Jobs to be Done + Strategy + Products/Services

I just finished reading a comparison of Spotify and iTunes and how the author predicted that Spotify will soon overtake iTunes due to how much better it solves the consumers Jobs to be Done of finding and listening to music. The Jobs to be Done concept was introduced by Clayton Christensen and it focuses on what jobs a consumer looks to perform when completing a task. I agree with the author that services like Spotify that allow the user to choose specific albums, stream them and save them for offline listening will win out over models that require payment per song or album, but I wanted to apply this concept back to strategy and product management.

At USC I learned that companies could either pursue a low-cost or differentiation strategy within their given industry and companies that try to do both would be "stuck in the middle". We have seen this with low-cost brands trying to go into a higher value demographic and high value products going downsteam. Within each of these strategies the company can choose to stick to their core competencies and gradually move into new markets and geographies where their products/services can be applied or create new markets based on solving new jobs to be done.  It is the latter concept I will focus on for this post.

Solving new jobs to be done in new industries/markets or new jobs to be done in the existing industries/markets requires first determining how the industry or market will evolve and what the problems will be. Following is a process I propose for matching the jobs to be done concept to strategy and product management.

Scenario Planning

Scenarios will need to be developed based on a fundamental question for the industry market. Sample questions could be, what will the US Auto Industry look like in 5 years for Mid-Market cars? This analysis would require an analysis of the social, technological, economic, environmental, political and regulation trends. From this analysis future scenario would be built to represent the future worlds.

Problem Definition - Jobs to be Done

Once the scenarios are built the team will need to define the jobs to be done, how users might solve those problems and which competitors might solve the problem. A clear understanding is needed so the target company can understand what capabilities need to be built to ensure they are well positioned for the future.

Planning and Roadmap Definition

Once the problems are defined and the possible solutions identified the target company will need to develop short and long term plans to meet the future needs. These plans should be laid out as part of a corporate roadmap and aligned to the priorities of the business. The alignment will require alignment of the corporate, business, department, employee level goals and priorities.

Summary

There are many more steps after the roadmap planning and alignment and I will look to cover those in a subsequent post. This goal of this post was to tie together the concepts of Strategy, Product Management and Jobs to Done.