HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW – Since Jack Dorsey reassumed the helm of Twitter in 2015, the company's performance has soared. Dorsey used the "jobs to be done" approach to rethinking Twitter's strategy – defining Twitter from the perspective of what really matters to Twitter customers. Dorsey focused on serving 3 jobs: news, discussion, conversation. DAU's grew to 200m+, from 126m in 2018. It is on pace for $4B revenue in 2021, up from $3B in 2018. In 2019 Dorsey said, "We got overly reactive to everything our peers were doing. We didn't have a clear sense of what our purpose was, and that really hurt us a lot."
Dorsey's effort to identify the jobs that people hired Twitter for involved three steps.
- Understand the full set of jobs for which Twitter was already being "hired."
- Prioritize the jobs Twitter wanted to focus on.
- Communicate the results and use them to allocate resources.
by David S. Duncan & Brian Hindo
See full article at HBR
Mark Brooks: It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming you know the purpose of your company. However, it pays to analyze and really understand this. What do your customers really expect from you? I studied under the wonderful (late) Clayton Christensen at HBS in 2015 and the 'jobs to be done' approach was absolutely core to his innovation method. This is his best book on the topic.