Jobs To Be Done: Real-Life Examples In 2023

The jobs-to-be-done theory allows businesses to introduce innovation into their product development and marketing. 

How?

It focuses on what causes customers to hire a particular product or service through two ways:

• By understanding what customers want to solve in a specific market;
• By creating a compelling customer journey.

With this article we shall enlist some real-life businesses as examples of using jobs-to-be-done concept in their product journey.

By reading this article, you can uncover the desires and needs of your niche market and customers’ jobs. Also, you can include various benefits for your customers through delightful product experience and value proposition.

You can achieve the following desired outcomes by using JTBD theory for your product cycle.

• Improved customer satisfaction: By understanding the specific tasks or “jobs” that customers are hiring your product or service to do, you can design your product or service to better meet their needs and preferences. This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Increased competitiveness: By designing products or services that better meet the needs of your target market, you can make your business more competitive in the market.

• Better product development: The JTBD framework can help you to identify new opportunities for product development and to design products that are more likely to be successful in the market.

• Greater market insights: By gathering and analysing customer feedback, you can gain valuable insights into the needs and preferences of your target market. This can help you to make informed decisions about your business strategy and operations.

• Improved customer retention: By meeting the needs of your customers more effectively, you can reduce customer churn and improve customer retention.

The customer “jobs” emphasises customer’s problems and desired outcomes from their perspective, instead of the best one. You may design a product or service which will completely avoid the need of cleaning walls, like a dust proof paint; but the high-cost cannot challenge the pain of dusting taken by many customers. 

To understand the concepts in a more detailed manner, we can see how businesses in real-world implemented jobs-to-be-done applications in their products and services.

JTBD Real-life examples 

Example 1: Uber, Ola, etc. ride-sharing businesses

A ride-sharing company might use the JTBD framework to understand the specific tasks or “jobs” that customers are hiring their service to do. 

For example, customers might hire the service “to get to work on time”, “to avoid the hassle of driving and parking”, or “to have a safe and reliable way to get home” after a night out. 

By understanding these “jobs,” the company can design their service to better meet the needs of their customers.

But, all these jobs cannot have the same degree of want. 

When it comes to Uber and Ola, they prioritised these customer jobs:

• Booking rides online through phone app,
• Booking rides for odd-timings,
• Various ride options in emergency,
• Sharing the cost of rides with other people even when travelling alone.

These customer jobs were selected as they are sustainable throughout the country, along with this, it also serves related jobs like, “booking personal cab”, “pre-booking for personal rides to far-off destinations”, etc.

Now, these companies use various customer data, and also include customer service ratings options for improving their services according to the customer’s changing needs. This is an amazing way to collect user’s data along with serving them a mental satisfaction of sharing their riding experience. Also, they solve any riding issues by providing refunds, or other help.

This way jobs-to-be-done framework helped these ride sharing companies to innovate their services.

Example 2: Retail stores using JTBD for better offline shopping

How can a retail store use JTBD?

Don’t get shocked. It is not only famous in online sales, but also works wonders for offline customer experience.

Famous retail stores like Walmart, 24*7 stores, used their target customer jobs and earned huge sales by implementing the jobs-to-be-done concepts.

Walmart focused on these customer jobs:

• “Providing all-in-one place grocery shopping experience”
• “Heavy discounts in wholesale”
• “Supplying every brand’s products and services in one place”
• “Not going to different places for different things”

This way the local and small grocery stores faced competition from the big players, and customers preferred going to one place for all their needs. 

Whereas, 24*7 stores disrupted the offline grocery shopping business by attending to the important customer jobs:

• “Odd-time grocery needs of consumers”
• “Emergency needs”

This concept attracts those customers who are ready to pay for exceptional services throughout day and night. And those who have odd work timings because of which they cannot shop in normal store timings. 

Also, big players like Amazon stores are attending niche customer jobs using AI:

• “Real-time notification of their desired products in nearby store”
• “Paying without cash, without any machine or touchpoint”
• “Customers who like to shop without any customer service attendants interference”
• “Ease of planning grocery shopping without leaving house”

There are many such examples of big and small companies, which use jobs-to-be-done concepts to improve their product serving experience for their customers.

Conclusion

The JTBD concept has helped many businesses get their product’s launch successful, and attend directly to the customer’s needs. There are hundreds of businesses or industries applying this concept like retail, banking, ecommerce, IT services, food, FMCG, etc.

You can also build your product using the JTBD concepts, and improve customer’s experience.