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The job is the progress a customer wants in a situation, with practical, emotional and social parts; everything that could get it done competes for it.
Paper packet. Every task here also exists on screen, where it is checked automatically; answers written on paper are not assessed by Nydus. When you are back at a device, enter your answers there.
You will state the job a customer is trying to get done in their situation, keep it apart from the product the owner sells, sort its practical, emotional and social parts, and map everything that competes to do it.
A segment is a situation and the need it creates, and a business can choose which segments to serve and which to decline. This lesson looks inside the need: what exactly the person in that situation is trying to achieve, in their own words, before any product comes into it.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Job | The progress a customer is trying to make in a situation. |
| Practical part | What the customer needs to get done. |
| Emotional part | How the customer wants to feel while and after it is done. |
| Social part | How the customer wants to be seen by others. |
| Hire | To choose a product or service to do a job. |
| Fire | To stop using it because something else does the job better. |
The office manager ordering from Neighborhood Kitchen on a Friday is not trying to buy salad bowls. She is trying to feed the whole team during the meeting without anybody leaving the room, on a budget her director will sign off, and without being the person who got the order wrong. Salad bowls are one way of doing that job. So are pizzas from across the road, a sandwich platter from the supermarket, and moving the meeting to after lunch.
Seen that way, three things change. The competition is everything that does the job, not only other kitchens. The features that matter are the ones that serve the job — delivery before the meeting starts, food that can be eaten at a table without cutlery, a clear invoice for the director — and many that the owner is proudest of turn out not to matter. And why customers leave makes sense: they leave when something does the job better, even if it looks nothing like the product.
A useful way to write a job down is the customer's own sentence: when I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so that this matters to me.
Another way: table
The job behind three purchases.
| Customer bought | Situation | The job |
|---|---|---|
| A chain repair | Chain snapped on Thursday | Get to work on Monday without taxis |
| An end-of-tenancy clean | Moving out next week | Get the full deposit back |
| A café set of cups | Opening in six weeks | Serve from day one without breakages |
Another way: steps
Start from the situation. A job always belongs to a situation: moving out, a chain snapping, a café opening. Without one, 'job' turns back into a product description.
Write the job sentence. When I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so that this matters to me. Use the customer's words wherever you have them.
Split the parts. Practical, emotional, social, each on its own line.
Map the competition. Everything that could get the job done, including doing nothing, doing it yourself and a different kind of business.
Count the switching. Among customers who stopped buying, how many moved to a similar business and how many to another way of doing the job? Divide each by all who left.
Check the answer. A job statement should make no mention of your product; if it does, it is a product description. The competition list should include at least one thing that looks nothing like your business. And the shares of lapsed customers by reason must add to a hundred, with an 'unknown' row if some could not be reached.
Describing the product tells the owner what they already know. Describing the job tells them three things they usually do not: who else is competing, which features matter, and why customers leave. A launderette that thinks its job is 'washing machines' sees only other launderettes coming. One that knows its job is 'clean clothes without losing an evening' sees the pickup app coming, and can decide whether to offer drop-off service before its regulars go.
Counting lapsed customers by reason is allowed because each one left for a single main reason that can be asked about. Where someone gives two, record the one that settled it, and use the same rule every time.
Most jobs have a practical core and something wrapped around it. The café owner buying from Maya needs cups that survive two hundred washes a week — practical. She wants to stop worrying about breakages before opening day — emotional. And she wants customers to photograph their coffee and share it — social. An offer that meets only the practical part competes on price with every supplier of plain white cups. One that meets all three is a different offer.
Keep the three apart when you listen. An owner who hears only the practical part undersells; one who hears only the emotional part overpromises. Write each part down separately, in the customer's words where you have them, before deciding what the offer should do about it. The next lessons turn these words into evidence.
Knowing the competing ways also tells you what the customer compares your price with. A commuter weighing a 45-dollar repair is not comparing it with another shop's 40; she is comparing it with ten bus rides at 2.50, or with borrowing her brother's bike for free. A tenant weighing a 250-dollar move-out clean compares it with the deposit at stake, perhaps 1,200 dollars, and with a weekend of her own time.
That comparison is often good news. The job's value to the customer is usually set by what is at stake in the situation, not by the cost of making the product, and a price that looks high next to a competitor's can look small next to the deposit, the missed shift or the ruined opening day.
A job belongs to a situation, so when situations change, jobs move. Office teams that once ordered lunch for a Friday meeting may now meet online on Fridays, and the job disappears; or they meet in person only once a month, and the job becomes 'make the one day together worth the trip'. Asking lapsed customers what changed is the quickest way to hear about it.
Jobs are found by listening, but the records point to where to listen. A booking note that says 'need it before the in-laws arrive' names a situation and a deadline; a repair ticket marked 'needed for work Monday' names a job. Reading a month of notes and grouping them by the progress the customer wanted often turns up two or three jobs that explain most of the business.
Northside Repairs did this with 80 tickets. Forty-three mentioned getting to work, school or a job by a date; nineteen mentioned a ride or race on a weekend; the rest gave no reason. Two jobs, 'get me commuting again by Monday' and 'get me ready for Saturday's ride', covered 62 of the 80 tickets, nearly 78 percent. Each needed a different promise: the commuters wanted speed, the weekend riders wanted the bike tuned to feel right.
The count matters because it keeps the owner from building the whole business around the most memorable customer. The vivid story of one rider's race is worth less than the quiet pattern in forty-three commuting tickets.
The same product can be hired for different jobs by different customers, and each job may need a different message or a slightly different offer. Neighborhood Kitchen's salad bowls are hired by office managers to feed a meeting, by gyms to sell after a class, and by parents to pick up a quick family dinner on the way home. The food is identical; the jobs are not. The office manager cares about timing and an invoice, the gym about protein and calories on the label, the parent about price and whether children will eat it.
Listing the jobs a product is hired for, with a count of each from the records, shows which job to build the main message around and which deserve a separate, smaller offer of their own.
Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at Harvard Business School often told the story of a fast-food chain that wanted to sell more milkshakes. Asking customers what they wanted in a milkshake, thicker, sweeter, more flavors, changed nothing. So researchers watched who bought them, and when.
Nearly half the milkshakes were sold before 8:30 in the morning, to people alone, who bought nothing else and drove off with them. Asked what job the shake was doing, the commuters described a long, dull drive, a free hand, and the need to stay full until mid-morning. The shake competed not with other milkshakes but with bagels, bananas and boredom: it lasted the whole commute through a thin straw and did not crumble onto their clothes.
Seen as a job, the improvements were obvious: make the morning shake a little thicker so it lasted longer, and speed up the morning line. The afternoon buyer, a parent treating a child, was hiring the same shake for a completely different job, and needed a smaller one that could be finished quickly. One product, two situations, two jobs, two different offers.
A launderette near Atlanta lost about a fifth of its weekend regulars in the year a pickup app arrived. The owner phoned 30 of them: 4 had moved to another launderette, 19 now used the app, and 7 had bought machines. Nineteen out of thirty, about 63 percent, had fired the launderette for another way of doing the job: clean clothes without losing an evening.
Rather than cut prices, which would not have answered that job, the owner added a same-day drop-off service at 1.60 dollars a pound, washed and folded by staff during the quiet weekday mornings. Within six months the drop-off service brought in more than the lost regulars had spent, and some of the lapsed customers came back, because the launderette now did their job.
The product is the job. 'Buy a deep clean' is what the business sells. The job is 'get my deposit back'.
Competitors are businesses like mine. The bus competes with a bike repair; eating at the desk competes with catering.
Every job is about price. Customers often pay more to get the job done with less time, worry or embarrassment.
The owner decides the job. It is found out from customers, not invented.
Read Monica's first description of the job.
$\text{sell cheap fruit and vegetables}$
That is the product and a price, not a customer's progress.
Note what her busiest customers do.
$\text{arrive before nine; a week's bag in ten minutes}$
What people do in a situation points at the job.
Write the job sentence.
$\text{when I shop on Saturday, one quick stop, so I keep my day}$
In the customer's words.
Map the competition.
$\text{the supermarket delivery slot}$
It does the same job with even less time.
Name an idea the job suggests.
$\text{a pre-packed weekly bag}$
Worth testing, because it serves the job directly.
Call the 20 office customers who stopped ordering.
$20 \text{ calls}$
Lapsed customers explain the competition best.
Sort the reasons.
$4 \text{ another caterer}, \ 11 \text{ another way}, \ 5 \text{ other}$
One main reason each.
Find the share who left for another caterer.
$4 \div 20 \times 100 = 20$
A competitor that looks like the kitchen.
Find the share who left for another way.
$11 \div 20 \times 100 = 55$
A shared fridge, eating at desks.
Check the shares add up.
$20 + 55 + 25 = 100$
Every caller counted once.
Say what the kitchen should compete with.
$\text{the desk lunch, not the other caterer}$
More than half left for another way of doing the job.
Write the commuter's job.
$\text{get to work on Monday without taxis}$
The situation is a chain snapped on Thursday.
List the ways of doing it.
$\text{repair, bus, a friend's bike}$
Each competes for the same job.
Cost the bus for the ten workdays until payday.
$2.50 \times 2 \times 10 = 50$
Two rides a day.
Compare with the repair price.
$45 < 50$
The repair is cheaper than the bus over two weeks.
Add the emotional part.
$\text{no crowded bus, no early start}$
Worth saying in the message.
Write the line for the counter.
$\text{back on your bike by Monday for less than two weeks of bus fares}$
The price, set against the competing way.
Check the claim holds.
$45 \text{ against } 50$
Only true while the repair costs under 50.
Name the situation.
$\text{moving out next week, inspection coming}$
The job always belongs to a situation.
Write the job in the customer's words.
$\text{when I move out, pass the inspection, so I get my deposit}$
When, I want to, so that.
Name a competing way of doing the job.
Bright Home Cleaning is trying to describe the job of a tenant moving out next week. Which statement is the customer's job?
Complete the worked solution: of $25$ customers who stopped ordering, $5$ moved to another caterer and $11$ now get the job done another way, such as eating at their desks. Find each group's share of those who left, and how much larger the other-way share is.
Find the share who moved to another caterer.
$(\text{another caterer}) \div 25 \times \text{a hundred} =$ q
A competitor that looks like the business.
Find the share who found another way.
$(\text{another way}) \div 25 \times \text{a hundred} =$ p
Competition that looks nothing like the business.
Find the difference between the shares.
$(\text{another way}) - (\text{another caterer}) =$ d
Percentage points.
Say what the difference tells the owner.
$\text{the real competition is the other way}$
More left for a different way of doing the job than for a rival.
Maya asked café owners what they wanted from new tableware. Sort each part of the job they described.
| Practical | Emotional | Social | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cups that survive two hundred washes a week | |||
| Not worrying about breakages before the opening | |||
| Customers posting photos of their coffee | |||
| Plates that stack in a small cupboard |
Bright Home Cleaning wrote down what a new client said when she booked. Mark every sentence that tells you about the job she is trying to get done.
This task has no paper form; do it on a device.
A commuter's bike chain snaps on Thursday, and they need to get to work on Monday. Draw what creates the job and everything that could get it done.
This task has no paper form; do it on a device.
A commuter in Portland, Oregon, could leave a broken bike unrepaired and ride the bus instead, at $2$ dollars a ride, two rides each workday, for the $10$ workdays until payday. How many dollars would the bus cost over those days? Fill in each figure on the sheet.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| A day's fares, dollars | |
| Fares over the workdays, dollars |
A launderette notices that $9$ regulars stopped coming after a laundry-pickup app opened in town. What job were those customers most likely hiring the launderette for?
Lesson test: one question per skill, one attempt each, no hints. Your answers are checked when you submit.
Neighborhood Kitchen called the $20$ office customers who stopped ordering last quarter. $4$ said they now get the job done another way — a shared fridge of sandwiches, or eating at their desks. What percentage of those who left did so for another way of doing the job?
Of those who left, v percent left for another way of doing the job.
You can say what a customer is really hiring the business to do, and name competition that looks nothing like the product. Tell someone why a launderette might lose customers to an app. Next: telling what customers did from what an owner assumes.
18. Your turn: the tenant moving out, step 3
$\text{cleaning it herself over a weekend}$
Not another cleaning company.