Customer Jobs

Customer jobs refer to the tasks, goals, or problems that customers aim to accomplish, solve, or address when interacting with a product or service. This concept is central to frameworks like the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory and plays a key role in both Design Thinking and Growth Hacking, as it ensures that user needs are prioritised in decision-making and innovation processes.

In Design Thinking:

• Understanding User Needs: The concept of customer jobs aligns with the Empathise stage of Design Thinking, helping teams identify what users are trying to achieve and why. This goes beyond just functional needs, incorporating emotional and social dimensions as well.
• Problem Definition: By focusing on the customer’s jobs, designers can clearly define problems to solve during the Define stage, ensuring that solutions are deeply aligned with what users value most.
• Informed Ideation: Insights into customer jobs guide the generation of ideas during the Ideate stage, leading to solutions that directly address the outcomes users are striving for.

In Growth Hacking:

• Driving Customer-Centric Experiments: Growth teams use the customer jobs framework to craft experiments or strategies that resonate with users by solving their specific pain points or enhancing their ability to achieve desired outcomes.
• Optimising User Journeys: Understanding customer jobs helps growth hackers design user journeys and touchpoints that seamlessly support the tasks users want to complete, improving engagement and satisfaction.
• Value Proposition Alignment: Growth efforts are more effective when the product or service’s value proposition is explicitly linked to the customer jobs it fulfils, ensuring relevance and differentiation.

Examples of Application:

• In Design Thinking: Discovering that customers of a meal planning app want to “save time shopping for groceries” as their primary job and designing features like automated shopping lists to support this goal.
• In Growth Hacking: Identifying that e-commerce customers want to “find the best deals quickly” and running experiments to highlight discounts more prominently on product pages.

By focusing on customer jobs, both Design Thinking and Growth Hacking ensure that efforts are user-centred and goal-oriented. This approach not only drives innovation but also enhances the relevance and effectiveness of solutions, fostering stronger connections between customers and the products or services they engage with.