JTBD: What is the job?

The most fundamental and often trickiest part of JTBD is defining exactly what is the job you are help customers get done.

I’ll use a social payments product called PayMe from HSBC I created back in 2015 to try and help explain.

First, get an idea of the job you want to either help with or do..

I’ll assume you have an idea already to get stuck in, although will call out the two very different starting points:

• Startup — If you are a startup founder, you would have already seen or felt a problem and can simply begin to define the job from here (the roots of the PayMe product were actually from London in 2012 when I found it was such a pain to pay back small amounts of money if you didn’t happen to have the exact cash and coins).
• Established Company - If you are an existing company, you probably want to start from your current position — unless you are trying to reinvent yourself. When I worked in HSBC Asia’s innovation team, we defined exploration themes that were in and around the banking industry e.g. payments, blockchain, digital identity, where we could leverage our assets e.g. customer base, distribution, brand trust to try to enter and win adjacent markets. It was in this team we analysed and sized the pain points around paying friends back in our largest market — Hong Kong.

Unpack the problems..

So we found a high level problem in that it was very difficult to pay people in Hong Kong due to cross-bank fees and the just awful user experience of local banks (Hong Kong was/still is surprisingly far behind on digital UX). We would witness people writing checks over the dinner table or walking from one bank’s ATM with cash and putting it into another bank’s with the wind literally blowing it away sometimes if they weren’t grasping it firmly enough (true story).

The majority of the time, it turns out, these people were paying their friend’s circles. Friendships (thanks Robin Dunbar) are a function of quality time spent and frequency of interaction and due to matchbox apartments packed with generations of family, Hong Kongers simply love to go out after work to eat shareable local foods like dim sum or hot pot and drink beers. In all these shared moments, money was inevitably exchanged — albeit with a lot of friction. If you think you can improve the experience by 10x, the market really is your for the taking (if you haven’t read, I highly recommend Crossing the Chasm).

Allow the core functional job to appear..

Slowly but surely, an abstract core functional job will begin to emerge from the dust left behind from your problems statements.

A well defined job statement should clearly express the function the customer is trying to execute, whilst removing any emotional or need statements (that comes later, don’t worry). It should also reveal the object and if required a contextual clarifier. Also avoid using adjectives or adverbs so you can really get to the core.

After some deliberation.. the job we were helping Hong Kongers with was:

Pay money to friends

I instinctively wanted to put the adjectives like ‘small amounts of money’ here to refine the job, however that would have been a mistake. Firstly, define small? It’s ambiguous to the reader. An affluent person may think $1,000 is small whereas a young university student may pass out at the thought of owing a classmate that much cash. Secondly, it is important not to add these type of constraints at this point. When you solve the job for your intended market, you may be surprised at the other uses you didn’t think of, which may make you miss the opportunity to create a much larger impact later.

Contextual clarifiers like ‘to friends’ help hone in on the core group of customers you want to solve for, but again we could’ve left this out due to it creating market constraints. On reflection I believe it was the right thing to do as it really helped us focus from the beginning on the inner friendships circles that made us successful.

So we found our job and that now becomes the point of analysis for future work. Just to remind readers, JTBD removes us from customer journey maps so we really focus on the core mechanics of the thing you just want to get done and improve it.

Emotional and Social jobs

Whilst analysing for solving the core functional job ‘pay friends money’, we will see many side jobs the customer wants to execute.

• Emotional jobs: How do they want to feel when paying friends back?
• Social Jobs: How do they want people to perceive them whilst they pay their friends back?

You see the difference? One is about being in control of their own emotional state e.g.“make me feel like I am a good friend by always paying money back” or “make me feel like I’m not being cheap”. These really depend on the values of the individual, although are usually shaped by the culture they are operating in. The other is about how others perceive them socially e.g. “make others feel like I always pay my debts” or “make others see I’m not being cheap”. These are more strongly shaped by the culture so can change a lot from country to country e.g. taking 10 minutes to split a group bill line by line may be socially acceptable in a culture that perhaps values thriftiness, but may make you quickly lose friends in another.

For each functional job, you will find many associated emotional and social jobs. Keep these in mind as they can create huge differentiation between your’s and your competitor's product even though you are both solving the same job as we found with PayMe.

Is there just one core functional job?

Yes and no. Yes you should set out to solve the core job and use that for your analysis, but at the same time you may find you solve other jobs too with little extra effort. With PayMe for example, within a few weeks we changed a few lines of code to enable another functional job:

Request money from friends

Summary

So there you have it. A functional job statement that is abstract enough to give you lots of room for maneuvering around problem statements and markets to finally creating a winning product. Now go launch something spectacular! 🚀