Future-Proof Your Services: Technology, Jobs-to-be-Done, and the New Era of Customer Outcomes

Table of Contents

• Redefining "Service" Through the Lens of Jobs-to-be-Done

• The Power of Abstraction: Doing More with Less (Visible Complexity)

• Mini-Case Study: Service Abstraction in Personalized Healthcare Management

• Designing for Outcome-Oriented, Abstracted Service Experiences

• The Future of Service: Personalized, Proactive, Autonomous, and Highly Abstracted

• Embrace Abstraction to Win the Future of Service

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We've all been there: tangled in a web of customer service calls, juggling multiple apps for a single task, or navigating a labyrinth of steps to get something seemingly simple done. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and often makes us wonder if the service provider even understands what we’re really trying to achieve. This common experience highlights a fundamental truth: the service revolution isn't ultimately about fancier tools or slightly faster processes; it's about radically improving how customers achieve their desired outcomes successfully.

The concept of "service" is expanding far beyond the traditional image of a helpdesk. Today, a service is any interaction that enables a customer to achieve a desired outcome. The real power of technology in this new era isn't just in optimizing the existing, often convoluted steps within these interactions. It's in abstracting away the complexity altogether, providing a more direct, intuitive, and efficient path to what the customer truly wants to get done.

This post dives into how successful future services will be those that leverage technology to achieve a higher level of abstraction. This means focusing intensely on the customer's "Job to be Done" (JTBD), often resulting in solutions that have fewer visible features to the user but deliver a far more complete and satisfying outcome. Sometimes, this even means the people or roles performing the "job" change entirely.

Here’s what we'll cover:

• How Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) redefines what "service success" truly means.

• The critical role of "abstraction" in designing next-generation service experiences.

• Concrete examples of service abstraction working today and a look at its future potential.

• How you can start thinking about abstracting your own service offerings to create breakthrough value.

So, let's start the conversation: What's the most fragmented service experience you've recently endured, where you felt the provider missed the mark on your actual goal? Share your story in the comments below! 👇

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Redefining "Service" Through the Lens of Jobs-to-be-Done

Traditionally, "service" has often been viewed through a process-oriented lens: How efficiently can we handle an inquiry? How quickly can we close a ticket? This is reactive and internally focused. The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework flips this perspective. It posits that customers don't buy products or services; they "hire" them to get a specific "job" done in their lives. Success, therefore, isn't about the service itself, but about how well it helps the customer achieve their underlying need and reach their desired outcome state.

Consider these examples, reframing common services through their core JTBD:

• Financial Services:

  • Traditional View: Manage transactions, provide loans.

  • JTBD View: Attain financial peace of mind, Secure future financial stability.

• Healthcare Services:

  • Traditional View: Receive a diagnosis, get a prescription.

  • JTBD View: Restore well-being quickly, Maintain an active lifestyle despite a condition.

• Logistics Services:

  • Traditional View: Track a package, schedule a delivery.

  • JTBD View: Ensure goods arrive reliably and on time to the destination, Minimize disruption to my supply chain.

• Education Services:

  • Traditional View: Complete a course, get a certificate.

  • JTBD View: Acquire skills for career advancement, Transition into a new professional field.

Understanding the true job your customers are trying to accomplish is the foundational first step. It moves the focus from what you offer to what they achieve.

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The Power of Abstraction: Doing More with Less (Visible Complexity)

Once we understand the core Job-to-be-Done, the next question is: how can we make it as effortless as possible for the customer to achieve that outcome? This is where service abstraction comes in.

Service abstraction is the process of using technology to consolidate multiple steps, tools, interfaces, or even areas of expertise into a simpler, more unified, and direct path to the customer's desired outcome. Think of it like a sophisticated software API (Application Programming Interface) that allows different systems to communicate and perform complex functions behind the scenes, while presenting a simple request-and-response to the user. The intricate workings are hidden, or abstracted away.

The benefits are significant:

• For the customer:

  • Reduced effort: Fewer steps to take, less information to manage.

  • Faster results: More direct path to the outcome.

  • Less cognitive load: Simpler interfaces, less to learn.

  • Achievement of a higher-context job: The solution handles more of the intermediate tasks, allowing the customer to focus on their bigger objective.

• For the provider:

  • Increased efficiency: Automation of previously manual or fragmented processes.

  • Scalability: Easier to deliver consistent service to more customers.

  • New value propositions: Ability to solve customer problems more completely.

This leads to the "fewer visible features" paradox. Highly abstracted solutions often appear much simpler to the user. They might have fewer buttons, fewer options, or fewer distinct interaction points. This isn't because they do less; it's because the underlying technology is doing more of the heavy lifting, intelligently managing complexity so the user doesn't have to. The solution is designed to get a bigger, more encompassing job done, making many of the old, granular features irrelevant.

Examples of Abstraction Working Today (that few are fully leveraging for differentiation):

• Integrated Travel Platforms: Thirty years ago, booking a major trip involved calling airlines, then hotels, then rental car agencies, perhaps a travel agent to coordinate. Today, platforms like Kayak or Google Flights allow you to define your desired trip (Job: "Plan and execute a successful leisure or business trip"), and they abstract away the individual supplier negotiations and complex scheduling options into a filterable list. The visible features are search boxes and filters, not individual GDS terminals.

• Cloud Computing Services (AWS, Azure, GCP): Before cloud services, launching a web application meant procuring servers, installing operating systems, configuring networks, and managing physical hardware. Cloud providers have abstracted all that away. You specify your computing needs, and the platform handles the underlying infrastructure. The Job: "Deploy and scale applications reliably and cost-effectively." The visible features are dashboards and APIs, not server racks.

Crucially, abstraction can also change who performs the job, or parts of it. AI can take over analytical or coordination tasks previously done by human experts. Well-designed self-service portals allow end-users to directly achieve outcomes that once required intermediaries, because the complexity has been engineered out of their direct experience.

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Mini-Case Study: Service Abstraction in Personalized Healthcare Management

Let's explore service abstraction with a hypothetical, yet increasingly plausible, example in personalized healthcare management.

Current State (Low Abstraction): "The Fragmented Health Journey"

Imagine Sarah, a 45-year-old professional with a family history of heart disease and recent concerns about her energy levels. Her journey to proactively manage her health might look like this:

1. GP Visit: Discusses concerns, gets basic blood tests ordered.

2. Lab Visit: Separate appointment for blood draw.

3. Follow-up GP Visit/Call: Reviews basic results, gets a referral to a cardiologist and a nutritionist.

4. Cardiologist Visit: More specialized tests, discussion of risk factors.

5. Nutritionist Visit: Diet planning, lifestyle advice.

6. Ongoing Self-Management: Sarah manually tracks appointments, tries to synthesize advice from different specialists, monitors symptoms, and researches information online. She might use separate apps for fitness tracking, food logging, and medication reminders.

The complexity is high. Sarah deals with multiple providers, appointments, information sources, and significant self-coordination. Her desired outcome is clear: "Maintain optimal health and energy with minimal daily disruption and a clear path forward."

The Job-to-be-Done (for Sarah):

• Functional: "Assess my current health status accurately," "Identify potential health risks proactively," "Receive a coordinated and personalized plan to improve/maintain my health," "Integrate health management seamlessly into my life."

• Emotional: "Feel confident and in control of my health," "Reduce anxiety about future health problems," "Feel supported and understood by my healthcare providers."

Future State (High Abstraction through Technology): "The Unified Health Navigator"

Now, envision a service where technology radically abstracts this complexity:

Sarah subscribes to "HealthJourney," an AI-powered personalized health navigation service.

1. Onboarding: Sarah securely connects her existing (and disparate) medical records, data from her wearable fitness tracker, and family history through a single, intuitive interface. She completes an AI-guided health questionnaire.

2. AI-Driven Insight & Coordination:

   • The HealthJourney platform analyzes this integrated data. It identifies potential risks and areas for optimization based on evidence-based medical guidelines and Sarah's unique profile.

   • Instead of multiple referrals, the platform determines the most efficient diagnostic and consultative pathway. It might facilitate an initial comprehensive e-consultation with a primary care physician who is supported by AI diagnostic aids.

   • If specialist input is needed, the platform identifies the right specialist and can even schedule a virtual consultation, with all relevant data pre-shared. Lab tests can be scheduled at convenient locations or even via at-home kits, with results flowing directly back into the platform.

3. Personalized, Dynamic Plan: Sarah receives a single, evolving health plan via the HealthJourney app. It integrates dietary advice, exercise recommendations (synced with her wearable), medication management (with automated refill reminders and potential interaction checks), and proactive screening schedules. The AI continuously monitors her data and progress, suggesting adjustments to the plan as needed.

4. Simplified Interaction: Sarah has one primary interface for questions, tracking, and accessing her information. AI chatbots handle common queries, and human clinicians are available for complex issues, already equipped with her full context.

The Abstraction Benefits:

• Fewer visible features/interaction points for Sarah: She's not juggling multiple apps or calling various offices. The service coordinates the backend complexity.

• Different job performers: The AI handles much of the data integration, initial analysis, scheduling, and routine monitoring that Sarah or multiple administrative staff might have done.

• Job done better: Care is more coordinated, personalized, proactive, and data-driven. Sarah achieves her desired outcome ("Maintain optimal health and energy...") with far less personal effort and cognitive load.

This abstracted model doesn't just make the old way more efficient; it creates an entirely new, more valuable service paradigm.

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Designing for Outcome-Oriented, Abstracted Service Experiences

Shifting to create these highly abstracted, outcome-oriented services requires a fundamental change in design philosophy:

1. Start with the Job, Not Your Solution: Deeply understand the customer's functional, emotional, and social Jobs-to-be-Done. What are they really trying to achieve, and what does success look like for them?

2. Map the Ideal Outcome Achievement Journey: Don't just map your current process. Envision the most direct, frictionless path for the customer to achieve their Job. Where would they ideally not have to do anything?

3. Identify Abstraction Opportunities: Look for points of friction, complexity, multiple handoffs, manual data entry, or required specialized knowledge in the current journey. These are prime candidates for abstraction through:

   • Automation: Using AI and RPA to handle repetitive tasks.

   • Integration: Connecting disparate systems and data sources for a unified view.

   • Intelligent Decision Support: Embedding expertise into the system to guide users or automate decisions.

   • Simplified User Interfaces: Hiding complexity behind intuitive UIs.

4. Leverage Technology for Novel Paths: Don't just digitize old steps. Consider how emerging technologies (Generative AI, IoT, blockchain, etc.) can enable entirely new, more direct ways to deliver the core outcome, potentially bypassing many traditional steps.

5. Craft Your "Elevated Pitch": Can you describe your service based on the ultimate outcome it provides for the customer, with minimal mention of the intermediate steps or underlying technology? If your description is still a list of features or process steps, you may not have abstracted enough.

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The Future of Service: Personalized, Proactive, Autonomous, and Highly Abstracted

The trajectory of service innovation points towards experiences that are ever more personalized, proactive, and, in many cases, autonomous – all underpinned by greater levels of abstraction.

Personalized & Proactive (Working today, but still underutilized by many):

• Hyper-Personalization: AI algorithms are already capable of tailoring service interactions and recommendations to individual customer histories, preferences, and real-time context, often without explicit requests. Think of Netflix recommendations, but applied to far more critical service areas.

  • The Innovation: Services that adapt dynamically to your specific needs before you even articulate them.

  • Abstraction Level: Hiding the "one-size-fits-all" process and the data analysis providing the personalization.

• Proactive Support: Predictive analytics can anticipate customer needs or potential service failures before they occur.

  • The Innovation: A smart home service that detects a failing HVAC component via sensor data and automatically schedules a technician before the system breaks down on the hottest day of the year. The job performer (the diagnostic system) is new.

  • Abstraction Level: Hiding the monitoring, diagnostics, and scheduling complexity from the homeowner.

Autonomous & Novel (The Next Frontier of Abstraction):

• Fully Autonomous Services: Imagine services delivered almost entirely by AI-powered systems, with human intervention only for the most complex edge cases or by customer choice.

  • The Innovation: An AI-driven legal service that can understand a small business owner's need (e.g., "Formulate a standard service agreement for a new client type"), ask clarifying questions, generate a legally sound draft, and even suggest filing procedures, all with minimal human legal professional input for standard cases. The job is done better (more tailored than a generic template) and at a lower cost. The visible features are conversational prompts, not complex legal software.

  • Abstraction Level: Hiding the legal research, document drafting, and procedural knowledge.

• Embedded & Invisible Services: The "service" becomes an inherent, almost invisible layer within a broader outcome guarantee.

  • The Innovation: Instead of buying "cloud server instances" (still a degree of technical management), a company might subscribe to "Guaranteed Application Uptime and Performance" for their critical software. The provider uses a deeply abstracted layer of AI-orchestrated infrastructure, self-healing systems, and predictive resource allocation to ensure the outcome is delivered, making the underlying "servers" or "instances" largely irrelevant to the customer.

  • Abstraction Level: Hiding almost all the operational complexity of IT infrastructure management.

• Decentralized Service Orchestration: Technologies like blockchain could enable secure, transparent, and automated execution of service agreements between multiple parties without a central intermediary.

  • The Innovation: Complex international trade finance processes, involving multiple banks, insurers, and logistics providers, could be orchestrated via smart contracts on a blockchain, automating verification, payment release, and compliance checks based on real-time data from IoT devices.

  • Abstraction Level: Hiding the manual verifications, inter-party communications, and reconciliation processes.

These future states are not just about doing current things faster. They are about technology enabling the achievement of core human and business jobs in entirely new ways, by abstracting away layers of process and complexity that we currently take for granted. The result will often be solutions with fewer visible features, because they solve a much larger, more complete job for the user, often with entirely different entities (like AI) performing the tasks.

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Embrace Abstraction to Win the Future of Service

Technology is no longer just a tool to marginally improve existing service delivery. It is a catalyst for fundamentally reshaping what services are and how they create value. By embracing a Jobs-to-be-Done mindset and strategically leveraging the power of abstraction, organizations can move beyond merely optimizing processes. They can design and deliver services that are dramatically more effective, efficient, personalized, and ultimately, more valuable to their customers.

The imperative for businesses is clear: stop just tinkering with the steps in your current service processes. Start envisioning how you can abstract away the inherent complexity to deliver your customers' core desired outcomes more directly, more intuitively, and more powerfully than ever before. This is the path to true service innovation.

Now, it's your turn to think about abstraction:

1. Identify one key service your business offers or that you regularly use. What is the ultimate outcome the end-user is seeking when they engage with that service?

2. What are the current steps, tools, decisions, or points of expertise that could potentially be abstracted away with technology to make achieving that outcome radically simpler and more direct for the user?

Which industry do you think is most ripe for a service abstraction revolution, and what would that look like? Share your bold ideas in the comments below – let's brainstorm the future of service together!

If you’d like to take action, I would love to help. Here’s are some steps you can take to make that a reality for us:

1. Join my community and get access to more content and tools

2. Apply for coaching so we can do projects together and build a new business-as-usual with someone who will share the knowledge, and hold you accountable. (I have limited seats so hurry!)

3. I do project work as well. Use the coaching link and we can discuss.

Why Me?

My schedule is often booked months in advance. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been trained by the best in Outcome-Driven Innovation. Part of that training involved how to understand what the future should look like. As a result, I’ve taken what I’ve learned and begun innovating so I can get you to the outcomes you’re seeking faster, better, and even more predictably. Anyone preaching innovation should be doing the same; regardless of how disruptive it’ll be.

How am I doing this?

• I’ve developed a complete toolset that accelerates qualitative research to mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. It’s been fine-tuned over the past 2+ years and it’s second-to-none (including to humans). That means we can have far more certainty that we’ve properly framed your research before you invest in a basket of road apples. They don’t taste good, even with whipped cream on top.

• I’m also working on a completely new concept for prioritizing market dynamics that predict customer needs (and success) without requiring time-consuming and costly surveys with low quality participants. This is far more powerful and cost effective than the point-in-time surveys that I know you don’t want to do!

I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:

• Get more of the job done for our clients

• Get the job done better for our clients

• Get the job done faster for our clients

• Get the job done with with fewer features for our clients

• Get the job done in a completely different and novel way for our clients

• Get the job done in a less costly manner for our clients

> But more importantly, I strive to deliver high quality and high availability. That's why I also have to be choosy.

All the links you need are a few paragraphs up. Or set up some time to talk … that link is down below. 👇🏻

Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
Why fail fast when you can succeed the first time?

📆 Book an appointment: https://pjtbd.com/book-mike

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