In large companies, leadership often wants you to do “market analysis and segmentation” when deciding what product or service to launch. This activity it done over and over, segmenting customers into groups, understanding product categories, all with the thought that more research into these areas from this approach will help us understand if we should actually invest in the new product or service.

I never understood exactly why; but I always felt like this activity and effort was a complete waste of time. An alternative to the “segment and analyze approach” is the “jobs-to-be-done” point of view proposed by Harvard Business Professor, Clayton Christensen.  Customers don’t act a certain way because they are a certain age, they make purchasing decisions based on what they need to get done or what Christensen calls “jobs-to-be-done.”

If we take one of the print industry’s most talked about technology initiatives, web-to-print, I’m wondering how printers would describe web-to-print according to the jobs-to-be-done approach for the customer!  I placed significant emphasis on the “for the customer” portion of that sentence because in my opinion, the whole web-to-print technology sector is overly focused on “jobs-to-be-done” for the printer and under focused on “jobs-to-be-done” for the printer’s customers!