What is up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team or new product.

And speaking of product, in the world of product management, there's something called the jobs to be done framework. I want to tell you about this framework and why I believe it is applicable to all aspects of work and life, not just developing new product. Let's hop into it.

Jobs to be done was introduced by Tony Ulwick in the 90s when he started using this approach at his company strategy to help clients develop and improve products for their customers and the theory goes as follows.

All it does is asks a very simple question, what job is your product hired to do? And by asking that question, it forces you to look at things from the perspective of the customer.

And realize that people do not buy products and services. Instead, people search for solutions constantly in all aspects of life that helps them get all sorts of jobs done.

The famous adage goes, people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. And what this mindset will allow you to do is focus on all solutions that best get the job done, not just the obvious solution. Here's a very simple example lawn mowers.

If you ask a random person, what is the purpose of a lawn mower? Their answer would be, oh, that's, you know, to cut the grass.

But if you think about it as a job to be done, the job a lawn mower does is to help keep a homeowners grass low in order for that grass to look beautiful and manicured. It's not for it to be cut.

And the reason this is a powerful shift in perspective is it can lead a lawn mower company to think about their business more efficiently and more directly in actually doing the job that their customer wants to be done.

And this obviously applies far beyond lawn mower companies. And let's keep it going with this. Perhaps rather than creating better and better lawn mowers, a lawn mower company should, you know, invest their profits in R&D to find grass seeds that only grows so tall that they never need to be cut, right? That would accomplish the exact same job as what a lawn mower does.

And what this example should make you realize, and it made me realize the first time I thought about it is the unit of measurement for a product, any product, not just lawn mowers, is not how it is serving the customer.

But instead, how is that product accomplishing the job that the customer is trying to do? And as I thought more about this, I got more and more encouraged by the power of this concept.

Because what I realized is jobs to be done is not just about product development or product management or marketing. It truly is a lens for looking at any single job to be done in life.

And so, honestly, as I think about this framework, I'm sure I'll bring it back in future episodes because there are so many applications. But I want to talk for a minute about how I think about jobs to be done in the context of the work that I do as a professional every single day. If you think about it, every day, you go to your desk and you get started for your day.

And whether implicitly or explicitly, you're actively choosing how to serve a job to be done in your business.

Think about it this way. Your business is your customer, and your customer has a job that needs to be done. You are providing your business, your services, which is helping your business get that job done.

And similar to the lawnmower example, when you start thinking about things through this lens of the job you are doing rather than the service you are providing, two things may open up for you in every job you do.

The first, sometimes, spending time on non-obvious things is what becomes the most obviously right thing for you to spend your time on.

The second is sometimes the most important job for you to do is to think about the right job to do. It's met up, but we'll talk about it in a second. It makes so much sense.

As you look through this lens, non-obvious decisions could include everything from you deciding to outsource the work instead of doing it yourself, or you deciding that you disagree with the majority of your team, or you deciding to buy a solution rather than build it within your company,

or you decide that the best time spent is reading and thinking instead of doing and executing. It could be you advising your team to go in a different direction, you spending time talking to your customer rather than actively serving your customer.

And what this thought process allows you to do is it allows you to keep out the noise and gain clarity over the things that will truly help your business, and therefore your customer get the job done that they want to get done.

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