What's the Job of a Milkshake?

Let's find the Job-to-be-Done

Let's find the Job-to-be-Done is a regular series of short blogs and podcasts designed to have some interactive fun while determining what the right job is for the many products we see in the market. There is no 100% right answer, because it will depend on who is trying to provide a solution and what their capabilities are. If you all make this interactive - with your questions and suggestions - this could be a great learning experience for the lurkers.

Your Typical Morning Commute Milkshake - it relieves boredom 😉

The question has been asked, "What is the Job of a Milkshake?" Clay Christensen hypothesized that it had to do with keeping your hand busy while commuting to work in the morning to relieve boredom, or something like that.

Let’s get this out of the way first: a Job-to-be-Done is something that a customer/consumer has, not something that a product has. Therefore, the focal point of any study has to be on the end user and it also has to be solution-agnostic. Starting with a product (like a milkshake) severely constrains your opportunity for innovation…and competing products are all milkshakes. It simply doesn’t work that way. Cherry-pick stories all you want. But I’ll ask you to provide the receipts on how your example was enabled by a method that created sustained, long-term growth rates, or how it informed the next level of innovation. I’ll also ask “how did the brand continually disrupt industry after industry?” I'll wait.

What IS the Job?

Well, there are multiple jobs that a milkshake could enable, along with a bazillion other products. If you zero in on a specific end user, it becomes a bit simpler. Tony Ulwick - of Strategyn - suggests that for the morning commuter (the end user) who opts to purchase a milkshake they are Getting Breakfast on-the-go. Clearly, milkshakes are not the only product that could enable that job. Also, milkshakes can be a solution for other jobs, depending on the end user. This is where Clay Christensen’s approach gets stuck because he treats them as segments. If you’re trying to innovate, you need to focus on the market, and the market is always a group of end users who are trying to get a job done. The article I liked to above explains.

Clay only addresses a handful of potential pain points, e.g., alleviate boredom. This is because he focused on a solution. In fact there could be scores of metrics that are measured differently by different groups of end users because they are not all in the same situation. The key is to know what all of them are regardless of whether they are current pain points, and also to define the market appropriately.

A milkshake - regardless of how thin you make the straw (to make it last longer), or how many chunks you put in it (to alleviate boredom) - is not a solution for the entire market of commuters who want to get breakfast on-the-go. If you don’t know all of the success measures, you will never find these different groups, or serve them adequately. The market does not equal a situation. There is no such thing as market of one.

👆👆 Milkshakes are not a market. Situations are not a segment. 👆👆 👈👀

There are a lot of excellent arguments that have been debated with regard to Milkshake Marketing, pro and con. I have no interest in rehashing those here. Also, it was a partially made up story that was never implemented by the “client.” Don’t believe me, read Clay’s last book.

“It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled” ~ Mark Twain

This is the real world. When the end user is a morning commuter, my pick for the Job-to-be-Done is Getting Breakfast on-the-go. Now it's your turn.

Please comment below and consider the following...

1. Who are the end users that are consuming milkshakes besides just morning commuters?

2. What are the different situations that a commuter could find themselves in?

3. Who are the other end users of milkshakes? What is their JTBD (single)? What situations do they find themselves in (many)?

4. Who are the traditional competitors (sorry, no hints) to milkshakes? Do they change with the situation?

5. Who are the non-traditional Competitors, why?

6. What constraints can you think of?

7. What are some of the performance metrics for getting the job done successfully?

8. What is the Job you think we should focus on, why?

We’ll get into some other real end users and jobs once this gets rolling. I thought it would be best to start off with a classic case