The saasmvp Project
Don’t Compete Against Luck
Rick Gregg October 03,2024 What do you think?
SOURCE: freepik.com
In its 2012-2016 annual Breakthrough Innovation Report, 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. That’s a failure rate of 99.5%! In our work of identifying the customer jobs for our customer profile, we view customer jobs in light of the “Jobs to Be Done” theory made popular by the late Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and thought leader in his book Competing Against Luck.
Creating the Right Experiences
The definition of what we mean by a job is highly specific and precise. It’s not an all-purpose catch phrase for something that a customer wants or needs. Identifying and understanding the Jobs to Be Done is key, but it’s only the beginning. After you have uncovered and understood the job, you need to translate those insights into a roadmap to guide the development of products and services that your customers will love. This involves creating the right set of experiences that accompany your product or service in solving the job. Creating the right experiences and then integrating them to solve a job is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your innovation processes.
Defining the Job
Customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. This progress is the “job” they are trying to get done. The metaphor used is that customers “hire” products or services to solve these jobs. Remembering that the definition of a Job to Be Done is precise, a job is then defined as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. The idea of a circumstance is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined – and a successful solution created – relative to the specific context in which it arises. The emphasis on circumstance is not hair-splitting or simple semantics – it is fundamental to the Job to Be Done. Finally, a job has an inherent complexity to it; it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions too. In many innovations, the focus is often entirely on the functional or practical need. But consumers’ social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.
Who Does Your Customer Have to Fire Before They Hire You?
Most companies want to stay closely connected to their customers to make sure they’re creating the products and services those customers want. Rarely, though, can customers articulate their requirements accurately or completely – their motivations are more complex and their pathways to purchase more elaborate than they can describe. But you can get to the bottom of it. What they hire – and equally important, what they fire – tells a story. That story is about the functional, social and emotional dimensions for their desire of progress – and what prevents them from getting there. The challenge is in becoming part sleuth and part documentary filmmaker – piecing together clues and observations – to reveal the jobs customers are trying to get done.
The saasmvp Project is dedicated to helping SaaS Entrepreneurs who want to create a repeatable SaaS business model and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that generates revenue with minimal financial risk. If you’ve enrolled in saaskamp, our FREE one-on-one mentoring program for SaaS Founders, you already know that we rely heavily on the Jobs to Be Done Theory in the development of our customer profile’s jobs. We’re excited to help you discover your ideal SaaS customer profile and can’t wait to see what you build! Let me know what you think.