The Customer- Centered Innovation Map
People “hire” products to get jobs done.
Very few companies use the perspective of “getting the job done” to discover opportunities for innovation.
Deconstructing a job from beginning to end, a company gains a complete view of all the points at which a customer might desire more help from a product or service
Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step
Not what they are doing currently.
By mapping out every step of the job and locating opportunities for innovative solutions
Companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings.
The Idea in Practice
All jobs have the same eight steps:
Define
Determine their goals and plan resources.
Simplifying planning.
Locate
Gather items and information needed to do the job.
Making required inputs easier to gather and ensuring they’re available when and where needed
Prepare
Set up the environment to do the job.
Making set-up less difficult and creating guides to ensure proper set-up of the work area
Confirm
Verify that they’re ready to perform the job.
Giving customers information they need to confirm readiness.
Execute
Carry out the job.
Preventing problems or delays.
Monitor
Assess whether the job is being successfully executed.
Linking monitoring with improved execution.
Modify
Make alterations to improve execution.
Reducing the need to make alterations and the number of alterations needed.
Conclude
Finish the job or prepare to repeat it.
Designing products that simplify the process of concluding the job.
Anatomy of a Customer Job
All jobs are processes.
Every job, from transplanting a heart to cleaning a floor, has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and comprises a set of process steps along the way.
A company can create value in a number of ways by improving the execution of specific job steps
; Eliminating the need for particular inputs or outputs; removing an entire step from the responsibility of the customer
All jobs have a universal structure.
That universal structure, regardless of the customer, has the following process steps
Defining what the job requires
Identifying and locating needed inputs
Preparing the components and the physical environment
Confirming
That everything is ready
Executing the task; monitoring the results and the environment
Making modifications; and concluding the job
Because problems can occur at many points in the process, nearly all jobs also require a problem resolution step.
Jobs are separate from solutions.
Customers hire different products or services to get the same job done.
When the job is the focal point of value creation, companies not only can improve their existing offerings but also can target new, or “blue ocean,” market space
Creating a Job Map
The goal of creating a job map is not to find out how the customer is executing a job
The aim is to discover what the customer is trying to get done at different points in executing a job
And what must happen at each juncture in order for the job to be carried out successfully.