What Makes Money Money

The Jobs to be Done with Money

When you work on a product as a product manager, there are a variety of techniques you can use to decide what you’re going to build. You could make your decisions based on the features you think your problem should have, or you can base your decisions based on what will meet your customers’ needs. The Jobs-to-be-done framework provides a guide for understanding customer behavior so that you can satisfy your customer’s needs.

Simply put, the theory of Jobs-to-be-done is “customers want to make progress in their lives and they hire products to help them get that job done.” It helps you better understand customer behavior by exposing the functional, social, and emotional factors that cause customers to make their choices. You can use this understanding of customer choices to develop new products and improve the customer experience on existing products.

A way to describe the Jobs-to-be-done when a person is brushing their teeth that could lead to more innovative product design is: “Keep my teeth healthy.” This is a better example of a Job-to-be-done statement because it’s detached from a solution and moves toward the person’s true motivation.

Poorly-worded Job to Be Done	Well-worded Job to Be Done
Get my floor as clean as possible when I vacuum.	Maintain a clean living space.
Edit my photos and provide a variety of professional filters I can easily use.	Share beautiful pictures.
Help me maximize my deductions and get as much back from my taxes as possible.	File my taxes with confidence.
Let me add tags, labels, and folders to my email program so that I can sort things according to my system.	Find emails and files quickly.

Four Fundamentals of the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework

People buy products and services to get a “job” done

People have problems they are trying to solve and things they are trying to accomplish. In the product management world, these are often referred to as ideal outcomes and according to the jobs-to-be-done theory, those are the customer’s jobs.

As a product manager, you’re interested in these jobs because customers look to “hire” a product or service to get their jobs done. The job describes what the customer is trying to accomplish, not the solution that they use to accomplish it.

Jobs are functional with emotional and social components

At first glance, the definition of jobs as things people want to accomplish may make them seem purely functional. But job-to-be-done is also concerned about emotional and social components which explain why people are trying to accomplish a specific job.

When you dig into these emotional and social components, you’ll pick up the language customers use to describe their unmet needs. When you can describe your value proposition using your customer’s words that improve your go-to-market message.

A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time

What someone tries to accomplish stays pretty consistent over time. How they try to accomplish that job changes as they become aware of new and different products.

Because the jobs stay stable over time, understanding the job customers are trying to get done is a good way to describe value which you can then use to make decisions about your product.

It also provides a language you can use to market your product to help people realize how your product helps them get their jobs done.

The Job is the unit of analysis

The Jobs-to-be-done framework places the focus of discovery on what your customers want to accomplish in a given circumstance - the job - rather than your product or your customer’s characteristics.

Use your understanding of customer jobs to define customer needs and create the metrics you use to measure progress and success.

When you focus on customer jobs, you fall in love with the problem rather than the solution. That improves the chances that your product design addresses customers' needs rather than blindly delivering functionality that adds limited value.

Summary

In the context of money, there are four core jobs-to-be-done for the end users; they are the ancient money issues that persist for millennia of civilization in which humankind looking for ways to facilitate economic activities between parties.

The jobs stay stable over thousands of years, but human intelligence has always been able to transform the forms of money to satisfy the jobs in a more effective manner over a long time horizon.