The Jobs Framework

Understanding customers is often seen as the holy grail that drives business growth. However, successfully driving growth from this data can be challenging.

The Jobs Framework, a new way of understanding what customers want, has over the last ten years proven to be very successful at eliciting a unique view of customers, their behaviour and decision making.

This simple to grasp, yet, powerful framework developed by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen is based on the premise that people use products and services to help them get "jobs" done.

At Cogentum, we successfully use the Jobs Framework to drive innovation and growth across a diverse range of industries and customer types.

Step 1: Eliciting Jobs

The jobs approach probes deeply into understanding:

What are all the specific jobs and tasks they are trying to do
Which jobs are the most important and why
How do they try to get these jobs done
What makes some jobs hard to do
How do different products perform and what makes one product better than another

Step 2: Identifying Unmet Needs

In this phase we look to confirm and rank the specific jobs or tasks the consumer is having difficulty accomplishing and understanding why existing solutions are falling short.

Sometimes we even find that products are over delivering on features and benefits that the customer does not place value on - and would prefer not to pay for. This provides a great opportunity for market disruption with a simpler product that meets the needs of consumers better than its over engineered rivals.

Step 3: Developing Strategies and Solutions

The key difference of the Jobs Approach is that it is continually trying to understand what consumers are trying to get done and why. As a result the focus is constantly on delivering solutions that help meet their needs. This focus on the problem being encountered rather than the solution means we do not ask users to define the product attributes or to design features. We leave that job to the experts: the marketing, R&D, or design teams.

Cogentum uses this approach to:

Design the strategies that will enhance the company's ability to serve the customers needs better than competitors can.

Uncover a job or set of jobs for which no solution exist or that the available solutions are all inaccessible in some way (they may be too expensive or rely on skills or technology that the consumer does not have)

Uncover a segment of the market which has yet to be discovered

Uncover an unmet need/job that your product satisfies well - but which you have yet to promote

Cogentum works with client teams across innovation, marketing, customer service, R&D, manufacturing and sales, to turn these insights into:

Innovation Strategies
New product or service concepts
Clear briefs to technical and design teams
Strong value propositions
Positioning and branding strategies

The Jobs Framework provides critical inputs whenever you are designing, marketing or selling products, services or customer solutions.

Cogentum has successfully used this approach to provide valuable insights and fuel for the development of growth, innovation, marketing, channel and sales strategies. It can even help to define the critical components of business processes and the needs of internal customers.