Define Jobs, Not People

02/21/15

There's this annoying tendency I see to define a product not by its utility but by the people who employ, use, or own the product. And by product, I mean basically everything: jobs, services, food, tools, games, movies, books, even advertizing itself.

The idea seems to be:

1. Collect data on the kind of people who want X or can do X
2. Try and get the attention of those people
3. Assess of the value of those people based on their habits
4. Match the product with the available people

And I just don't understand this mentality. It's describing patterns as they exist now, and then trying to take advantage of those patterns without attempting to understand why those patterns exist and how they opperate.

Several books I've read have also voiced their disagreement with this mentality. Currently, I'm reading Hire With Your Head, and I've recently read through a section where it describes the tendency for job ads to describe the skills and requirements of the person they think they're looking for, but not what the job actually does.

This is faulty on two levels:

• Do you know what the job is when you just define the person?
• Are you defining the right person if the job isn't defined?

It comes across as a purposeless wandering that sticks dogmatically to any measured thing that somehow correlated with success.

And it's not just jobs and people. A while back, I read The Innovator's Dilemma and in it the author Clayton Christensen talks about asking what purpose a product serves. What is its job? Not who does it sell to, but why those people are buying.

He gives a specific example of a fast-food restaurant trying to increase the sales of their smoothies. I believe they identified that the smoothie did well with two demographics of people, business-type morning people in a rush, and children. I believe they attempted some stereotypical "this demographic likes our smoothies, they are also known to like X, let's combine the two" that flopped pretty terribly (I may be adding details to this story, it has been many years since I read this book, it might even be from Blue Ocean Strategy).

Anyways, they decided to find out why their smoothies were doing so well with these two demographics. With the busy morning group, it was a quick breakfast they could eat on their drive to work. With the kids, it was a nice, cheap treat that their parents could get for them that the kids appreciated.

To improve the quality of the product, they made it both more filling and more nutrious. They may have also split the product in two, to better cater to the different reasons for buying the product. Sales improved.

And I hope that maybe I'm only ever hearing the popular opinion, the conventional wisdom, of advertizing and general salesmanship. I hope that it is tradition, and a lack of considering the premises, that have caused this failing to consider actual jobs, the purpose, the very why of why something exists and why others might want it. I hope that the scholarly view knows better, and that it has simply been ignored by all the majority of advertizing for some baseless reason.

Perhaps the scholarly view has been turned into a buzzword that the mainstream parrot but do not understand. It happened to disruption, it apparently happened to scrum (though, I still need to learn real scrum to really know). Maybe advertizing only ever worked on being good at being spam.

I certainly hope that there's not good science to suggest shotgun spam at some described audience is time or cost or quality effective. And based on my loose reading into various business books and concepts, it is constantly derided as not being so, so maybe I'm right in my observations.