All three types of jobs are important to analyze because helping your customer get these jobs done better than your competitors is what creates the best customer experience with your product.

Let’s look at some examples of how these jobs work together in consumer, business and medical markets.

Consumer Markets

In a consumer market, new parents need to get a baby to sleep through the night. This is a functional job. As new parents try to get a baby to sleep through the night, they feel emotions, including feeling anxious about being a good parent. Avoiding anxiety is an emotional job. And parents need to purchase solutions to get a baby to sleep through the night like swaddle blankets, bedding, and nighttime diapers.

Your goal as a product, marketing, and sales team is to satisfy unmet needs in all three types of your customer’s jobs. We will explain unmet needs in much more detail in another lesson.

Let’s look at a few more examples of function, emotion, and consumption. As we saw in a previous lesson, the JTBD in this market is to get to a destination on time. This is the functional job that defines the market. As people execute this job, they want to avoid feeling anxious about being perceived as unprofessional by being late to a meeting.

A consumption job in this market is to interface with a product while traveling. If your customer cannot easily interface with your product, they won’t be able to get their functional job done.

Business Markets

Business markets have functional, emotional and consumption jobs as well. As we saw before, salespeople need to acquire new customers. This is the functional job, the goal salespeople need to achieve. Salespeople have emotional jobs, including being perceived as valuable to their team. And they have consumption jobs including maintaining current prospect information.

Medical Markets

The function-emotion-consumption pattern works in medical markets as well. As we saw, patients need to obtain a blood sample. This is a functional job in a medical market.

Patients want to reduce their anxiety about the procedure, which is an emotional job.

And patients may have to learn-to-use a new medical device like a micro needle array. This is a consumption job related to using a product.

All three job types are important to analyze because they determine your customer’s experience with your product. But defining your customer’s functional job correctly is critical because your customer’s functional job is your market.

Let’s look at how you can identify and define your customer’s functional job.

Defining Your Customer's Functional Job

Defining your customer’s job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful. Companies often struggle to define what their customer’s job even is. A functional job has three elements:

First, it is a goal that your customer is trying to achieve. Remember, a job and your market is not your job, it is your customer’s job. It is your customer’s goal and the problem they need you to solve.

Second, a functional job has an action verb and an object.

And third, a job cannot contain any mention of a solution, a product, a service or a technology.

Let’s look at a consumer example.

Consumer Jobs-To-Be-Done

A consumer might say, “I need to play MP3s.” Is this a job? Is it therefore a market?

Let’s use our three criteria to find out. 

First, is this a goal? Yes, this is something consumers want to do.

Second, does it have an action verb? Yes it does - “play.”

And does the action verb have an object? Yes it does - “MP3s.” So is this a job? Is it a market?

This is not a functional job because it contains a solution: MP3s. MP3s are a product format, which makes this an unstable definition of a market. And since formats, like all technologies and products, change over time, “play MP3s” is not a good definition of a market. As we saw before, the job is to create a mood with music. This is a stable definition because people have been creating a mood with music forever.

Business Jobs-To-Be-Done

Let’s look at another example in a business market. Businesses use software to run their companies, and they need to “install software.” Is this a JTBD? Is this a market? Let’s use our tests.

Businesses do install enterprise software, so it is a goal.

It also has an action verb and an object.

However, note that “install” is a consumption job. If you could achieve a goal without installing software, would you? Of course. Not long ago, installing business software used to be a large business for service firms, but today, cloud and SaaS applications are eliminating the need to install on-premise enterprise software.

Over time, new products emerge to eliminate or reduce the need to execute consumption jobs in order to use the product. This make sense because your customers don’t buy your product to interface with it or to learn to use it or install it. They buy your product to get their functional job done. As a result, the consumption job is not your market.

In this example, what about the word “software”? Software is an object, and it is a solution, but it is also a big enough platform that it is stable, like an aircraft. We will discuss platforms in more detail in later lessons.

Medical Jobs-To-Be-Done

Finally, Let’s look at an example of a medical job-to-be-done.

In a medical market, a patient, doctor, or nurse might say they need to “Monitor blood pressure.” Is this a job, is it a market? Again, Let’s use our tests.

Is it a customer goal? Yes, patients need to monitor their blood pressure.

It also has an action verb and an object.

And it has no solution.

But why do patients want to monitor their blood pressure? Is their end goal just to monitor?

It is important to analyze the level of abstraction of any job statement. Monitoring is an example of a step in achieving a higher-level goal. While there may be an opportunity in the short-term to provide a better product that does a better job of monitoring blood pressure, monitoring is not the end goal for a patient.

A patient, of course, monitors their blood pressure in order to optimize their health. If you have a health condition, blood pressure can be a key input. But the goal, therefore the job, and thus the market, is to optimize health. With higher level jobs like "optimize health", you can be more specific about your market definition.

For example, a patient who has diabetes needs to optimize their health with diabetes, so this is a specific job and therefore a market based on a health condition.

Different health conditions represent different markets because they are specific goals that different patients need to achieve, independent of any products, services, drugs or therapies they may use.

Level of Abstraction

You can specify level of abstraction for many types of jobs.

For example, parents need to instill a behavior in a child. But like health conditions, there are many types of behaviors, each of which defines a specific market.

For example, parents need to instill behaviors in their children to prevent anger, to learn music, or to resolve a dispute.

When defining your customers functional job, use these three tests, and use action verbs like these to help you identify your customer’s goals. You can refer back to this list when working with your team to define your market based on your customer’s job.

How to Identify JTBD

When identifying your customer’s job, you should conduct customer interviews, and analyze research to identify your customer’s goals independent of any solutions. Apply the three rules for jobs to ensure you have a well-defined market.

Defining your market using your customer’s job is just the beginning, but it has profound implications for everything your product, marketing, and sales teams do for your company.

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In the next lesson, you will learn how to size your market using your customer's job. This is critically important, since your revenue and profits are a function of the size of your market.

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