Jobs to Be Done

Reflection on compassion, target audience, active listening and “jobs to be done” framework

After watching Daniel’s short video about “Jobs to Be Done”, I went ahead reading the relevant HBR post from Clayton. What striked me is not only the “strategy development part” at work, but how a bunch of dots are connected around this simple “Jobs to Be Done” framework.

This is the original discussion in Daniel’s post about “Customers’ Jobs to Be Done”. By understanding what your customers want to get their jobs done, you can better build your strategies and focus on what you customers really need. For example, Netflix is not just a streaming service, it helps customers kill time better; Amazon is not just a book store, it helps customer discover anything they want to buy online; Envy is not an Apple seller, it sells customer healthy snacks.

Note that understanding what your customers’ jobs is not just doing what your customer asks, that is a hard lesson I learned. In our case, for example, for the core framework pod, its job is not to fix bugs or tune parameters in an y customer chosen distributed training strategy, like fulfulling “fix this MWMS bug for me”, but to provide a scalable distributed training solution so customers can horizontally scale their training jobs. What shall we do? We need to develop our opinions around that to get customers’ jobs done, and build/support a sustainable training solution around this.

I think half a leader’s job is to really understand customers’ jobs, build the right product to help customers get their jobs done, and derive the right user contract/APIs.

Inside large coporations, one key skill is to “manage up”. In simpler words, understand what you manager needs to get done for their managers. This is really the same as “know your customers’ Jobs to Be Done”. Your job is not to provide a function to your manager or do task A/B/C/… by words, but to understand what your manager’s jobs are and help your manager get their jobs done.

For presentations, the goal is not to brag about your cool gigs, but to understand who your audience are and what you audience wants to learn from you talk — know your audience’s Jobs to Be Done.

We often say “put yourself in someone’s shoes”, it is easier said than done. I found that what is more important than thinking in others’ stances, is to understand the reason behind their stances and how you can help them out while keeps integrity with your personal values. We call this lead with compassion, or live with compassion. They are also related, a byproduct of thinking this way during collaborations and negotiations is to equip you with a mindset of “open minded” and “assuming good intention”.

What is behind “Jobs to Be Done” and why this works? If we dig deeper here, “Jobs to Be Done” is a shorthand for applying one more layer of critical thinking in your life and work. Instead of staying at a superficial layer of delivering a specific function to your customers, understanding what the customers need and what painpoints you want to solve for the customers. We need to get beyond surface appearances to the core.

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