Jobs to Be Done: Defining Your Brand’s Growth Strategy

As a product or service-oriented company, you always have to be on your toes to keep your product competitive. To do so, product people apply various growth strategies, which work on accelerating and improving different product growth aspects of the market. 

It is not easy to grow a product-based business, as it involves various processes, and many teams work on multiple aspects of the product. Once your product hits the market and competes with other products serving the same market, the journey provides various opportunities to improve your product and evolve into the best solution possible. 

The technology has provided us with further product testing and management tools, which help us forecast product issues and help improvise the same.

But, in the industry 4.0 world, you must act quickly for your product to perform in the market to know its competencies. One of the best strategies to make your product flexible is to perform a jobs-to-be-done growth strategy mix on your product.

A rightly planned growth strategy makes your product adaptable to the changing market trends and user demands. The jobs-to-be-done framework reverses the process of improving product performance to focus on carefully understanding the customer pain points and jobs that they want to be done.

The jobs to be done framework’s clear mandate is “Customer doesn’t care about the product, but the jobs it performs – what, why, and how.”

How To Define Your Brand’s Growth Strategy Using Jobs-To-Be-Done Principle

With this mandate in mind, the discovery of unique growth strategies happened for the companies to win the market.

It created a jobs-to-be-done growth strategy matrix, which illustrates applying the growth strategy and how it will improve your product’s customer experience. By implementing these strategies, businesses can assess the product’s success and failure points since launching, which helps in building a winning growth product strategy in the future. 

There are various questions that trouble businesses for their product lines to grow.

• What new features to add to the existing product?

• Can a new-product launch be cheaper?

• Should we create a new platform-based solution to get the jobs done in a more affordable and better way?

• A completely new product with different features?

It seems like a guessing game. 

Fortunately, with the jobs-to-be-done growth framework, we have a less risky and more predictable approach to defining the growth strategy for your product’s improvement.

All the winning products and services in the marketplace improve the customer’s journey of getting the jobs done faster, more predictable, and high-output manner at a lower price. 

How Growth Matrix Components Devise Growth Strategy?

The growth matrix segments every product or service into one of the five categories serving customer segments.

1. Better and more expensive

This segment focuses on serving customers with unmet needs and willing to pay a higher price for better service delivery. For example, Apple products deliver better quality solutions to its customers for higher prices.

2. Better and less expensive

This segment covers a more extensive customer range where a better-performing, the economical product can appeal to those customers. For example, Oppo and Xiaomi products are economical but provide better lens quality and features. 

3. Worse and more expensive

This segment targets those customers for whom there is no other alternative for reasonably doing that particular job—for example, Google glass.

4. Worse and less expensive

This segment appeals to the over-served customers without any unmet needs or those who cannot afford better-performing products with higher prices, as the solution cannot be cheaper—for example, low-quality sweets with a lower price.

5. Stuck in the middle

This segment completes the job with a slightly cheaper or better quality. This growth strategy is a disaster for new market entrants but can help a company retain existing customers. 

This information can provide a clear understanding of your product and its performance in the market. It helps achieve your product’s success goals and improves your growth performance compared to competitors. But how to achieve these?

Jobs-to-be-done Growth Strategies

With each of these five situations in place, they have unique growth strategies to define your product’s success steps. Let’s understand how to define your brand’s growth strategy using this jobs-to-be-done framework. 

1. Differentiated Growth Strategy 

You can pursue a differentiated growth strategy to appeal to underserved consumers with your product or service. Here, you perform the customer jobs in a better manner with a good quality experience, but at a higher price than competitors. 

Various product/ service businesses follow this strategy, including Nespresso with its coffee vending machines, Apple products, Organic food products, Emirates airlines services, Sony PlayStation products, Mercedes Cars, Italian Marble miners, etc.

Such strategies have a loyal customer base with unique needs like luxury experience and exceptional service experience to enjoy something different.

2. Dominant Growth Strategy

This type of strategy is the dream segment for most of the new entrants into the market.

The company, which applies a dominant growth strategy for its product/ service delivery, targets a broad customer base with the need for better solution delivery for their jobs-to-be-done, with a competitive or lower price. 

Various businesses have deployed this strategy, which includes UberX, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google Adwords, Trivago, Makemytrip, Xiaomi, Boat, etc.

You get to attend various customer bases here with almost similar jobs to be addressed. Still, the competition is enormous, and you need to monitor your profits regularly. 

3. Disruptive Growth Strategy

The disruptive growth strategy helps in discovering and focusing on those customers who are either overserved or are non-consumers, where the company provides them with an economically cheaper solution for their jobs to get done, but not as good as their competitors’ solutions.

This strategy reached its name due to its disruptive nature of serving a vast customer base who had previously depended on a high-priced solution and had a budget as their solution priority.

These strategies are adopted by various companies, including Google Docs (alternative to Microsoft Office), Dollar shave razor (alternative to Gillette), Udemy courses (alternative to Coursera online courses), Coursera (alternative to traditional institute courses), etc.

4. Discrete Growth Strategy

This growth strategy is targeted at customers who remain restricted to a product that gets the jobs done worse but costs more than the competitors. Here the customers have some exceptional situations, which can be physical, legal, emotional, or the manner of getting their jobs done. 

The services with a discrete growth strategy include ATMs at remote locations, high-priced vehicle services on highways, eateries and drink counters at airports, past security checkpoints, food and logistics services at tourist spots, etc. 

5. Sustaining Growth Strategy

This segment includes companies introducing new products or services into the market for a particular job to be done only slightly cheaper or better.

Such a sustainable growth strategy is pursued by many companies, which fall on neither ends nor price or service delivery experience. 

Using Jobs-to-be-Done Framework for Growth Strategy

To evolve your product or service that wins a competitive market advantage, you must develop your growth strategies with the latest technology.

Using a jobs-to-be-done growth framework provides a successfully tested growth strategy, as it is consumer-centric and makes your strategy flexible to adapt. It gives a different latitude to your product in the existing and new markets. 

There are various segments in which you can place your product for testing in different market scenarios to ascertain which growth strategy will be the best for growth.

This approach provides a practical, consumer-centric way of successfully improving your product scaling and growth and devising a competitive strategy to outwit your competitors in that segment.