Jobs Theory is not just another framework or marketing approach, but a powerful lens that has driven breakthrough innovation and transformational growth in some of the world’s most successful organizations—in wildly diverse arenas. Jobs Theory transforms how you define the business you’re in, the size and shape of the market in which you compete, and who your competitors are. This enables you to see customers where there were none, ideas for solutions where there were only problems, and opportunity where you least expect it. Here’s how.
Standing in front of the graduating class of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) in 2015, President Paul LeBlanc decided to go off script. It was the third commencement ceremony that day—the total number of graduating students and families was too large to fit into the auditorium in one sitting, even in the twelve thousand seats of Verizon Wireless Arena, so the school had to stage three separate events. Instead of wading into the usual jokes and graduation platitudes, a wide smile spread across LeBlanc’s face as he turned his focus to those in caps and gowns before him. “If you served in the military or are serving in the military, and are graduating today, please stand for a moment,” he asked. About half of those in caps and gowns stood. “If you are, as I am, the first generation in your family to get an undergraduate degree, stand.” Roughly half of the crowd got to their feet. “If you’re getting a degree today, and you also have kids, please stand.” By then, virtually every member of the graduating class had been on his or her feet. Usually a poised and polished speaker, LeBlanc choked up for a moment as the crowd roared. Achieving that degree, against considerable odds, was an enormous accomplishment for the people in caps and gowns that day. “They recognized what they’d done,” LeBlanc later recalled. “No one in that graduation ceremony had it handed to them. There’s so much that gets in the way of that happening—finances, busy lives, lack of academic preparedness, feeling like you don’t belong. They’d truly earned that moment.”
The people in the auditorium that day were just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the vast majority of SNHU’s students will never set foot on its modest Manchester, New Hampshire, campus. But that hasn’t stopped those students from making progress toward their goals. In fact, so many have chosen SNHU that by the end of fiscal 2016, SNHU was closing in on $535 million in revenues—a 34 percent compounded annual growth rate for the past six years. Routinely lauded by U.S. News & World Report (and other publications) as one of the most innovative colleges in America, the school also has the distinction of being ranked one of the best places to work by the Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2012, Fast Company magazine named SNHU as one of the most innovative organizations in the world—ahead of LinkedIn, Starbucks, and the National Football League.
A decade before, none of that might have seemed possible—to either the students or LeBlanc. In 2003, when LeBlanc first became president of SNHU,1 the seventy-year-old college was a relatively unknown second-tier institution. Originally founded as an accounting and secretarial school, it had become a mishmash of specialties—culinary arts, business, and justice programs—with just a few thousand students.
All around the country, similar colleges were facing deep financial troubles, closing or merging just to stay alive. The onset of the recession five years later made things look even worse. Enrollment began to fall and budget pressures just to tread water were overwhelming.
Around that same time, LeBlanc attended a working group at Harvard Business School that I put on every year to help market-leading companies avoid their own innovator’s dilemma. Over the course of the day, we discussed the milk shake story and the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which immediately resonated with LeBlanc.
Like most higher educational institutions, SNHU essentially treated all students the same. The university’s longtime bread-and-butter strategy had relied on appealing to a traditional student body: eighteen-year-olds, fresh out of high school, continuing on a traditional educational path. In essence, “Come to this picturesque New Hampshire campus and you’ll get a solid education for a reasonable price.” The marketing and outreach were generic for everyone, regardless of their circumstances, and the policies and delivery models that served the school were designed to appeal to a “typical” student that really didn’t exist. This one-size-fits-all perspective was reminiscent of the milk shake dilemma—only in this case they were trying to design a one-size-fits-all education for the “average” student.
What job were students actually hiring SNHU to do? Simply asking themselves that question, LeBlanc says, led them to an important insight. Not only was there one answer to that question—there were two.
Almost nothing had changed in SNHU’s approach to recruiting high school graduates in decades. It relied on traditional marketing and word of mouth to get prospects to the campus, where SNHU would wax poetic about the academics or financial aid or future career prospects. But through a jobs lens, LeBlanc says, the school realized that when these prospective students toured the campus, there were actually very few questions about these subjects. Parents of those students might ask those questions, but the students themselves focused on something entirely different. The students’ questions centered on the experiences they hoped to have in college—experiences they’d been anticipating for years. “Do you have a sports team I can root for? Do you have climbing walls? Will I have lots of interaction with full-time faculty with whom I can have long conversations about the meaning of life?” The prospective students—in the circumstance of graduating from high school and being away from home for the first time—were not focused on the functional dimensions of their education; they were hiring SNHU for the coming-of-age experience. And SNHU had plenty of competitors for the roughly three thousand coming-of-age students it expected to enroll each year. There are a handful of established local colleges, such as the University of New Hampshire or Franklin Pierce University, that compete every year for more or less the same pool of applicants. In that competition, SNHU knew exactly how it would typically fare—win some, lose some, draw others. That ratio had not moved in years. It was hard to see much potential for growth.
By contrast, however, SNHU had an online academic program, known as distance learning. It was “a sleepy operation on a nondescript corner of the main campus,” as LeBlanc describes it, but it had been able to attract a steady stream of students who wanted to resume an aborted education at a later stage of their lives. The online program had been launched a decade before, but it was treated as a side project, and the university put almost no resources into it.
On paper, all the students might have looked similar, rolling up into one category based on where they were in terms of course completion. A thirty-five-year-old working toward an accounting degree needs the same courses as an eighteen-year-old working toward the same degree, right? Don’t they both need quality education at affordable prices?
But with the lens of Jobs to Be Done, LeBlanc and his team saw that the job these nontraditional students were hiring SNHU to do had almost nothing in common with the job coming-of-age undergraduates were hiring it for, and that it was framed by a very different circumstance. The average online student is thirty years old and juggling work and family while trying to squeeze in an education. Many of them have some college credits, but stopped their education along the way for a myriad of reasons. Often they were still carrying debt from that unfinished experience. But life has told them it’s time to go back to school; they realize they need further academic credentials to improve their career prospects and thus to improve their family’s lives. They’ve already had all the coming-of-age experiences they can handle. They need higher education to provide just four things: convenience, customer service, credentials, and speedy completion times. This, LeBlanc’s team realized, was an enormous opportunity.
SNHU’s online program wasn’t in competition with the same set of local competitors at all. It was competing with other national online programs, including both traditional colleges and some of the for-profit specialty programs, such as Kaplan, University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute, and more—created and designed to provide students with training and credentials that might help them get a better job. But even more significantly, SNHU was also competing with nothing: nonconsumption. People choosing to do nothing to further their education at that stage of life. With that perspective, the size of the market suddenly went from seeming finite and hardly worth fighting for, to one with enormous untapped potential. Who wouldn’t want to be competing with nothing?
But LeBlanc and his team quickly realized that very little about SNHU’s existing policies, structures, and procedures were set up to support the actual job of online learners. The division had managed to bring in a respectable $32 million in revenues, but it was almost a miracle that so many students had found SNHU in the first place—and stuck it out to reach graduation.
Take, for example, the way that SNHU (and many other universities) typically discussed financial aid with prospective students. For a typical high school student, a conversation began sometime in their junior year, during which time SNHU would provide some basic information about financial aid. Neither student nor university expected to have to offer any more specifics for at least a year, after formal application and financial disclosure by the student’s parents—when a college admissions offer was made. The financial-aid process at SNHU was structured around the ability to have a leisurely, low-level-of-urgency conversation with prospective students. Even responding to a query could reasonably be expected to take weeks.
If a prospective student made a query through SNHU’s website, he’d receive a boilerplate response within twenty-four hours: “Dear Clayton, thank you for your interest. . . .” Then a week or so later, a packet of information—the same for everyone who inquired—would arrive in the mail. Then SNHU, like many universities, would simply wait for the prospective student to call or follow up in some way. And for many undergraduate candidates, particularly for the coming-of-age segment, that system worked fine. Because as they realized, the decision about financial aid might be important to their parents, but it wasn’t critical to what the students themselves were hiring the university to do for them.
By contrast, financial considerations were enormously important for adult online learners. The job they were hiring a university to do was to provide them with credentials that would improve their professional prospects as quickly and efficiently as possible. When the leaders of SNHU thought about these students, it became clear how flawed the school’s generic response to all prospects was. When an adult learner was actively online seeking information about a continuing education program, he or she was ripe, right then, to make a decision about what to do next. He’d probably thought about getting additional educational qualifications for a long time and, for him, starting the inquiry process was very close to the moment of making a decision. SNHU knew that its students were often moms and dads sitting at their laptop late at night after the kids have gone to bed, squeezing in the time to hunt and gather information in the first place. There was no leisurely response and follow-up that would meet their needs in those circumstances. For SNHU to wait twenty-four hours to send a generic response and then weeks later to provide candidates with any specific information about their own financial aid options was tantamount to not responding at all. What online learners required was completely different from what traditional students out of high school required, yet SNHU had been providing a single “average” solution for all.
For LeBlanc and his team, it was an “aha!” moment. The key was finally asking the right question that led them to better answers.
“We were frustrated and struggling with our inability to grow,” he says now, “and focusing on the Jobs to Be Done felt like a no-brainer.”
What had to change at SNHU as a consequence? “Pretty much everything,” LeBlanc recalls, and on two different tracks corresponding to the two distinct jobs.
Instead of the second-class-citizen status the online portion of the university had been given since its inception, LeBlanc and his leadership team made it their focus. They moved the small online recruitment and administration team two miles away to new offices in a former mill yard in Manchester—a classic “disruptor” positioning that allowed the online team to grow unfettered by the physical and structural limitations of the traditional university policies and procedures. Then LeBlanc and his team led a session of about twenty of the top online faculty and administrators and charted out the entire admissions process—from first inquiry to first class—on a whiteboard. “It looked like a schematic from a nuclear submarine!” he says. The team circled all the hurdles that SNHU was throwing up—or not helping to overcome—in that process, with an eye toward the unique job of online learners, their unique circumstances, and the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the job that were important to them. And then, one by one, they eliminated those hurdles and replaced them with experiences that would perfectly satisfy this job. There were literally dozens and dozens of decisions that came out of this new jobs focus, but to highlight a few, through the lens of the job:
But perhaps most important, SNHU realized that enrolling prospects in a first class was only the beginning of doing the job for them. To truly fulfill the job that those applicants were hiring continuing education to do for them, SNHU had to make sure it succeeded in meeting their own goals. SNHU sets up each new online student with a personal adviser, who stays in constant contact—and notices red flags even before the students might—in order to help them continue to make the progress they want to make. Haven’t checked out this week’s assignment by Wednesday or Thursday? Your adviser will check in with you. The unit test went badly? You can count on a call from your adviser to see not only what’s going on with the class, but also what’s going on in your life. Your laptop is causing you problems? An adviser might just send you a new one.
SNHU’s staggering growth suggests that LeBlanc and his colleagues deeply understand these students’ Jobs to Be Done. There are now twelve hundred College of Online and Continuing Education (COCE) staffers at that site in the former mill yard in Manchester, and more than seventy-five thousand students in thirty-six states and countries around the world. “There have been times when we almost broke the machine, we were outgrowing our systems so much,” LeBlanc recalls. When growth has been that rapid, SNHU has dialed back its recruiting efforts until it can reinforce its internal support and systems. LeBlanc knows that if SNHU fails to deliver on the job, students will not hesitate to fire it and seek something that does the job better.
SNHU now routinely generates very healthy 10 percent surpluses, which in turn has allowed it to make major investments in infrastructure, provide award-winning working conditions for its employees, and keep tuition low for students (indeed, online students have had no tuition increases in the last four years). It has also allowed investment in continued cutting-edge innovations, such as SNHU’s $2,500-a-year competency-based program, in which students can earn a degree based on demonstrating competency in various subjects, rather than hours logged in classes or fulfilling the right number of requisite courses. In a speech in 2013 at the University of Buffalo, President Barack Obama made a point of singling out SNHU for creating programs that allow students affordable options for pursuing advanced degrees.
Would LeBlanc and his team have stumbled onto a better way to grow online without asking the Jobs to Be Done questions? LeBlanc doesn’t think so. “It gave us the language to start talking about it in our leadership team and more broadly on campus,” he says. “It was a heuristic that was really useful for looking at what we had to do.”
Over the past decade, we’ve worked closely with many companies that provide helpful illustrations of how the Theory of Jobs to Be Done has helped transform innovation. Because Jobs Theory uncovers the cause of why consumers make the choices they do, it’s useful in a wide range of industries and organizations—from the simplest consumer packaged goods to complex business-to-business solutions. In every case, uncovering why customers make choices allows organizations to better create solutions that get hired. We’ve chosen to highlight just a few here—and then later, throughout the book—to make clear the breadth of applicability of Jobs to Be Done.
For example, nothing sounds less innovative than a cheese company rolling out yet another type of cheese. But Sargento cleared $50 million in its first year with its prepackaged ultrathin slices, driving enormous category growth and exceeding $150 million in year two. Why did this product thrive, when the vast majority of the other thirty-four hundred consumer packaged goods launched in the same year didn’t even survive their first twelve months in the market? Sargento’s ultrathin sliced cheese was solving a job consumers were struggling with: “How can I enjoy all of the delicious cheese experience that I love on my daily sandwich without the calories, fat, and guilt that come with it?” Jobs Theory, explains Rod Hogan, vice president of New Business Development at Sargento, “forces you to define the offering in the context of a very specific consumer struggle. And that is neither easy nor natural for most large companies.”
In its 2012–2016 annual Breakthrough Innovation Reports, Nielsen tracked over twenty thousand new product launches and identified just ninety-two that sold more than $50 million in year one and sustained sales in year two (excluding close-in line extensions). On the surface the list of breakthrough winners might seem random—International Delight Iced Coffee, Hershey’s Reese’s Minis, and Tidy Cats Lightweight, to name just a few—but they have one thing in common: Every single one of them nailed a poorly performed Job to Be Done.
At the other end of the complexity spectrum is FranklinCovey. Formed in the 1997 merger between Franklin Quest and Covey Leadership Center (the latter was founded by Stephen R. Covey, the famed author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)—the company had been struggling to gain a foothold for years. Revenue hit a peak of $589 million in 2000, but by 2009—after sales of businesses (including its iconic Franklin Planner and other planner-related business), streamlining, layoffs, and refocusing, it was down to $130 million. The company had survived some tough years—but was now intent on accelerating its growth.
Over the course of three years, Bob Whitman, the company’s former chairman of the board who had assumed the role of CEO, personally visited nearly four hundred existing and potential customers for the company’s line of B2B training offerings. On his eighth customer visit, something clicked. He was meeting with the chief learning officer of a Fortune 500 company that had used FranklinCovey content to train thirty-five hundred of its staff in improving personal and professional effectiveness. But this company had thirty-five thousand employees who should also have been potential beneficiaries of the training offerings FranklinCovey sold. “How come only thirty-five hundred people have been trained so far?” Whitman asked. The chief learning officer explained that he bought FranklinCovey training materials to help build a mindset and capabilities that were critical to the company’s culture. But there were a lot of products that could help him do that.
HR professionals needed an array of offerings—such as Myers-Briggs testing and analysis, training in conflict resolution, delegation, navigating difficult conversations, project management, and so on, to roll out within the organization. FranklinCovey’s offerings at the time were just one of many that HR personnel could tap. And as FranklinCovey had learned the hard way, learning-and-development budgets get cut when times get tough. There wasn’t an infinite upside for FranklinCovey in creating more, new, and different products that more or less did the same thing as all the other options already available on the market.
But Whitman probed further: what was the chief learning officer really hiring FranklinCovey—and other—products to do? Using a jobs frame for the discussion, Whitman says, they uncovered a far more complex picture—one that clearly pointed to an unfulfilled job. Though the chief learning officer’s team loved FranklinCovey products for learning and development, it hadn’t been clear to their own internal customers—leaders inside the company—how these products helped them with the priorities they cared most about: driving customer loyalty and delivering growth.
As Whitman continued his visits to customers, he realized he was hearing the same thing over and over: for the people buying FranklinCovey products, their single biggest challenge was getting line leaders and other influencers within the company to recognize what they did in learning and development was mission critical. They wanted to be seen as vital, contributing members to the company’s long-term goals. But they hadn’t always been able to connect the work they were doing to something that business leaders would recognize as helping them achieve their objectives. These HR and learning professionals wanted their work to matter—and to be acknowledged to matter—in implementing their companies’ most important priorities.
That insight led to years of reworking, rethinking, and repositioning all of FranklinCovey’s offerings around its customers’ key Jobs to Be Done. “It’s been a fundamental part of how we think about everything,” Whitman says. Historically, FranklinCovey would sell courses, typically to the chief human resources or learning officer. The FranklinCovey sales team would focus on identifying and selling the specific courses that a customer might need in any given year. But there was a flaw with that approach. If a CEO declared a set of priorities and goals that didn’t match those particular courses, they weren’t going to be hired. So FranklinCovey revised its approach: instead of selling courses, it now sells all access passes that provide customers with nearly unlimited access to all its courses and content. Moreover, this content can be formulated into courses, bite-size learning modules, single-point lessons a leader might utilize to start a staff meeting, etc., and can be utilized across a range of delivery modalities. That way, the chief learning officer has access to whatever tools he or she needs in whatever circumstances arise. “Here’s the whole library! How can we help you resolve whatever jobs arise in your life this year?”
FranklinCovey also sells entire processes and experiences geared toward satisfying a particular Job to Be Done. At a high level, the offerings are grouped around various categories of jobs—for example leadership, execution, customer loyalty, sales performance—but underneath each of those categories are offerings aimed at specific Jobs to Be Done. Jobs that are measured in business outcomes.
For example, after being hired by a major information technology equipment company to help improve sales, FranklinCovey created an offering that not only included training, but also included stationing a full-time coach at the client’s headquarters to ensure that the process improvements were adhered to for all sales prospects above $500 million. “A company doesn’t get a lot of ‘at bats’ with contracts of that size,” Whitman says. “So we own the outcomes with them. Our deliverable is really a process, not a product.” One with measurable ROI.
What has innovating around jobs meant for FranklinCovey? Among other critical shifts in perspective, it’s changing the competitive landscape. No longer is it simply competing against other companies that provide world-class training content. It’s largely competing in its own lane.
“We try to position ourselves around jobs that don’t have competitors,” Whitman says. If a company is looking to change its strategy, that work usually goes to a conventional consulting firm. But if they want help in implanting that strategy, getting large numbers of people to do something better or more consistently in order to invariably execute on a new strategy or to achieve a very specific business goal like increasing complex, multimillion-dollar sales, FranklinCovey sees few competitors for the gig.
In fact, Whitman says, traditional consulting firms have become a source of work for them—FranklinCovey’s been retained to help see a new strategy through. As we’ll discuss later in the book, competitive advantage is built not just by understanding customers’ jobs, but by creating the experiences that customers seek both in purchasing and using the product or service—and then, crucially, building internal processes to ensure that those experiences are reliably delivered to the customer every time. That is what’s hard for competitors to copy.
And that means the potential for growth is far greater than it was when FranklinCovey was only competing with other providers of training products. In 2015 FranklinCovey’s revenue reached $220 million, a 9.2 percent compounded annual growth rate in the past six years.
Intuit cofounder Scott Cook was an early adopter of Jobs Theory—and his work has helped define and shape the theory. Within Intuit he refers to the “improvement in the customer’s life that matters most to him in selecting the product.” But we agree that we’re talking about the same thing: the progress a customer seeks in particular circumstances. He and I eventually went on to coauthor the first article to preview the Theory of Jobs to Be Done in Harvard Business Review2 (along with one of the coauthors of this book, Taddy Hall). This theory helped Intuit launch the wildly successful QuickBooks accounting software for the small business market—and has guided the company’s innovation strategy since.
Interestingly, Cook says he nearly missed the insight that led to QuickBooks—a product that has become critical to Intuit’s long-term growth beyond its original offering—because he wasn’t focused on the right things. For years small business customers were using Intuit’s personal financial software product, Quicken, to jury-rig a way to keep track of small business accounts—a workaround that made no sense. Quicken didn’t allow small business customers to do a whole host of things that other successful business software on the market already did, such as keeping journals, ledgers, postings, closings, debits, and credits, and to do so in the recognized language of accountants. Why were these folks using Quicken when there was far more sophisticated accounting software easily available to them?
It turns out that accounting software was the last thing these people wanted. They just wanted to have the confidence that financial mechanics were operating efficiently—invoices sent, cash collected, and bills paid. The progress they wanted to make was more about what they didn’t want to do than what they did.
What Cook and his team identified was the difference between a task (enter a debit in the ledger) and a genuine struggle—in specific circumstances. These business owners didn’t need to understand the complexities of recognized standards of accounting. “‘Civilians’ don’t know that stuff,” Cook recalls. They just wanted to get money in and out of their business as efficiently as possible. “We did all the hocus-pocus in the background,” he explains. So if a small business owner wanted to pay a bill, she’d see a check on the screen and didn’t have to work through confusing and cumbersome accounting language. “And if she wanted to see which customers were late in paying, we made that fast and easy.”
It became clear that Intuit’s competitors for this Job to Be Done were not the other sophisticated accounting software products already on the market, but rather the decision whether to hire another person just to do the books, spending extra hours at the office just to get the paperwork done, figuring out how to construct and use one of the generic spreadsheet software products available, or even a shoebox where all the receipts went with no hope of ever actually being properly reconciled. Thus, the size of the potential market couldn’t even be accurately estimated based on current sales of competing software. Intuit was seizing the opportunity for people who had not found any satisfactory solution at all yet—a much bigger potential market.
To outside eyes, QuickBooks might have seemed an unlikely success. After all, the product offered half the functionality of more sophisticated accounting software at twice the price. But QuickBooks quickly became—and has remained—the global leader in online accounting software. Competitors were focused on making the best accounting software possible. Cook and his team focused on the job customers were trying to do.
A clear view of customers’ jobs means an organization should never overshoot what those customers are actually willing to pay for. On the contrary, we believe that when customers find the right product to respond to their Job to Be Done, they’re often willing to pay more—something we’ll demonstrate throughout this book. Intuit’s $4 billion in revenue and $25 billion in market cap makes clear that Cook and his team understand that. “All that we do is focus on solving the customers’ struggle,” Cook says. “That’s all we do and the only thing we do.”
Intuit may have stumbled into Jobs to Be Done, but the initial discovery of a job doesn’t have to be accidental or random. With a deep understanding of this theory, organizations have the ability to fundamentally change the way they innovate and grow. So many innovations that are launched with great hope and fanfare flop because they have focused on improving the product on dimensions that are irrelevant to the consumer’s actual Job to Be Done, with enormous resources wasted in the process. This is because improvements on such dimensions do not cause a customer to pull that product into his life. A product that has been designed specifically to fulfill a well-understood Job to Be Done allows you to crawl into the skin of your customer and see the world through her eyes. It says to the customer, “We get you.”
But as we’ll discuss throughout this book, uncovering an unsatisfactorily resolved job is only the first step. Your organization has to build the right set of experiences in how customers find, purchase, and use your product or service—and integrate all the corresponding processes to ensure that those experiences are consistently delivered. When you are solving a customer’s job, your products essentially become services. What matters is not the bundle of product attributes you rope together, but the experiences you enable to help your customers make the progress they want to make.
We believe the thinking in this book has the potential to change not just innovation success rates, but to transform companies themselves. But first, executives have to change what they believe is possible. For far too long, companies have accepted that innovation success is just random and we’ve allowed ourselves failure rates that we wouldn’t tolerate in any other aspect of business. Innovation does not have to be the least successful thing that companies do.
Chapter Takeaways
Questions for Leaders
1. I have served on the board of trustees of SNHU in the past and on the FranklinCovey board since 2004.
2.Christensen, Clayton M., Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall. “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure.” Harvard Business Review, December 2005. https://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure.