 Good morning. Thanks Bruno. Thanks everyone for coming. It's always a pleasure to be here at UX Lisbon. I'm going to talk today about a topic called jobs to be done. There's my Twitter handle if you want to follow me on Twitter at Jim Callback. I am the head of customer success at Mural. Mural is an online whiteboard. I'm very interesting and relevant for designers. If you haven't checked out Mural, please do so. It's mural.co for a free trial. In 2007 I wrote my first book called Designing Web Navigation. Since then I've been looking at more strategic concerns around UX design that culminated in my book Mapping Experiences which came out in 2016, May of last year. That's available for sale upstairs. If you buy a copy I'd be happy to sign it for you. It's a topic in that book that I wanted to expand on. I mentioned jobs to be done briefly in the book but I wanted to talk a lot more about it today with you here. I want to make three points throughout my talk so I'm going to make three big points. Allow me to digress a little bit before I get started. I want to ask the question what is disruption? The word disruption we can see it in many different ways. We can think about disruption as changing the norm or an upheaval of the norm or chaos even. There's also a very specific definition of the word disruption particularly from a business standpoint. I wanted to start by talking about what is disruption from a business standpoint. We can use this chart to explain it. A company and offering progresses over time and the performance of that offering increases. These two lines in the middle represent the low end market demand and the high end market demand. When a company starts out they have an idea that's maybe not ripe. It's a startup and they develop that solution, that offering until it meets the low end of the market demand. It increases in power. You want to be able to charge more money for it. You want to add new features and services. I think mine does work. It gets better and better incrementally. You get 10% better with the feature and you add more and more to it and that justifies a higher price and you eventually reach the high end of market demand. This is normal growth. This is not a bad thing. This is what all companies strive to do. They want to grow in lots of different ways. You grow incrementally and that's called a sustaining innovation. What happens is this leaves the incumbent, the existing offering open to low end disruption. What happens is another offering comes in and meets low end market demand. It gets the jobs done for the customers at the low end. It comes in and it's cheaper and it performs less actually lower. It has lower performance but that's not static either and that product gets better and better and better until it starts eroding the market of the incumbent, the offering that had been there for a while. Disruption is really about a competitive response because what happens when this new product is launched, these guys say, yeah but we're a premium product. We have high end customers. We charge a lot. We're a lot more powerful. They're just starting out and that attitude assumes that they're going to stay static but of course that company wants to grow until they eat the lunch of the incumbent. This is in a nutshell, these are the dynamics of disruption. When we say disruption in disruptive technology in a business standpoint, it has a very specific definition and a very specific meaning, the disruptor. Here are some examples of disruption. Encyclopedia is disrupted by Wikipedia, bookstores disrupted by online stores like Amazon, CDs, MP3s, film photography disrupted by digital photography, premium airlines, budget airlines, rental cars from car sharing and telephones by conference systems, voice over IP. It's this last one I want to talk a little bit more about and give an example. I used to work for a company called Go To Meeting. How many people know Go To Meeting? A lot of you but not all of you, Go To Meeting. In 2011, so around 2000 the company got started on this trajectory of improving performance so they can justify their higher price than move upstream, up market. In 2011, this was an article from GigaOM, in 2011 Go To Meeting launches high definition video conferencing, it was called HD Faces. Not only do you have audio and video but you have high definition webcams. They're a little 10% little more so they can justify their $50 a month price. Without kind of regard, this is them looking at their own technology and improving their own technology, almost for technology's sake. Does anybody want that? Does anybody need that? And I want to share a little video that I saw from the new season of Silicon Valley. Does anybody watch Silicon Valley on HBO yet? You guys like that? Okay, go to HBO.com and watch Silicon Valley. If you're in software development, it's absolutely hilarious. So if you know the scene or the setup, there's a company called Piedpiper and they do data compression but they have this video chat application. And in this scene, the CEO is showing the other developers his new compression that gets 10% better video quality. And just take a look at the reaction of everybody else here. So I'm just going to start this video. I hope the sound is good. I started to optimize our code to handle higher traffic. Then it occurred to me, why rewrite our old code when I can build a new encoder that doesn't strip away a ton of channels and metadata. So I extended my compression algorithm to support, get this, 12-bit color. Okay, so our users will be able to experience a 10% increase in image quality with absolutely no increase in server load whatsoever. Just watch this. Before. After. Before. After. Richard, I'm trying very hard not to completely lose my shit right now. I get it. I get it. After every VC in town to understand, we decided that the best way to stay alive until we got to a million users was to cut server usage. Remember that? The whole reason that Guilfoy and I stayed up for 48 fucking straight hours was to decrease server load, not keep it the same. Technically, the reason why we stayed up for two days was to maximize our ability to get a million users. And I just did that because who doesn't want 10% better image quality? Who doesn't want it? Everyone. Everyone doesn't want it. We already have the best video chat. People are using this on their cell phones. They're not going to be able to tell a fucking difference. Guys, this is a better product. And I'm the CEO, and I'm going to say this is where we... I'm the CEO. This is where we're going to go. It's a better product. It was a better product. It's 10% better, right? Thinking about an incremental innovation. But the question, who actually needs this and who wants it? Or the fact that they're using their cell phones, their mobile phones, when they're doing this, right? It becomes irrelevant. This is just symptomatic. Now, they're a startup, so it's not actually a disrupted disruption dynamic going on here in particular. But the attitude of making a better product and launching that in the hopes of getting more customers, he wanted to get up to a million users with better high definition video. And for me watching this, it was very comical because that was pretty much the language going on at GoToMeeting at the time. We're going to get more visitors because we have HD webcams. The same time that GoToMeeting was growing up, this started, right? Anybody who knows Skype? Raise your hand if you've ever heard of Skype. Yeah, that's like everybody, right? What was the competitive response from GoToMeeting to Skype when it came out, right? We're a premium product. We have business customers. We're for serious business people, right? Skype is for college kids to call home and chat with their girlfriends, right? That's okay. They can live down there in the low end of the market. They're free. We charge $50 a month. We're way up here. But that assumes that Skype is going to stay static. What happened to Skype? They improved their services and their quality, and they eventually had, in my opinion, better audio than GoToMeeting and most other services. And then what happened around the same time, that article that I just showed in 2011, what happened to Skype? Where did they end up? And what did Microsoft brand them? Skype for business, right? So now, now GoToMeeting and Skype are literally head to head. So disruption is when the competitive response from the high end is, oh, don't take them seriously. That's just the low end. At the heart of this dynamic, though, is this notion of looking at the goals that customers have and what they're trying to get done. And we can call that the job to be done. And that's what Clayton Christensen outlines in his book, The Innovator's Dilemma. It's probably the most famous and most widely read business book out there. If you don't have The Innovator's Dilemma, I do recommend you read it. It is a business book, but it's fascinating reading. In his follow-up book, The Innovator Solution, particularly in chapter four in there, he expounds on this notion of jobs to be done. Basically, what he's saying is that companies get disrupted because they stop focusing on the job that the customer is trying to get done. And a job to be done is not a task. Sometimes the term jobs to be done gets confused with task analysis. It's not. It's actually about a progress towards a goal. It's ultimately about a need. Jobs to be done perspective sees consumers as goal-seeking agents, that we're trying to improve our lives. We're trying to solve a problem. And that act of trying to solve a problem is a job. And we call it a job to be done. It's not about demographics. It's not about solutions either. So one of the kind of principles of jobs to be done thinking is you need to describe the job to be done without describing a technology or a solution. You need to look at what the human being, what the person is trying to get done. And this shows causality. Why people buy products? Why they hire our solutions over other solutions is because of the job to be done. So the first point that I want to make is that at the core of disruption, this very, very important business theory is the realization that opportunity, business opportunity comes from understanding the jobs that people want to get done. So I think for us, you know, the advocacy for understanding our customers and understanding human behavior is kind of feels kind of natural. But this should be this should be fucking interesting for all of us in this room because this is what business people are talking about more and more these days, right? So never before in my in my experience, or my opinion, has what business people are talking about in terms of the dynamics of business opportunity overlapped with what we're talking about. And I think part of my message here today is that I think we should be part of this conversation and be involved in what they're talking about when they say jobs to be done. So understanding jobs to be done part of the problem with the theory of jobs to be done is there's not really a codified language or a way to look at jobs to be done. There's a couple of competing perspectives and competing approaches out there. But I offered this practical model for understanding understanding jobs to be done. Again, if the job to be done is a progress towards a goal, we can we can describe it one way along several different dimensions, the functional job. And I made that bigger because typically a job to be done is described by its functional job. That's why it gets confused with task analysis. But we can also talk about the emotional job in a social job that's involved there. And I'll give an example of this coming up. But it's also a contextual is also a job to be done is for a certain context. Notice we're not talking about the psychodemographics of a customer, a persona that doesn't that doesn't drive behavior, but they're context and the job that they need to get done does. Let me just give you an example of those six dimensions or six facets of a job to be done. Let's say you want to hire a keyless lock. They have these locks for your front door that are wireless hooked up to the internet. You can actually open your door with your smartphone. You can see online who's entered your house or not. You can let people in or not. The functional job is you want to control access to your home and that's how you might describe the job to be done. But there's also an emotional job there too, right in this goal that I have. I want to feel safe and secure. Right. So if this solution came out and it met that functional job but didn't meet that emotional job, people might not hire that solution. There's also a social job. It lets visitors in but keeps strangers out. But then we also need to look at the circumstances around this keyless lock. This is for private home owners to let people in during the day when they're at work. And the motivation is to solve the problem of selective access. And then there are these things called desired outcomes. So we have the job to be done, which we can describe by functional, emotional and social. But the desired outcomes are the metrics, the means by which we subjectively judge whether that solution is meeting our job or not. Right. So you have a job to be done and you have a desired outcome. And you can express desired outcomes in a series of statements. So for any one job to be done, there might be a dozen or several dozen desired outcome statements. And it's that last point that I wanted to just expand on because I want to show how you can actually find business opportunities by understanding the job to be done. In particular, the desired outcome portion of a job to be done. And there's a method that had been pioneered by a guy named Tony Olwick that normalizes the statements for the desired outcomes. And the way that you get these statements, by the way, is going out and talking to people, where they are, where they work or where they're playing if that's what you're looking at. You go out and collect all of these desired outcome statements and you put them into a normalized format. And the normalized format begins with a verb that shows direction. Either you're going to move something down or erase it. So you're either going to minimize, reduce, decrease, or lower something, or you're going to maximize, increase, or raise something. The next element is a unit, usually a noun, that shows the thing that you want to move up or down. In this case, it's maximize my ability and then you have a qualifier to allow visitors in during the day. So you do observations of the world, look at the job to be done, and collect these desired outcome statements in a qualitative way. But then you can actually measure opportunity, business opportunity, with a quantitative survey. You can ask a sample of the job executors, the people in your market that are of interest to you. You can ask them two questions for each desired outcome statement. You can ask them how important is that to you? And how satisfied are you currently with getting that solution done? Scale of 1 to 10 on each. So what this gives you is a scale of where that desired outcome fits in a matrix, like this. And where business opportunity happens is right here. Things that are important to people, but aren't satisfied. And that's, by the way, this is where disruption also potentially happens. If you have an existing offering, you need to watch out for these things, because if somebody figures out a cheaper way or a better way to do that, to fulfill those jobs for customers, you may be disrupted. And this is the method pioneered by Tony Olwick. It's quite scientific and very specific in its methodology. But it's using the jobs to be done theory, general jobs to be done theory, which I think overlaps with a lot of our thinking, but comes from the business literature. And he has operationalized the jobs to be done theory to pinpoint where business opportunity is, but from customer needs. In fact, look at the title of the article where he explains this method. Turn customer input into innovation. So these are business folks talking about similar topics that we have, but from a business standpoint. So my second point is that jobs to be done give designers, they give us a way of capturing insight that leverages our skills to help inform business to find help find business opportunities. I think that's I think that's important. And that's pretty cool to there. There's still not one central place or language around this this notion of jobs to be done. And people like Tony Olwick and Clayton Christensen, they tend to consult CEOs of, you know, Fortune 500 companies. They operate way up in the stratosphere. And they're talking about a corporate strategy and corporate innovation, like what markets should you be in, and that those types of things. But I think jobs to be done can actually be applied at a much more practical level and can pervade the organization. So I'm seeing this jobs to be done thinking, again, similar to concepts that we already know around user centered design or human centered design. I see jobs to be done as a lens, as a lens that we can use in lots of different practical ways. And I just wanted to show a couple of practical ways that you can think about using jobs to be done. So I encourage you all, first of all, to go out and read more about jobs to be done. That's kind of my my call to action is I want to make this this topic, this concept known to this community. But I want to give some specific examples of how you can apply it. In discovering value in finding new opportunities, understanding your market, in designing solutions for that market, in packaging and delivering and creating language around your solutions, but then also in innovating and redefining your position in the market. You can use the jobs to be done thinking as a way of seeing to help you do any or all of these. So in terms of discovering value, right, we like to do a lot of qualitative research observations, ethnography, contextual inquiry. And, you know, it's always a challenge. If you've ever done qualitative research, it's a challenge to make sense of all of that data and present it back in a way that makes sense. Here's one way that you can do it. This was a project that I was working on a while back when I was looking at small law lawyers in Germany and how they do new business development. How does a law office in Germany do new business development? And I went out and talked to a dozen lawyers and I listened to them and I was listening for jobs to be done. And what I did is I created a hierarchical description of the things that I heard. So down here, these are individual statements or tasks that I grouped into a cluster that I then grouped up here into a higher level kind of pattern that for me pointed to a value, a higher level driver for the lawyer. I'm going to zoom in on this just so you can see some of the language there. So lawyers were telling me they wrote legal articles. Why would a lawyer write an article? Well, because they need to publish to stay relevant. Well, why would they do that? Because that improves their reputation. And reputation feeds into new business and becoming a successful law firm. So it's almost like the five whys. Do you guys know the five whys? It's about asking the question, well, why do you do that? Why do you do that? And asking the question, why will always expand and get more towards the underlying motivation. Within the jobs to be done framework, if we're looking at this as a process or progress towards a goal, we can we can use this this line of thinking, both questioning the audience, the consumers, but also as a way to describe it back to our internal stakeholders. I can make sense of the jobs to be done and use these models to capture and create a diagram and artifact that we can then talk about internally inside of my team. And this this this method represents or resembles mental model diagrams. Does anybody know mental model diagrams in the Young's book that came out to 2008? Yeah, you create these really long diagrams that are essentially a hierarchical representation of jobs to be done. She doesn't call them jobs to be done. But it's a very similar perspective. So we're kind of doing this already. That's what I said. This feels natural and comfortable to you. I hope that's a good thing. Here's me at a go to meeting. And we did some research where we created a hierarchical model of jobs to be done that people were doing. But look what we called this thing. We didn't say buy go to meeting or get better HD video for your webcams. How do people work? It was really how do people work together because we were looking at collaboration. But how do people work together? That's what we wanted to understand. And we presented this back to the folks that go to meeting. And guess what? High definition video doesn't solve any of these jobs that people have. That's not going to help them try to get what they're trying to get done better. And we had gaps. So the thing, we were missing out on opportunities, but focused on the wrong opportunities because we were focused on the technology for technology's sake. 10% more increase in video quality. So what? And that, by the way, the HD webcams brought almost no revenue back to the company. It didn't really help go to meeting in the way that they hoped that it would. The second thing that you can do is when you're designing a solution, so that's understanding the market. But I can also design for the market as well, too. And there's this notion of job stories. A guy named Alan Clement talking about how user stories are so poorly formulated. As a user, I want to log in. But he wants to log in. That's not what they want to do. They want to access their content. The log in, you're putting a barrier there. That's friction. I don't want to log in. So he suggests that we reformulate the way that we're writing user stories to say, when I'm in this situation, I want to, you know, when I'm on the go, I want to access my content so that I can continue working on a document at work or something like that. Now, job stories are probably aren't going to replace your user stories. Anybody work with user stories and agile and stuff like that? Okay. So you kind of know what user stories are. These probably aren't going to replace your user stories in your backlog. But what you can do, and this is what my colleagues at Mural do, is before they go and design something, so they're designing a new feature set or a new capability, they list all of the job stories up front. And this is a mural. So we have these big canvases. And in the upper left of the canvas, they say, okay, what are the jobs that people are trying to get done in the context of this solution? And they write them out as job stories. The engineers might then use user stories to measure burn down rate after that. But these become then guiding principles to look at. Not what's our technology or what technology are they using, but just what are people trying to get done? What are the jobs that people are trying to get done? And it helps frame the conversation and keep that as reference. So when you're designing that login screen, it doesn't say people want to log in. It says they want to access their content. The third thing that you can do is help the job you don't can help you deliver value. In this case, and I did this too when I was working at Citrix, where we looked at a marketing language, right? So just looking at how you're phrasing things back to the market. This might be a, you know, a slogan or a statement that you see on a brochure. Our conferencing software features high-definition video with the best resolution. That's technology, technology, technology. But what are you trying to get done with that technology? Well, you can connect with your remote colleagues on a more personal level with true-to-life video. That same thought rewritten from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. So we went through that exercise of actually looking at language, speaking to the market from its own perspective. What are you trying to get done? And actually, when you do this, you see, well, you don't actually need that. That doesn't help you get your job to be done. Or at Mural, I'm in charge of the customer support team and we have a help desk where we have articles that describe our functionality and we use that framework that I just showed to actually structure the content of our help articles. So each one of our articles begins with a verb that represents the functional job. So you can paste from a spreadsheet. So that's the functional job. The very first sentence, though, on all of our help articles, is really the desired outcome. Why do you want to do that? It's to increase your ease of working with content across documents. There's no feature, there's no technology mentioned there. You might say document is a technology, but I didn't want to say source because that's a little too abstract. But working with content across documents, that's what you're trying to get done. The spreadsheet is a feature. It's a function that helps you do that. And then we talk about the situation, when and why would you do that? We describe in steps the continuation of the functional job. And then we end with a little bit of emotion there, feeling control of your content. Impress your colleagues, the social job as well too. So this becomes a checklist for us to write help content article. It's not dogmatic. You can, you can, you know, you can go off of this beaten path if it doesn't make sense to do it. But we believe that we're speaking when somebody comes up to this article that this is their frame of mind, that they're trying to get something done and we're trying to speak to them in that way. We know you're trying to get something done and we're going to talk to you as if you are trying to get something done. And then finally, jobs to be done can help us redefine our value and reframe our market and our position and even what it means to be a competitor. Right? We have this notion of markets that are actually artificial boxes that we put ourselves into. We're in the, you know, the tax software market and we compare ourselves to other tax software. Right? But that's not what your customer's doing. Your customer's just trying to get a job done. So Scott Cook founded a company called Intuit in the United States, which is the largest tax software producer. They help you fill your taxes out once a year. And he, he's quoted as saying this, the greatest competitor in tax software was not the industry or other tax software offerings, it was the pencil. The pencil is a tough and resilient substitute. Sorry. Yet the entire industry had overlooked it. Right? So think about it from your perspective somebody trying to fill out taxes. Right? You got a lot of papers, you got a lot of numbers, screens, screen one, screen two, I got to carry a number over from screen one to screen two or do a side calculation. What are you going to do? What are you going to grab as a solution? What are you going to go for to get that job done? A pencil. Right? So he's, he's looking at the job to be done and looking at his market, not just developing a solution, but looking at his market through the eyes of the customer, saying we're tax software, we compete with a pencil. Right? There's a very good book by Alan Clement and the title of the book is When Coffee and Kale Compete. Right? Because what's the, what's the job of coffee in the morning? It's to give you energy. Right? But kale juice might give you energy as well too. So in that context, in, defined in that situation, the job to be done is get energy so coffee and kale compete. Tax software and pencils compete. But this line of thinking then lets you actually expand your market not by finding more customers doing the same thing or buying competitors, but by expanding by adding new jobs to what you cover and looking at how pencils and tax software can compete. So jobs to be done, it offers a practical lens. I think it's a lens, it's a way of seeing. Right? And it's a way of seeing that similar to things that are out there already, but it comes from the business community and I think we should be more involved within these conversations in our organizations. And it allows you to view to view various aspects of your organization. It can pervade the organization. It doesn't just have to be high level strategy like it's positioned in a lot of the business books. You can use jobs to be done thinking to help you organize your own research to design solutions to even write text and copy and things like that. But the overall effect I think is it helps us shift the view from the outside in looking at our industry and our company from the outside, from the inside out rather and be able to look at it from the outside in to see the market as customers and human beings see themselves. So quickly to summarize, you know, at the core of disruption and I think this is really cool at the core of disruption, this very important business theory is this notion of jobs to be done which is a very human very human focused notion. And I think it's relevant to designers and that we can apply it in practical ways. One quick quote before I end and this is kind of where the jobs to be done thinking comes from Theodore Levitt a famous business professor used to tell his students that people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill they want a quarter inch hole. So as manufacturers we're focused on our technology. We sell drills, buy our drill. I'll tell you about the specifications of my drill. The customer just wants a hole in their wall and there might be other ways to do that. But if we think about it from the customer's perspective it flips our view of how we create value discovering value, designing value, delivering value and redefining value. So thank you very much.