This is a make-up post. I accidently rescheduled a post I had already published, and I apologize if you got that email this morning.

Imagine what it was like to hook your horse(s) up to a wagon and trek 3 hours into town to get supplies from the General Store, knowing that the items you needed only got stocked once every 3 months because the town was so far from a railroad. A 6 hour round trip wastes an entire day. What if the General Store missed a shipment of something you needed? Did I mention there were no cell phones? You’d have to wait 3 more months before you could get the needed supplies.

Humans have lived in such a world (and worse) far longer than we’ve lived with Home Depot and Kroger. Were they satisfied with this solution - the General Store 3 hours away - given what they knew from the past? Absolutely. Was it a hardship? Absolutely. It was a difficult job, and this difficulty is what limited its frequency. Transportation was slow and unreliable. Distribution was therefore also slow and unreliable.

Getting access to and maintaining adequate supply levels you need is an important job. And as much as we sometimes complain today, getting access to them in the past was slow, unreliable and difficult for individuals on a scale far greater than we experience today. But today, we’re nearing the point of autonomous distribution as we enter into the Coordination Age. This means that in conjunction with a more efficient and accurate distribution network, the final mile to our homes can become automated so we don’t need to run ‘5 minutes’ down the road to get a loaf of pre-made bread. That’s such a pain in the ass, right?

As we think about rating difficulty, it’s important to consider that the less difficult we make solutions for necessary jobs, the more frequently they will be accessed - whether manually or automatically. Frequency is a key component when evaluating a market for opportunity. It would appear that “going to the general store” (a solution) is infrequent. But the need for staples (a job) is frequent, and therefore each trip will require more volume, which requires more storage, and so on. Making the struggle stack larger and more difficult.

When pioneers in rural areas needed wood to keep warm through the winter, did they chop a little every day through the winter (difficult)? Or did they try to stock up for the winter all at once (still hard, but the strategy made the winter easier)? Either way, it was hard work, which led to innovative tools to perform related tasks.

Generations of innovations ultimately led a new way to heat homes that was far easier. Fewer (to no) tools, manual efforts were moved to a new location in the value chain, and new resources were used. There are now fewer home heating features for us to interact with than there used to be. By centralizing the production and distribution of resources needed we’ve been able to automate much of it through a set of services and utilities, e.g., HVAC installation, electricity, natural gas, etc. The collective service now runs frequently (non-stop), and we do nothing but tell our smartphone to turn up the heat, or we rely on algorithms.

I just thought this was something to consider when you think about innovation and it’s also one of the reasons I’ve switched from satisfaction to difficulty as a rating dimension.

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done

How does frequency play into Jobs-to-be-Done?