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Product, Marketing, and Executive teams put JTBD into practice

Years ago, teams at medical device company Cordis Corporation were battling over how to best serve their customers.

Team members from sales, marketing, development, and R&D all had different ideas, and each was convinced they knew the best way forward.

Each function argued its points vehemently until team members were quite literally red in the face. Some resorted to personal attacks. It was ugly.

While each team member and each function was motivated to create customer value, the groups could not align around the best way to make it happen.

Unfortunately, misalignment between teams is common.

Fortunately, putting Jobs-to-be-Done into practice helps you to solve for it.

Once Cordis had a clear understanding of their customer’s job and job map, they were able to quickly align their teams and begin brainstorming solutions. In a matter of about 90 minutes, the team went from red-faced fighting to realistic product solutions to help the customer get their job done better.

Cordis’ revenues nearly doubled within two years of launching these solutions.

Cordis then went on to develop the stent, which became the fastest-growing product in medical device history, producing nearly $1 billion in revenue in its first year.

With Jobs-to-be-Done, all functions in the business can align around a common understanding of the customer and how to add value for that customer. You can get everyone rowing in the same direction, so to speak—stripping out the biases like technology preference, opinion, or politics—to get down to what matters to the customer.

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Product teams can launch the next big thing with new insights like:

Do our products get the entire job done, or only parts of the job?
What holes exist in our portfolio?
Are customers cobbling together solutions to get the entire job done?
What product in our portfolio holds the potential to get the entire job done?

Marketing can position and communicate most effectively with answers to questions such as:

How can we better market/position our current offerings?
How should we modify our marketing communications?
How should we adjust our content?

Executives can confidently grow the business with answers to questions like:

How can we align our teams around value creation?
Are we really delivering on customer-centricity?
What should we innovate to become a preferred solution in the market?
What non-traditional competitors should be on our radar?

The goal is to align all of your value creation efforts across the organization around your customers’ needs. If you can do this well, and communicate this well, your business will literally pull customers in. Your offerings and messaging will resonate with exactly what they are trying to accomplish.