Job Map Canvas.
Thinking about what your customer is trying to achieve as a way to define your value proposition just makes a lot of sense, instinctively. But how do you actually define that elusive Job to be Done? The Job Map Canvas can help!
Thinking about what your customer is trying to achieve as a way to define your value proposition just makes a lot of sense, instinctively. But how do you actually define that elusive Job to be Done? The Job Map Canvas can help!
you want to make sense of the customer’s job to be done in more detail
you want an alternative to the customer journey canvas
Ever since Clayton Christensen’s iconic ‘Milkshake Video’ his ‘Job to be Done’ framework has earned its place in the innovator’s toolbox. Thinking about what your customer is trying to achieve as a way to define your value proposition just makes a lot of sense, instinctively.
But how do you actually define that elusive Job to be Done? What is the job your customer tries to achieve? And how do you get more insight in it?
Service designers have used different approaches to this same problem. Looking at your customer through the lens of anthropology, documenting the thinking process and activities they go through in detail helps a lot to get intimately familiar with what drives your customer, but can take a large investment of time and requires experts.
Visualizing the ‘customer journey’ with a customer journey canvas or diagram helps a team to develop a common understanding of what drives a customer. The inviting blank page of the customer journey exercise is deceptive, however. Many teams run into problems as they try to figure out where to start, how to agree on a scope, and how to subdivide the different activities.
The Job Map as developed by Tony Ulwick provides an intermediate approach. When analyzing customer activity, it turns out that they tend to go through the same sequence of eight steps, whatever they are trying to achieve. This sequence can be used as both a handhold in detailing the Job to be Done and a checklist to make sure all the important stages have been addressed. ne of the great things about Card Sorting is that you don’t have to stick to the same organizing principle all the time. You can get other people to give feedback on the ideas, by asking them to organize the cards in order of (their) preference. This will give you insight in your ideas and the person giving feedback at the same time!
The stages Tony Ulwick defines in his Job Map are:
Define: The customer defines what they are trying to achieve. For instance, they might notice they have a problem and decide to solve it.
Locate: The customer locates more information and resources to support what they are trying to achieve.
Prepare: The customer prepares the environment to start executing.
Confirm: The customer confirms they have everything that is needed to start executing.
Execute: The customer starts executing the task.
Monitor: The customer monitors the execution of the task to see if they are making progress.
Modify: If necessary, the customer modifies how they are executing the task.
Conclude: The customer decides that the task has been completed.
Not all the steps in this sequence are explicitly necessary or very elaborate, but in most cases they can all be found when looking at any customer journey or job to be done. Note that some steps might be part of a ‘loop’ in the sequence, or have links back to an earlier stage.
To help with mapping out Jobs to be Done, I have created the Job Map Canvas, based on this universal sequence of steps (and the implicit loops). Going from left to right, you will see the same sequence of steps. I have further divided this in three stages: preparation, execution, and conclusion.
TIP! It may be interesting to notice that the ‘Execute, Monitor, Modify’ loop in the diagram is very similar to the ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ loop in the Lean Startup.