Many companies have lofty mission statements with a variety of intentions from motivating workers to informing strategies to attracting investors, but almost as many companies struggle to translate these mission statements into everyday behaviors. However, when the job has a voice in an organization, individual work streams have meaning and employees understand why their work matters. A well-articulated job provides a kind of “commander’s intent,” obviating the need for micromanagement because employees at all levels understand and are motivated by how the work they do fits into a larger process to help customers get their jobs done.
Not long ago, Intuit founder Scott Cook led a brainstorming session devoted to improving one of Intuit’s flagship products, TurboTax. For years the team has focused on how to improve the “interview” built into TurboTax that asks customers to answer questions and fill in data to generate an accurate tax return. Every year the team would debate how to improve that interview tool, polishing and perfecting and adding specificity that led to the most accurate possible results.
With the well-intended effort of giving customers what they ask for, Cook recalls, Intuit’s development teams would extensively survey customers about what new features they’d like to see in Intuit products. And customers had a lot to say. They’d rattle off an expansive wish list. “They’d ask for 150 features,” Cook says. So the team jumped on that feedback. Development teams would spend weeks arguing and debating which of the list of potential new features were most important to provide. Everybody, Cook says, was guided by what he or she thought was right for the customer. But in reality, it offered no guidance at all. “We got into feature chase,” Cook says. “Too often we’d go look at what customers were asking for and build it.” But absent a clear understanding of the job the customers were hiring that product to do, “there was simply no way to differentiate which features were the right ones. It’s like navigating without a compass.”
Then Intuit promoted a new leader, Sasan Goodarzi, to general manager for the TurboTax organization. It dawned on him that maybe TurboTax had been missing the point. Customers weren’t hiring TurboTax to provide them with a better tax interview tool. “Sasan led the organization to a deeper understanding,” Cook says, “of ‘what problem did the customer really want solved.’” The organization’s energy, for years, had been focused on a good goal, but not the goal customers wanted most. Customers didn’t want to have to work through that interview at all. They didn’t want to have to input data. They hired TurboTax to get their taxes done. Period.
It was a sea change from optimizing the interview to eliminating the need for it altogether. But an energizing one. That realization, Cook says, led to an immediate burst of creativity in the organization. Once the team was focused on the Job to Be Done, it was clear what TurboTax had to be working to solve: completing customers’ taxes without their having to answer any questions or input any data.
How is that possible? Goodarzi and his team are still working on solving the challenge, but they’ve made progress. For example, if a customer gives TurboTax permission to obtain W-2 information from a payroll company such as ADP, a lot of basic information can be downloaded immediately into the customer’s tax return. Achieving a true “no interview” TurboTax might take a decade, Cook says, but even the baby steps they’ve been able to take toward that goal have made a significant difference in customer experience already. In 2015 Intuit experimented with preloaded data, such as payroll information, in just one “chapter” (there are anywhere from four to forty chapters, depending on the taxpayer’s situation) in the TurboTax questionnaire. With just one chapter being prefilled in, Intuit saw a noticeable uptick in the number of customers who actually completed the TurboTax interview, even when customers had to manually correct some of the data that was automatically filled in.
In the case of TurboTax, the team had a flawed essential unit of analysis when it focused on relentlessly improving the interview. But this is exactly what most companies do when they follow the wrong innovation guides. How can a leader consistently rally his team about such a challenging goal—and keep them focused? “I think you’re on to the sixty-four-billion-dollar question,” Cook says. Staying relentlessly focused on the job enables—and even compels—employees to new and better ways of working. A deep understanding of customers’ Jobs to Be Done should trigger a cascade of questions about how the company is organized, what’s measured and rewarded, what priorities run throughout the company, and how people work together to solve problems. As Cook suggests, we don’t yet have all the answers to these questions, but we do know that leaders interviewed for this book have told us that Jobs Theory turns out to be a powerful tool for focusing and leading the organization as a whole. In Intuit’s case, Cook says, the organization is so focused on customers’ jobs that it allows itself to operate like a “network of start-ups” in which small teams launch new product pilots with minimal senior-level approval because they are so clearly aligned with jobs. When everyone on the team understands that the goal is “taxes are done,” they’re all pulling in the same direction.
Having a jobs-focused organization, the CEOs we interviewed for this book tell us, leads to four categories of clear benefit:
Focusing on customers’ Jobs to Be Done provides not just a one-off improvement idea, but an enduring innovation North Star. It helps bridge the gap between what senior management expects to see happen and what rank-and-file employees instinctively know to do. It’s both inspiring and empowering.
Most companies have a mission statement—and if they’re lucky, employees will have memorized it well enough to recite it chapter and verse. However, mission statements are usually phrased at such a high level and so generically that employees find it difficult to use them as guides for action, decision making, and innovation. Take, for example, these mission statements from a few Fortune 500 companies.
These are just a random sample, but they’re representative of typical corporate mission statements. There’s nothing wrong with having a mission statement. They’re like the themes of our lives that I spoke about earlier in the book—I want to be a good father. I want to be a good husband. I want to contribute to my community. But on their own, they aren’t enough to provide guidance in daily decision making.
But a clear job spec does. For example, unlike the case in the yellow fats business, Unilever has managed to turn the oldest “health” soap brand in the world, Lifebuoy, into one of the company’s fastest growing brands in the past few years by nesting a job under the mission of helping children in emerging markets live to the age of five. You can’t innovate to the broad goal of helping children live, but you can innovate around the very specific circumstances of that struggle. Experts tell us that it takes thirty seconds of vigorous washing with soap and hot water to eliminate germs—but in the circumstances that Unilever was innovating into, that was not likely to happen. Most people spend around seven seconds washing their hands—and rarely more than fifteen seconds. Kids are usually in even more of a hurry. In emerging markets, the circumstances were even more daunting. In India, for example, nearly 400,000 children under the age of five die in a year from diarrheal disease—an average of more than one thousand deaths a day. Yet mothers and children in parts of India, and other emerging market countries, don’t routinely wash their hands.
So Unilever created a series of products that helps consumers make the progress they were struggling to make—in their particular circumstances. Color-changing soap was created to ensure that children scrubbed for long enough to kill germs. The soap changes color when they’ve reached ten seconds—all that is required to kill germs with Unilever’s special formula—(and makes it more fun for kids to stick with it long enough to matter). The mission of saving children’s lives was powerful, but it was only with the specificity of what job consumers were trying to do that Unilever was able to energize its oldest soap brand. The more you understand about the job, the better you will connect to it internally.
A leader has to count on employees up and down the company’s ranks to make the right choices in everyday decisions. Those choices will determine a company’s real strategy. As we discussed earlier, the way an organization’s employees work together toward common goals is the basis of its culture. If they work together with a focus on the Job to Be Done, a culture will emerge that reinforces that job and stays deeply connected to it. If that culture has formed around the job, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
But those instincts aren’t formed overnight. Rather, they are the result of shared learning—of employees working together to solve problems and figuring out what works. As long as the way they have chosen keeps working to solve a problem, the culture will coalesce and become an internal set of rules and guidelines that employees in the company will draw upon in making the choices ahead of them. The advantage of this is that it causes an organization to become self-managing. Managers don’t need to enforce the rules. They understand the “commander’s intent”—a military term that explains why soldiers up and down the ranks know how to make the right choices absent a specific order. They are clear on the commander’s goals and priorities.
Business leaders need to ensure that employees everywhere in the company make the right choices every day without requiring constant supervision. This is nothing new: as far back as ancient Rome, emperors would send an associate off to govern a newly conquered territory thousands of miles away. As the emperors watched the chariot go over the hill—knowing full well they would not see their associate again for years—they needed to know that their understudy’s priorities were consistent with their own and that he would use proven, accepted methods to solve problems.
A clearly defined job spec that everyone understands can serve the same purpose—a focal point for employees to make the right decisions without being told specifically what to do each time. Absent a specific directive, employees know how to balance the tradeoffs that necessarily come with any new initiative. What’s most important? What can’t we compromise on? What’s the ultimate goal? What’s my role in achieving that ultimate goal? Jobs Theory provides you with the right set of lenses to make everyday choices that connect to the jobs you are solving in customers’ lives. Jobs Theory provides a language of integration, whereby marketers, engineers, salespeople, and customer service employees can communicate with each other, rather than talk past one another.
As Mercer’s Jacques Goulet sees it, the concept of a Job to Be Done serves this purpose perfectly “because of its simplicity. It’s a simple expression—one-syllable words. Jobs. To. Be. Done. It’s not overly engineered and overly complicated. But it’s powerful, it’s simple, and it focuses the mind.”
It’s not easy to get these jobs-based goals right—as we’ve discussed, jobs are complex and nuanced and require a deep understanding of the progress a consumer is trying to make. But when you do, the impact on an organization’s productivity can be dramatic, because the resulting clarity enables a much greater share of the organization’s human capital to be deployed with the right balance of autonomy and alignment. Since we know that strategy is formed in the everyday choices employees make about resources, processes, and priorities, clarity about what jobs your customers are hiring you to do provides a kind of intuitive playbook.
Once GM’s OnStar team figured out that customers were hiring the service for peace of mind while driving, that clarity shifted the organization’s focus from cool new “brochure ware” features to genuinely targeted customer benefits that aligned with the Job to Be Done. It was a focus that played out not just in what and how OnStar designed into its service, but the everyday decisions made by employees in all parts of the organization. In an organization like GM, where OnStar was formed, there are potentially limitless possibilities for how a service like OnStar could develop. But should it? Having clarity of Jobs to Be Done actually made it easier to decide what did and didn’t belong in the OnStar suite of benefits and services. What to pursue, what not to pursue? Which technical priorities were most important? Which didn’t add value? How do we talk to our customers? How do we make sure dealers aren’t obstacles to the job customers are hiring us to do? “The real challenge is how do you get this herd of energy—your team—lining up on a future road map, some of which you can’t yet see. Jobs Theory helps you do that,” says Chet Huber, OnStar’s founding CEO. “It’s crazy powerful, if you get that right.”
Until they zoned in on the Job to Be Done, Huber and his team were picking and choosing among all kinds of cool bells and whistles that OnStar technically could offer. Optimizing around the Job to Be Done, Huber says, might have seemed to narrow the team’s focus in a way that was limiting—but in reality, it provided helpful clarity. Less time and energy were spent evaluating options. “The focus you get greatly simplifies.”
For example, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hitting the Gulf Coast less than a month apart in 2005 triggered a whole series of new experiences and processes essential to keeping the peace-of-mind promise. When Katrina hit, OnStar was new enough that it hadn’t had the experience of intersecting with a natural disaster. When the call center started getting flooded with calls, all kinds of previously unconsidered problems were flagged. A panicked customer would call in the middle of getting on the road and be told that their OnStar plan didn’t include getting real-time directions. So initially, OnStar required that customers buy an upgrade to access the plan that gave directions.
By the time Rita was approaching, OnStar realized what was happening, that these weren’t individual subscriber issues but regional crisis events. And while you couldn’t envision any more powerful call to action to buy a service upgrade than being caught in a hurricane, it just didn’t feel right to the people delivering the services—it wasn’t consistent with the job they were being hired to do. So the employee in charge of that part of the OnStar business simply made a decision to immediately offer anybody calling from a crisis area all the services that OnStar offered, without requiring any upgrades to her current plan. It was so clearly the right decision, Huber says, “it was about a fifteen-second conversation in my office. I can’t imagine many organizations in which that would be possible.”
Not least because making the decision—and executing it—are two different things. The way the OnStar system had been designed and built at that point made it technically difficult for an employee to just declare that everyone in the affected zone would automatically receive all the services that OnStar offers. OnStar had to create imperfect workarounds—“we had to cobble it together with duct tape and Velcro to make it work,” Huber recalls. For example, OnStar had to create a system that would detect all calls coming from a regional crisis area and divert them to a specialized call center team that would have access to valuable real-time information, such as the best evacuation routes or current weather forecasts. Making that happen was not simple. But the difficulty of the challenge never undermined the clarity of its purpose. It gave his team laser focus. As Huber sees it, the Job to Be Done served as a compass.
As was true for Intuit’s Cook, Huber found the power of focusing his team around the Job to Be Done extended beyond knowing what features and benefits made most sense. The clarity of a Job to Be Done actually motivated employees to do their best work because they clearly understood why that mattered. When the arrow on the “two-sided compass” shifts to point more clearly at a deeper understanding of the job, so too must the other side of it, aligning with a better job spec.
“Whenever something came up that we had never thought about, but clearly intersected with this compass heading, people just did it. They just got on it,” Huber says. “You didn’t get the normal reaction, ‘Don’t give me one more thing to do.’” Instead, Huber says—like what Cook found at Intuit—the team would often be energized by the focus.
Here’s an example of the two-sided compass in action. After discussions with emergency room physicians showed that providing 911 responders with advance information about the severity of a car accident they were responding to had the potential to save lives, Huber’s team eagerly rallied around that goal with new processes. It was a very difficult technical problem to solve—what information was needed to determine how serious a car accident has been? It would require a complex algorithm and the ability to determine the relevant information automatically. The change in velocity. The use of seat belts. The direction of the force. How many cars were involved? And so on. “I remember the discussion with the engineers,” Huber recalls. “I was a little bit nervous—it was clearly the right thing to try to do, but it was likely to be really hard and very expensive. But in a relatively short period of time, they came back and said, ‘We think we can figure this out.’ And it wasn’t because I told them to go work nights and weekends to figure it out. It was because they knew what was at stake and that it was perfectly aligned with the job we were being hired to do. This wasn’t figuring out how to beam latte coupons to Starbucks into the OnStar unit. This would save lives.”
As Huber found, a clear Job to Be Done can provide the foundation for an organization’s culture—we solve problems this way because we know what matters and why.
Southern New Hampshire University’s Paul LeBlanc believes his organization’s clarity around a job empowers employees to clear the roadblocks for students when they happen. “We have a culture that empowers people to put that to work,” he says. For example, a career-services advisory staff member was supporting a student who reported that she was running out of cash. She happened to be a single mom without a huge support network around her at home. That adviser decided on her own to purchase a $200 gift card from a local grocery store to send to the student. In another case, a tech help desk employee and an adviser working with a student who was a few credits shy of graduation, but was very ill, took it upon themselves to present a case to the dean that the student had completed enough work to finish her degree. When they got approval, they personally flew to present her diploma to her while she was in the hospital. “These things happened with no prompting,” LeBlanc says. “But they’re clearly consistent with the Job to Be Done. My goal is making sure we continue to create the structures and the culture by which people make those right choices without being asked.” At its best, Jobs Theory enables “lean” operations—waste and overhead and time are minimized systematically because once you have alignment around the job, LeBlanc says, wasted time, energy, and resources are minimized.
“We had a saying when I ran American Girl,” reports American Girl founder Pleasant Rowland, “‘American Girl is story, not stuff.’ It was a constant shorthand that we used among ourselves to keep us honest about that. I think within the company, you could walk into any part of it and talk to any person and they would tell you that. We were all zealots, we thought we were going to change the world and hold back adolescence for a couple of years.” The jobs focus, Rowland says, was constantly empowering employees up and down the ranks. It motivated them. “Everyone who came and worked for me liked the Job to Be Done—making childhood better for girls and for moms.”
“What gets measured, gets done.” It’s generally used in the positive sense of urging managers to measure for benchmarking efficiency and improvements. But the data we use to measure efficiency is double-edged. Yes, it enables measurement and management, but data also creates a model of the external world. Managers inside a corporation—especially large ones—rarely know their customers directly. They know the customer only through data—the models and spreadsheets that slice, dice, and reconstruct real people into “segments” of similarly attributed phenomena. When companies organize themselves into business units with responsibilities for products of certain characteristics or units with responsibilities for certain customer groups, data is gathered through those filters creating models that rarely map to customer jobs.
“Turns out in the modern world, there’s so much you can easily measure: screens, traffic, conversion rates, frequency, screens per use. . . . There were so many things to measure that our people got full of measuring all the stuff that was easy to measure because it rolled off our servers,” says Intuit founder Scott Cook. But in spite of the volume of data that Intuit had on every click its customers made, something fundamental was missing. “We weren’t measuring what was most important to our customers. Because it’s hard to measure. But it matters profoundly. We were not measuring whether we were improving customers’ lives.”
“Improving customers’ lives” didn’t translate into a single piece of data that Intuit was already capturing. But it was possible to measure whether Intuit was providing the experiences in purchase and use that its customers were seeking in hiring Intuit software. For example, Intuit knows that accountants who hire Intuit software are trying to save time doing clients’ tax returns. That frees them up to take on more clients (and consequently bill more) or simply to have more free time to pursue other activities. Did Intuit software help them achieve that?
Cook, who served on the board of Amazon for years, points to the online retail giant as the model of understanding how to measure what matters most to customers’ Jobs to Be Done—while still focusing on improving efficiency. As we discussed earlier, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been crystal clear since its inception that there are three things that matter in their retail business: vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery. In Amazon’s now famous “customer backward” innovation process, those three measures are monitored on a minute-by-minute basis. Bezos doesn’t consider delays to be accidents or poor performance, he considers them “defects” to be eradicated. For example, to stay true to its foundational promise of “lowest prices,” Amazon built a shopping robot, an automated search engine that scours the prices of hundreds of benchmark products twice a day. If a lower price was found, the Amazon price was automatically lowered to beat that competitor’s price. That’s why you sometimes see an unexpected price drop while a product sits in your Amazon shopping cart. If the lower price dips below some appropriate gross-margin threshold, it triggers human review. Everything about that system is designed for efficiency—but its focus is squarely on efficiently delivering on the job customers are hiring Amazon to do. Bezos personally hands out the Amazon “Just Do It” award—an old Nike shoe—every few months to an employee who has strayed from his or her official job responsibilities to do something for the greater good of Amazon. That kind of focus keeps employees clear on what matters most to Amazon’s customers.
SNHU has a similar focus. “Our success is defined by our students’ success,” President Paul LeBlanc says. While SNHU tracks reams of data at a micro level, LeBlanc and his leadership team keep one critical statistic front and center: Would graduates of SNHU do it all over again if they had a chance? In essence—did they hire the right “solution” to get their job done? As of early 2016, 95 percent of those surveyed said yes. As LeBlanc puts it: “We can measure lots of things. But what you measure matters.”
The night of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, Clark Gilbert was riveted by the television and laptop screens in his hotel room as the world tried to piece together what had happened in the chaotic aftermath of the bomb. Gilbert stayed up much of the night, watching the breaking news unfold, trying to make sense of the shocking tragedy. But his intense interest in the coverage was not solely that of a concerned citizen: Gilbert was then-CEO of Deseret News Publishing Company,1 the organization that publishes Utah’s oldest daily newspaper, Deseret News. The next morning, as he walked the corridors of his hotel to the elevator and through the lobby, he couldn’t help but look critically at the rows of newspapers outside of the hotel rooms and in the lobby. They had missed the emerging story because they’d gone to press before critical details had surfaced. Hour by hour throughout the night, more details had been shared, video of the bombing and scores of photos were posted, early misinformation was corrected, and the names of victims and heroes had begun to emerge. An entire news cycle had played out in the interim.
Glancing at the headlines of those newspapers in the hotel lobby was a stark reminder: the jobs that people hired traditional print newspapers to do were far better filled by other sources. There was no newspaper in his hotel lobby that morning—including his own—that would have been the best solution to hire for getting up to speed on the bombing. The 24/7 television news cycle, live blogging on major media sites, and even Twitter had eclipsed them. If you didn’t already know that there had been a bombing in Boston the day before, you must have been living in a cave.
That realization was not, of course, a surprise to Gilbert. The newspaper industry had been fighting a losing battle for decades to be hired for the job of breaking news. And Gilbert had been leading Deseret News through a reorganization for several years, focusing on building the organization’s digital capabilities to better compete in a just-in-time-news world. But the Boston Marathon bombing coverage brought home to him that focusing on building digital didn’t address the core question: What job are our readers hiring us to do?
Newspapers had historically been hired to address four to five distinct jobs. For example, the classified ads were targeted at jobs such as “help me find employment” or “help me to find a low-cost item I can buy this weekend.” Opinion columns might be targeted at the job of “find someone who supports my view or who can clarify my view.” And prior to the revolution in communication speed brought on by the Internet, print newspapers were where people turned to keep them abreast of breaking news stories, or, in Gilbert’s words, the job of “tell me what is happening right now in my community.”
But muddling all these jobs together, and doing none of them well, prevented newspapers from understanding what people really were trying to get done—regardless of whether it was through a printed newspaper or an online publication. This key insight would have allowed them to double down on making their solution even more distinctive for these jobs, and enable them to stop wasting resources trying to address jobs for which they were no longer relevant.
If there were a host of better solutions to perform the job of “tell me what is happening right now in my community,” was there still a Job to Be Done that Deseret News could fulfill—and could it be compelling?
So Gilbert and his team turned to Jobs Theory to answer the question.
What started as a demographic segmentation actually led to a jobs-based segmentation, Gilbert reports. “We found a segment in the country looking to solve a very common job: I want to be well-informed, feel more confident in my knowledge, and still be true to my beliefs so that I can make a difference in my home and community.” The target audience was made up of subgroups: tolerant believers (people of faith and family values, but with less of a denominational focus), devoted denominationalists (people of a decidedly religious background), and strugglers (people who might have had aspirations to be in one of the other two groups, but for whom life had been more challenging). Taken together these three subgroups became known collectively as “like-minded believers.” They valued family, were generally faith-oriented, worried about the decline in moral values, were focused on teaching their children, and wanted to give back to their communities.
Remarkably, in Deseret’s research these like-minded believers made up nearly 56 percent of American news consumers and yet they felt massively underserved. Part of the reason that traditional media was missing them is that they couldn’t be identified on traditional demographic or psychographic dimensions. They were not primarily rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, or even urban or rural. What distinguished these news consumers is that they had an entirely different Job to Be Done and no one was providing it in the news media. What the mainstream media so often provided was news about the awful, seedy side of life. These news consumers wanted thoughtful, nonpolemical news and analysis from credible sources. But they also wanted that news and information to be informed by issues that mattered to them, including their families, their perspective on faith, and their desire to understand solutions. Gilbert described the frustrated news habits of these like-minded believers by saying: “They were reading the New York Times and watching Sean Hannity and they hated them both. They admired the rigor and depth of the New York Times but felt a disconnect, even an ignorance of their core values. They heard some of their values from Sean Hannity, but it felt polemic and angry.” Into that breach, the Deseret News began to meet the Job to Be Done that had been there all along in the American public, but never identified and served deliberately.
The Deseret News is an affiliate of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), but had historically run itself more or less as a traditional newspaper, competing with other local and national newspapers to be the primary source of news in its local region. Through a functional, emotional, and social lens, the Deseret team identified a significant gap between what traditional media (including the historical Deseret News) had been providing and what many consumers wanted. “We realized the job was ‘be well-informed with news that reflects my values,’” Gilbert says. “People wanted this type of information so they could be more confident in living [their] beliefs and so they could make a difference in their homes and in their communities.” They weren’t looking for the “shock and awe” value of news. “We knew that if we could deliver against that emotional dimension of the job, they were going to read more and more from us.”
Gilbert used this insight to frame the challenge for his leadership team: find a job for which print media is still relevant and can be distinctive, and focus all your energy on nailing that job. “I used to say to people, ‘You’re going to have to pretend that everyone already knows the story you are writing about. It’s old news. That is the context for consumption of anything we might put out in print.’”
Fortunately for the team at Deseret News, this line of thinking quickly led them to identify a very compelling job related to getting deeper insight and analysis on news events that had already happened. To describe this job, they borrowed an acronym from the publishers of the Dallas Morning News, PICA: “Perspective, Insight, Context, and Analysis.” Readers were looking for all these things after an event had already happened and been reported on. In other words, there was still a job focused on helping readers understand the meaning and relevance of a news event after it became known to the public. But that was only the functional part of the job. The emotional part of the job for the Deseret News then layered on top of the functional job and helped readers connect those issues to their deeper interests around their families and their faith. “What the Washington Post is to DC politics, we want to be for the American family,” Gilbert says.
Gilbert’s description highlights perfectly the importance of the circumstance in framing this job: “We realized that on the functional side, there was still a role for the newspaper when it was last to the game. It’s the ‘tomorrow morning’ circumstance, the circumstance that happens after a story has already been reported and people know the basic facts. People can only listen to CNN repeat the same thing for so long. What we all need the next day is deeper analysis of what it all means.”
Clarity on the jobs Deseret News could distinctively solve provided not only a compass for how to shape its solutions and how to compete, but also a filter for what to not do. Take the example of covering the legislative session in Congress. Traditional news organizations would say, “We’re covering the legislature,” and provide broad coverage across all the bills and debates happening in the session. But the jobs-based lens resulted in a different approach: “For our A1 page coverage on the legislative session, there might be thirty bills coming forward. But we would focus on just the five issues that were going to affect your family. Once we had this job related to faith and family defined, it completely shaped the way we searched for, discovered, and covered news. It was about understanding the job of the reader—putting yourself in those shoes.”
It also had the benefit of clarifying who were the right employees to carry out that Job to Be Done for readers. “We are not the Sacramento Bee,” became the rallying cry to make that distinction clear. “What I was trying to say was we are not a traditional newspaper. We’re not generic. We’d use that to help emphasize what we would not do because it didn’t align around our Job to Be Done,” Gilbert says. “Everyone knew that the worst insult you could get was that a story or a page looked like the Sacramento Bee. That would be the last thing you’d ever want said about your work inside the organization.”
Not everyone at the existing organization got it, Gilbert says. And some of those employees had to be restructured or counseled out. But on the other side of those changes has come a culture that’s focused on the same goals: “One of the reasons we have seen so much growth is that we have been able to recruit and cultivate talented people who believe deeply in the idea that there is a gap in faith and family news coverage in this country.”
“Reorienting the whole organization around that job really changed everything,” Gilbert says now. Deseret News saw dramatic circulation gains relative to its traditional print competitors. It also saw online traffic soar. And it realized it was also addressing an important social dimension of the job as well, which was to connect with like-minded readers. “Once we put that audience together socially, we found huge connections between our readers. It was electric—we put together social communities on the web connected by their common interest in issues related to faith and family.”
But rather than building its social communities around traditional publications, the Deseret team began building communities around the emotional benefits of the job itself, launching communities on Facebook around faith and family-oriented themes and letting those channels carry the news content to a much wider audience. The number of followers on social media went from the low millions to over 100 million (through a variety of social channels created through Deseret’s FamilyShare Network), a number that would shock people who haven’t ever heard of Deseret. But that, Gilbert and his colleagues say, is tied to the clear Job to Be Done. “We found huge engagement with people who might never have come to us,” Gilbert says. “When we built our social strategy around the Job to Be Done versus the product of the newspaper, it opened up our market to a much broader audience than we ever thought possible.”
Every successful organization achieves initial success, consciously or not, by performing a valuable job for a group of customers. At the outset, there is very little in the way of processes or the type of rules we refer to as “priorities,” such as how companies evaluate opportunities, compensate managers, and measure success. A successful start-up is typically organized around the job, which tends to make it look like a small group of people each wearing multiple hats and sharing an understanding for what the entity is delivering that enables the customer to make progress. In short, the organizing unit in a start-up is the customer’s job.
Things change over time: growth requires additional layers of management and increased communication. Clear individual responsibilities and defined processes are a simple necessity as an antidote to chaos. The informal, often unconscious way that early-stage entities organically organize around the Job to Be Done—because that’s how value is created and revenue is generated—becomes untenable and unmanageable as companies grow. Inexorably, the organizing unit moves to a far more intense focus on customers and products and competitors and investors—but a less and less intense focus on the job. Increased control and efficiency, however, is not without risk. The risk is that managers frame their task as efficiently executing established internal processes rather than effectively resolving customers’ Jobs to Be Done. And the further removed managers are from the customer context, the easier it is to slip into a highly edited view of the external world.
Over time, our organization can become less and less aligned with the job customers hire us to perform as we blithely expand and optimize our capabilities based on these internally benchmarked “competencies.” But Intuit, SNHU, American Girl, OnStar, Deseret News, and so many other of the successful organizations we’ve studied reveal a very different orientation: a focus on the core customer job as the defining and aligning organizational principle of the enterprise.
Functional oversight and efficiency is a requirement of competitive markets. However, efficiency is only value creating when it is in the performance of a process that is creating customer value by fulfilling a high-priority job. Successful organizations pursue operational efficiency without compromising the customer Job to Be Done.
“You might disagree about spreadsheets or marketing campaigns,” observes Hari Nair, group chief of the Strategy Innovation Office at the Malaysian-based conglomerate Sime Darby. Nair has used Jobs Theory in his innovation work for years, including in prior positions at Innosight, Procter & Gamble, and Kimberly-Clark. He says, “But internally nobody should be debating about the Job to Be Done. I have seen it be a unifying force in a corporation. We are inundated and flooded with messages, often conflicting. But it’s simplifying to say: ‘Let’s get back to the Job to Be Done. What are our customers hiring us to do?’ We don’t argue about that.”
Chapter Takeaways
Questions for Leaders
1. I have previously served on the editorial advisory board of Deseret News.