The Data-Driven Job Story for Jobs-to-be-Done

Jobs-to-be-Done emerged to help us deal with the fuzzy-front-end of Innovation — which provides designers with the targeting necessary to create the right products, with the right features.

Possibly the most important part of innovation — or consulting for that matter — is the ability to identify a target of opportunity. All too often, we begin with an idea — or worse, we ask a customer what their pain is. What seems to be customer-centric, is actually the chaotic beginning to a solution that will likely fail in the market, or an implementation that will fail to drive sustained business results.

Ideas are dangerous when they are not backed up with facts. Maybe I’m over-emphasizing the danger, but they are certainly not helpful in the real world if they are not repeatable; e.g. a process of generating ideas that turn into dominant solutions in the market can be executed over and over again with predictability. If you simply have an idea with nothing to back it up, it’s nothing more than a hypothesis. I can point to many a founder who had an idea…can’t remember their names right now. You don’t take Hypotheses to market.

The publicly emerging theory for analyzing markets, seg…