Out of Alignment: What Jobs Do Parents Want Done?

Clayton Christensen's book, Competing Against Luck, co-authored with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan, uses the theory of jobs to be done (JTBD) to explain purchasing decisions about products and services. The basic JTBD paradigm, if not the actual name, appears in a classic 1960 Harvard Business Review article by Theodore Levitt, "Marketing Myopia." Levitt's premise is that most organizations sell rather than market; that is, the push the product they have rather than research what the customer actually wants. JTBD holds that customers--in our case parents--hire an organization to do a "job", and that effective marketing means understanding the job they want done and creating ways to do it (that is how value gets added). [Note: Anthony Ulwich's Outcome-Driven Innovation model is in the same mold.]Private schools sell seats in classrooms with teachers, and together these are the vehicles students use to access the educational program (X students to Y teachers in Z classrooms = school). But, one might ask, what if parent, not to mention student, wants are different, or only slightly correlated with seats? Going further, one might also ask whether those of us who sell (anyone on the school side) really understand what job(s) parents are hiring us to do? Administrators and teachers avoid thinking of their work in transactional terms, but that is exactly what we are doing when we set a price for our services. Being transactional in some ways does not preclude being transformational in others, and this both/and dialectic is something those of us on the school side need to master.Going still further, we can ask whether those that sell not only understand but also value those jobs? For example, many administrators and teachers we speak with understand that one of the jobs parents hire schools to do is get their children into elite universities, but they dismiss this as being somehow not appropriate or even as an unworthy goal. I suppose a school could refuse to perform one or more jobs, but in the end it must do at least some jobs that enough parents value to stay open.The peril in not coming to terms with JTBD is apparent in Ron Schade's Strategyn blog post on June 20, 2017. Schade applies JTBD to the now-infamous case study of the telephone company and Yellow Pages:

Imagine if the product managers responsible for Yellow Pages’ success thought this way 20 years ago. They would have created two Job Manager roles. One Job Manager would have been focused on helping businesses “obtain new customers”, a job that was better addressed and disrupted by non-traditional competitors.

A second Job Manager would have been focused on consumers who were trying to “find a local service provider”. This would have freed up the product manager from a focus on its three-pound paper book platform to look for other technologies that could get the job done better. The focus on the book instead of getting the job done better was costly. We all know how that story ended.

In short, Yellow Pages executives and strategists hewed to a product focus when a jobs focus would have given them much for flexibility in the face of disruptive change. We posit that independent schools too often take a product approach--focusing on what the school offers--rather than JTBD--focusing instead on the congruence between outcomes and what jobs parents hire the school to do.