Christensen et al came up with the concept of ‘customer jobs’ – the things that people needed to get done to achieve a specific outcome or objective – as a way of more accurately defining what value propositions matter most to people.
A way to understand how to develop a product or service in alignment with the things that most enabled customers to achieve their goals if you like.
There is a great article in the Harvard Business Review called ‘Know your Customers’ Jobs to be Done’ that will help you understand how to leverage this concept effectively. If you are battling to understand where you should dedicate your time, efforts and money, the ‘customer jobs’ framework – applied to your own personal & professional life – combined with the 80/20 rule can go a long way to helping you do just that.
The value of understanding what jobs need doing.
We work with talented, ambitious and creative people who have heaps of great ideas, and all the enthusiasm necessary to make an impact, but don’t know where to start or how to structure their efforts in a strategic and meaningful way.
It really helps to highlight the concept of defining what needs doing into specific jobs rather than trying to think in terms of something as broad as goals.
Paralysis by analysis can put the best of us into quicksand pretty quickly, and you’re better served defining what needs doing, why it needs doing, and in what order it needs to be done if you’re going to move the needle on what most matters to you.
The value of ordering jobs rather than prioritizing them.
Oscar Styf, Professional Scrum Trainer and Agile Coach, really helped me understand the importance of ordering items rather than prioritizing them, and so I’ll paraphrase what he said to provide you with some clarity too.
In a traditional project management environment, every stakeholder’s work items are a priority to them. If you asked them to prioritise their work requests, it would all rank ‘urgent’ because it is a priority for them in the context of their job, their objectives, and what metrics they are measured against.
But, for the team producing the work, having multiple competing priorities means that they have no priorities, and they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t, so they just respond to the loudest, most powerful stakeholder and use a reactive approach to define their workflow.
Great if you’re the CEO, not so great if you’re the business development manager.
Ordering items means that you acknowledge the urgency of each work item but take a scientific approach to defining the order of work items and use value as the primary justification for that workflow.
If delivering work item D generates $1 million in revenue for the organization but work item A only generates $50 in revenue, it becomes very easy to let stakeholders know that you’re going to complete work item D before work item A because value creation is what defines the priority.
Similarly, if work item D generates $1 million in revenue but your analysis shows that the cost of delay for work item H is $20 million, the priority shifts according to the value that is being created by completing that work item first.
Paraphrased from a conversation with Oscar Styf
The 80/20 rule aka Pareto Principle
So, what does ‘value’ mean?
It’s different for everyone.
To the Chief Financial Officer, a $1,000 cost saving per month is more valuable than a salesperson generating $1,000 per month because in the context of their job, and the things they are rewarded or penalized for, cost saving is more valuable than revenue generation.
To an entrepreneur, acquiring a customer who is going to spend $2,000 a month for the next 5 years is more valuable than acquiring a once-off sale for $20,000 because they value sustainable, profitable business growth more than one-hit-wonders.
Understand what is creating value.
The Pareto Principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs.
This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. You will have experienced this a number of times in your life.
20% of your sales team are responsible for 80% of the revenue. 20% of the team you work with are responsible for delivering 80% of the work. It isn’t a perfect formula because there are always outliers, but it is reliably demonstrable and true of most environments.
Define what is creating value.
So, just as you articulated which jobs need doing, and grouped them in terms of categories that make sense to you, you now need to define where the most value is being created.
You may have articulated 100 jobs that need to be done, but you now need to articulate which of those jobs is most likely to generate the most value, and then order them in terms of value.
This isn’t as simple as tallying up the revenue you generate from each job, you also need to understand what enables value and what supporting jobs are necessary for that value to be created or captured.
If something you do generates zero revenue, but it is a critical element of maintaining or sustaining a relationship that does generate millions, then it needs to be ordered relative to the value that job or task supports or enables.
Focus on value.
Once you have ordered your jobs to be done, you have a pragmatic and actionable list of work items that you KNOW are going to create or capture value effectively. You also know that your time, effort and money are being dedicated to jobs that have the highest potential to deliver significant returns on investment.
If you have 100 items on your to-do list, but 20% of those items are going to create 80% of the value, you can start to breathe and recognize that even if you don’t complete all of the items within your deadline, you’re still going to capture at least 80% of potential value and minimize 80% of the risk.
Remain flexible, adaptable, and responsive.
We do a lot of things out of habit.
As a marketing + design agency, we see this a lot. At the start of the process, people will list 100 items for the project because that’s what they are used to doing.
List everything that needs doing, regardless of the value it creates, because doing that means we can’t get fired, punished or criticised for ‘forgetting’ something on the list.
It’s almost guaranteed that 50% of the items represent only 5% value in total. If that. They are just on the list because people think that creating an exhaustive list is part of the planning process.
What happens if it doesn’t need to work that way?
What if you create a list, order it by value, and recognize that you only need 20 work items to create 80% of the value and simply focus on that.
Once you are done with those 20 work items, everything will have changed and you may now need a new list of 20 of the most valuable work items to focus on next to capture or create even MORE value than you could initially have imagined.
As you learn and evolve, more valuable opportunities tend to come up on your radar and it makes sense to respond to those opportunities and pivot immediately rather than insisting that the original list be completed in its entirety.
Remain open to the value of responding to change and adapting the plan OVER simply following the plan from point A to point Z because that is how we’ve always done things around here.
Let us know if this helps you focus on the most valuable work you could be doing, and also let us know what else we could help you with.
