Jobs To Be Done Exercise

I had the chance to try my first Jobs To Be Done Mapping exercise recently as part of my Pendo Product-led Certification course.

I haven’t any experience previously with Jobs To Be Done exercises, so I’m not going to give a detail breakdown of the methodology, but I thought it would be useful to document my first attempt (for me at least).

The Jobs To Be Done Template provided by the Pendo course was as follows:

I did happen to have been reading The Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach at the time I was completing the exercise. In addition to the above, I wanted to add the remainder or the core JTBD elements that he describes — Job Performer, Needs and Circumstances:

I had a look around at various JTBD templates on Miro, as well as the latest JTBD Canvas 2.0 created by Jim Kalbach, but none mapped to the items on the Pendo template, so I created my own basic version in Miro as below:

Having created the template, my next decision was which “product” to pick a job map for. It might be a bit basic at this stage, but I decided to pick my own personal portfolio website: www.daniellinehan.me. In some ways, the simplicity of the site might prove a good challenge in defining the Jobs, and would hopefully generate some useful insights as I build out the site.

Here’s how I filled out each section:

Job Performer

I went back and forth on this one and ended up with one Job Performer — Me. The other option to be added in would be a Hiring Manager or colleague looking to consume more content and contact me. This might be something I add in later, but as I filled out the rest of the template, I realised that most of the Jobs that I wanted to carry out for now are for my own consumption. Once the site is filled out, these Jobs may change.

Needs

Some of the Needs that I didn’t enter were around having an archive of my work, getting experience in blogging and creating a site. In completing the rest of the template, I realised that these Needs were secondary to the primary needs of working in a job I like with a culture I like. I did find these a bit vague but they are the guiding light for now. The other, secondary Needs are more like jobs to be done in order to increase my change to fulfil those Needs.

Circumstances

The circumstances in which the Jobs would be executed were a bit broad at this point. I knew that I would be attempting to work on the website while working, travelling and attempting to have a social life. I would also be learning as I went as far as the technical aspects of building the site, as well as what I wanted to build. Ideally, I would refine these to be more specific, but for now they are an accurate representation of the circumstances involved in carrying out the Jobs

Main Jobs To Be Done

The first two Main Jobs defined were my website were in essence to 1) create the website and 2) create the content. These seemed obvious things to define but it was helpful to think of the tasks of creating the site and its content as separate. A third job that then came to mind was to Share and Promote the content. This insight came about in completing the Needs section described above. It wouldn’t exactly fulfil those Needs to simply create a site and for no one to ever see it. I had been thinking of the sharing job as a related job, but for this reason elevated it to a Main Job.

Main Job Aspects

The straightforward part of the Main Job Aspects were the functional aspects of building the site. The Personal, Emotional and Social Aspects all in some way relate to the idea of how users other than myself will engage with the site. How will they use it? How do I want them to use it? How will I feel about them using it? These aspects all feed back in the Main Job of Sharing and Promoting the site, This in turn requires a Functional Aspect — that of sharing the site and its content with others.

Related Jobs To Be Done

In filling out the Related Jobs, I realised I was really describing Jobs that I needed to do in order to be able to complete the Main Jobs. In order to build a website I needed to learn how to build one. In order to create content for a website, I need to pull from work experience, training and reading materials from elsewhere. The main insight gained from this section was separating out these Jobs from the Main Jobs, while keeping in mind that they will also need to be done.

Related Job Aspects

As the Related Job Aspects followed the Related Jobs, in that they were mainly to do with activities outside of the website that would feed back into it. The Functional Aspects were centered around learning different tools and techniques that could then be documented on the website. The Emotional, Personal and Social Aspects were mainly concerned with engaging others outside of the website — as a means of generating content, and also as a way of sharing that content.

Lessons Learned

(1) To start with, the first thing I had to learn about the Jobs To Be Done was the basic Job syntax. As described by Jim Kalbach, I used the format of:

verb + object + clarifier

This was useful in that, to a degree, it forced me to write out Jobs in the format of a task to be completed, rather than a user requirement. What helped clarify how the Jobs should be written is the idea that the Job is an objective to be completed regardless of the tools or technology used.

(2) Having typically used Design Thinking and Human Centered Design approaches in the past, I wasn’t sure how simply focusing on tasks would help satisfy the user’s needs. From the carrying out the exercise, the second lesson I learned is that focussing on the task to be completed actually forces you to gain an understanding of the user’s needs. If you are trying to write out a Job as an objective to be completed regardless of the tool used, you can only do this with a great understanding of the objective to be completed and the user’s needs for doing so. It also helps in gaining an understanding of why a user might “hire” your particular tool to complete that job, versus another method or tool.

(3) The above two lessons were the real key insights I learned on using Jobs To Be Done. The final lesson I learned is that I need to continue using it in order to gain a greater understanding. There were a few instances in the exercise where I was unsure I was using the correct approach — such as defining the Job Performers, and separating the Main Jobs from the Related Jobs. It will be interesting to see how many revisions I will need while building out my website.

Having said that, I did gain a few key insights in carrying out the exercise, which will better help define and deliver the value that I am looking to derive from it.