We frequently leverage a Jobs to be Done approach to enable teams to root their innovation in the problem and avoid the pitfalls of their ideas being irrelevant to the consumer, incremental instead of disruptive, or simply not strategic for the brand, product, or company.
Starting with consumer insights, teams identify pain points and translate it those into Jobs to be Done. And teams identify hundreds of Jobs to be Done within days. But from there, how do you prioritize to ensure that you choose to move forward with the most relevant Jobs to solve for your consumers?
Understand The Full Consumer Context
Before you even begin forming your Jobs to Be Done statements, it’s important to build an empathetic understanding of your consumer and the circumstances in which they interact with your category. Consumer Jobs must be rooted in consumer pain points, and it’s important to understand the full context surrounding those pain points. Immerse your team in the consumer’s perspective, and look for the following:
Understanding the answers to these questions, and taking it a step further to uncover the “why” behind each, is the first step to discovering the right Jobs for your team to focus on during innovation.
Start Broad, Then Dig Deep
Divergence and convergence are as important for Jobs as they are for solution ideation. Using the foundation you’ve built in research to understand your consumer and the full context, create as many Jobs as you can. Go for quantity and defer judgement for the time being knowing you’ll prioritize later. However, ask yourself the following to ensure quality for each Job:
Once you’ve achieved a divergence of Jobs, identify set criteria for your consumers and brand as a scrappy way to prioritize this long list and give your team some focus. For example, you can use the following simple criteria to help your team figure out the right areas of focus:
Be prepared to make hard decisions when prioritizing your Jobs, and have the courage to trust your team’s process and experience to prioritize the right Jobs.
Keep The Consumer At The Center Throughout Ideation
Even after you clearly prioritize your jobs leveraging the criteria, there is still more you can do to ensure your team is focusing on the right Jobs. By keeping your consumer at the center of ideation, you can continually check-in on Job resonance, and the alignment of your solutions to serve that Job for consumers. Get scrappy to create research touchpoints that enable your consumers to become your co-creators, and help you solve these Jobs for them. Even if you don’t have the time or budget for research studies you can squeeze the juice out of your resources by phoning a friend, going online to crowdsource feedback, setting up in-store intercepts, or creating another team mission to creatively gather relevant insights. Over time your team will gain more confidence that you have the best areas of focus. As you move from idea generation into concept development, use your Jobs as your key insights to ensure your solutions always stay rooted in the Job they are solving for. The Job can serve as the constant anchor for your concepts which will ensure you have the right areas of focus from start to market success.
