Customer 2008

Job Map

The eight universal steps of any job a customer is trying to get done, mapped so you can find where it goes wrong.

What it is

A left-to-right map of a job in eight stages — define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, conclude. It deliberately describes the job, not your product: the point is to find the stages where customers currently struggle, because those are the openings a competitor has not filled either.

Reach for it when

• A product team can list features but cannot say what job customers hire them for
• Innovation work keeps producing variations of the existing solution
• A market looks saturated and the team needs somewhere genuinely unserved to aim

Running it

1. State the job as a verb plus an object, with no product in it. "Prepare a workshop agenda", not "use the planner".
2. Walk all eight stages even where they feel empty. The thin stages are usually where the unmet need is hiding.
3. For each stage, ask what makes it slow, error-prone or unreliable today. Capture struggle, not wishes.
4. Rank the stages by struggle and pick one. That stage, not the whole job, is the innovation brief.