The “jobs to be done” approach provides such a solution.Ī job can be a problem to solve (e.g., “repair my car,” “soothe my sore throat”) or a goal (e.g., “run a marathon,” “get into college”). What’s needed is a way to define a business from the perspective of what’s at the heart of any company’s success: its ability to create value for customers. This often happens when an organization defines itself by the products it sells (“we are in the insurance business” or “we are in the car business”) or by some other inward-looking characteristic such as its business model (“we are an online marketplace” or “we are in the rental business”) or a capability (“we are a software development business”). Even worse, the wrong frame of reference can result in completely missing emerging threats and opportunities. Yet too often this question is answered in ways that are overly constraining, myopic, and obscure what’s really happening in the world around them. How an organization defines its business impacts nearly everything it does: what customers it serves, how it serves them, whom it competes against, what external forces it regards as relevant, how it interprets those forces, what strategies it contemplates and pursues, and how it innovates. We didn’t have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot.” (Disclosure: Twitter has not been a client of our firm, Innosight, and he was an unpaid speaker at the 2019 CEO Summit.)ĭorsey and his team were grappling with one of the most profound questions every leader must answer: What business are we really in? As Dorsey described it later, at the Innosight CEO Summit in August 2019, “We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. In 2015, Twitter posted a net loss of $521 million on revenue of $2.2 billion, and its shares were trading below its IPO price of $26. Facebook was growing users at an astounding scale and pace, and Snapchat was the shiny, new social network set to take it on. At the time, the company was still evolving and its focus was unclear. As it turns out, jobs to be done has been a key tool in Twitter’s turnaround, which began in earnest after Jack Dorsey reassumed the CEO role in October 2015. And as of September 20, Twitter shares had appreciated over the past five years by 170%, which compares to 185% for Facebook. It is on pace to cross $4 billion in annual revenue in 2021, up from a little more than $3 billion in 2018. Its daily active user count has grown above 200 million, up from 126 million at year-end 2018. And Twitter’s results have been impressive. Such strategic focus is essential for a company such as Twitter - which competes against a varied set of players ranging from Facebook and TikTok to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The language Dorsey used - “three core jobs” - refers to a concept called “ jobs to be done,” which is an approach to defining a business from the perspective of what really matters to its customers. At the outset of a conference call with securities analysts in July to discuss Twitter’s second-quarter earnings, CEO Jack Dorsey laid out his company’s strategy: “We intend to build an ecosystem of connected features and services focused on serving three core jobs: news, which is what’s happening discussion, conversation and helping people get paid,” he said.
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