The Journey Should Follow the Job to be Done

Journey mapping has become a farce. And that’s a big problem for experience strategists. By building on problematic personas, company-centric stages, and cumbersome channels, strategists have turned the once king of customer-centric design, the journey map, into the court jester.

The typical approach that most companies follow is to start by creating a persona, a representation of the buyer/user that often includes segmentation data, then design a journey map, that shows how the persona experiences the solution. The journey maps are typically made up of stages that customers experience. The personas and journey maps help companies to solve for complex delivery issues that grow out of their channel strategies.

Let’s start with the most glaring problem: personas. Most journey mapping exercises start with creating personas. A persona can be helpful to get internal groups to understand ‘who’ the customer is. But customers don’t need companies to create ‘who’ documents that stereotype them. Customers need ‘what’ profiles. As in, ‘what is the job that most customers are trying to get done?’  We shall return to this point.

The next big problem: key stages. Many companies imagine that the stages that customers go through follow the company’s business model. That is almost never the case. These companies conjure up a logical decision-making process where the customer becomes aware of the solution, then progresses through stages of comparing products, making trade-offs, and buying from the company. Then after a short interlude of positive experiences, the customer experiences a problem and moves into the resolution phase which leads to loyalty and return activity. If only.

Complicating the way that companies journey map stages is the fact that they align stages with personas. So, a small business persona may have a very different set of stages than a father of five persona. This may or may not be true since, in some cases, that persona describes the exact same person.

And let’s not even go down the channel rabbit hole. As companies add more and more tools, channels, and capabilities, they often imagine that each channel is designed for a certain persona.  Fathers of five only go into stores. Small business owners only sign up online.  You’ve seen this happen, haven’t you?

There’s a better way.

The Journey Follows the Job

To avoid the pitfalls of farcical journey mapping, companies need to start with the job the customer is trying to get done. As Clayton Christensen used to say, ‘the job to get done’ is the unit of analysis. Your company might use jobs to be done thinking to guide innovation or technology design. It should also guide journey design.

Some retailers understand this type of journey work because they develop their purchase journeys based on shopping missions. Missions like urgent buying, daily purchases, browsing, entertainment, travel, and so forth are common purchase activities that most people understand. They are jobs to be done.

When a company starts with the job to be done, the journey stages adapt to the job rather than some fictitious persona. Companies can study urgent buying and learn how to get the customer to their solution as fast as possible. That’s a journey map. They can then study situations where people are spending more time in browsing mode and create experiences that fit that kind of job to be done.

This principle works for other journey types. Are you designing the way that people engage with your company? Start with the job to be done. Then let the journey match the job. It doesn’t matter who the customer is, they will appreciate that you’ve thought through the steps with their needs in mind.

Some experts might say that this approach works great for functional needs that all customers have but that people are driven by emotions and unique psychographic needs. Let’s clarify that a journey can be built around an emotional job to get done. It can be built around a social job to get done. Almost all aspirational jobs to get done have a journey associated with them. In fact, in our research, we’ve found common journey elements for functional, emotional, social, and aspirational jobs to get done.

Companies are making journey work too complex and, oddly, too predictable because they focus on the wrong things. A persona is an internal tool. It’s not a job the customer wants done. Stages in a journey that look a whole like your sales process are stages of your sales process, not the journey the customer wants to take.

Start right. Start with the job most customers want to get done.

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Dave Norton, Ph.D., is the founder and principal of Stone Mantel, a research-led consultancy at the forefront of customer and employee experience strategy.