When Jack Dorsey stepped back into Twitter in 2016, he inherited an annual loss of over $500 million on revenues of $2.2 billion, and a languishing stock price, when other platforms were booming. Dorsey reflected recently, as cited in this piece, “We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. We didn’t have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot.”

To get a clear understanding of what business Twitter was really in, Dorsey and his team used a framework known as “jobs to be done.” They mined data to understand what users were “hiring them” to do, prioritized what was core for them, and aligned the organization to that core.

“It cleared up what was missing for me, which was how do we plan and build around a customer-centric framework that would focus the organization on why our customers are coming to us in the first place,” Dorsey said. They now focus on three core jobs: 1. News to inform, 2. Conversation and discussion, and 3. Helping people (their developer and advertising community) get paid.

The results? Over 210 million users, revenue of over $4.5 billion expected this year, and healthy operating profits have fueled a 4-fold increase in the stock price since Dorsey’s been back at the helm.

The dining room table

In the mid-2000’s, a condo development in Detroit aimed at downsizers did their homework. They designed and built what buyers said they wanted, priced the units attractively, and launched a solid marketing campaign. When the lookers didn’t turn into buyers, confounded, they hired Bob Moesta, an innovation consultant to do some detective work.

Moesta studied people who had actually purchased the condos, and his sleuthing revealed a clue. While prospective buyers repeatedly said they didn’t need a formal dining room, the actual buyers kept saying, “As soon as I figured out what to do with my dining room table, I was free to move.” The dining room table? And these weren’t valuable tables; many had seen better days. But they represented something so much deeper: family, decades of nightly dinners, birthday, holiday, and graduation celebrations, homework and projects. If a relative wasn’t willing to take the table, they couldn’t part with it. THAT stopped the purchase.

Moesta said, “I went from thinking that we were in the business of new home construction, but I realized we were in the business of moving lives.” People weren’t just moving to a smaller place, they were in the psychological throes of a jarring transition. The condos weren’t competing against other condos. They were competing against the option of not moving at all.

The condo developer addressed the jobs to be done by reconfiguring the units to allow for a dining room table, paying for and arranging moving, offering two years of free storage, and providing a staging area where people could lay out their stuff, decide what to keep and what to get rid of over time.

The strategy proved successful. And, when the housing crisis hit and industry sales were off 49%, the developer's condo business was up 25%.

Clayton Christensen and colleagues used this and other vignettes to introduce the jobs to be done framework in this 2016 piece. The idea is to move away from gathering endless amounts of data on consumer behavior, and shift to understanding what people hire products to do for them. “It transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase,” Christensen noted.

Jobs to be done inside an organization

Jobs to be done can be turned inward. Endless employee surveys could be replaced or augmented using the jobs to be done framework inside of organizations in two ways: first, what jobs are employees hiring us to do when they join? A mission and values fit? The opportunity to practice and get better at their craft? Security? Well-being? Community? How are we doing at those jobs? The second way would focus on the systems, processes, and structures we have in place to enable people to do their actual work. Is our operating system delivering the jobs to be done our people need? How is that ERP system working? Our payroll system? (Just ask Amazon employees about that.) Are we putting decisions and agency where it needs to be for people to get their jobs done?

And, turn the mirror on ourselves

Could we get some aha’s and insights to our own behavior and make some good changes if we examined the jobs to be done from our own purchases? What if, in the condo case above, people could have self-diagnosed that the job to be done in downsizing was really transitioning a life? They might have been able to get themselves unstuck. Or, maybe some of those things we purchase are doing a job we don’t really need done, or not doing the job well. We could eliminate some things or find better ones. Better for us and our environment.

Thoughts are welcome