume, and fit in the car’s cup holder. Taken together, these changes can materially improve the experience of breakfast for the morning commuter. Of course by doing so, customers become more satisfied, return more often, and tell others about their best option for breakfast which increases total sales.
As you can see, following this approach enables a more innovative and powerful response to the problem of “how to sell more milkshakes,” while making these non-intuitive changes turns the McDonald’s milkshake into a much better thing to “hire” for the jobs to be done, especially when compared to the competition like donuts, bananas, or a bowl of cereal.
When we take this same approach in technology, with our ideas and our customers, we emotionally detach from the solution and from the competition, focusing on where we can create the most magical experience in the most effective way possible. Rather than looking at the competition for inspiration and a path to building your product roadmap, instead look to your customers. If you don’t believe me, even Steve Jobs who is famed for his ability to “think different” shares this same perspective of talking to customers rather than starting with the engineers at Apple’s infamous Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997.
To put an exclamation point on it for our founders, it’s not enough to identify the JTBD and build for that experience, you also have work to reduce the “time to value” for your customer as close to zero as possible (TTV = 0). If your customers can get immediate value on their core jobs to be done, if you can create that magical moment, you will have accomplished something truly powerful in setting your idea and company in motion.
See you Monday.