Entrepreneurship
When Coffee and Kale Compete
Alan Klement 2018 11 references
Alan Klement's Jobs to Be Done framework for understanding why customers buy — use when designing products, defining competition, conducting customer research, or making innovation decisions.
jobs-to-be-done product-strategy customer-research innovation competition demand-forces
Overview
The Core Framework
- JTBD is self-betterment: Customers buy to transform their life-situation into a preferred one — to become a "new me"
- Products are enablers, not end goals: They have no inherent value; value emerges only when customers use them to make progress
- Four forces govern demand: Push and pull generate it; anxiety and inertia reduce it — address all four
- Competition is customer-defined: Two products compete only if a customer has switched between them — category is irrelevant
- Systems, not parts: Innovation succeeds by optimizing interdependencies in the customer's system, not by improving isolated features
Quick Lookup
| Situation | Do This | Avoid This |
|---|---|---|
| Defining your competition | Find evidence of customer switching | Grouping by product category |
| Validating a feature idea | Ask if customers previously tried to solve this | Asking if they want the feature |
| Customers churning | Investigate habits-in-use pulling them back | Assuming product dissatisfaction |
| Low first-time adoption | Map anxiety-in-choice blockers | Lowering the price |
| Describing your JTBD | Write as struggle + desired transformation | Describing your product's features |
| Segmenting customers | Filter by struggle intensity ("energy") | Using demographics |
| Product feels bloated | Split into focused products per Job | Adding more features |
| Stated preferences conflict | Study system interdependencies | Taking preferences at face value |
The Key Insight
"When a customer starts using a solution for a JTBD, she will stop using whatever she used before." — Alan Klement, Chapter 3
References
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