This is a guest post by Hutch Carpenter. I met Hutch when he was running products for Spigit. He is one of rare product management leaders who starts with customers and their job to be done over myriad product features. Hutch now does Innovation Management Consulting for startups and enterprises. You can read his thoughts on innovation in his blog and follow his tweets at @bhc3. Hutch’s motto is, ” You can’t wait for customer insight. You have to go after with a club.”
Will your thoughts be featured next in this guest post series? Write yours now.
Jobs-to-be-done asks this: why did customers hire your product? “Hire” means they picked the product to satisfy some need or want. To think this way is to empathize with customers, better understanding growth opportunities. Two things to know:
- Jobs are relatively unchanging over time
- Products to fulfill jobs are not the same as the jobs themselves
Take Twitter: how’d anyone ever think *that* would be successful? Because it fulfills these jobs:
- Learn new information
- Share interesting stuff
- Talk with others
- Participate in major events
- Connect with like minds
- Establish professional reputation
We used to MySpace, email, write letters-to-the-editor, etc. Now we tweet.
Iterative Path 