Corporate Explorer Fieldbook

CHAPTER 4Jobs‐to‐be‐Done: Defining a Market by Customer Outcome

Tony Ulwick

MARKET DEFINITION

Many aspiring Corporate Explorers doom themselves to failure by making a fatal mistake even before getting out of the gates, because they don't properly define the market they are targeting to serve.

Why does this happen? Because while a clear and precise market definition is a prerequisite for success of any new venture, an effective process for defining a market is often missing from the innovator's toolkit. For example, Lean Startup, one of the most popular methodologies available to entrepreneurs, takes for granted that entrepreneurs know the best way to define the market they are pursuing.

This turns out to be a questionable assumption: in a survey, we found that 70% of product teams do not agree on the best way to define a market.

Managers use various, seemingly random classification schemes to define the markets they serve. Some innovators choose to define markets around a product, for example, the vacuum cleaner market or the espresso maker market. Others choose to define markets around verticals, such as the financial services market or the healthcare market. We've seen markets defined around demographics (the people‐over‐45 market), technologies (the brain sensor market), customer activities (the fitness market), and product portfolios (the heavy equipment market), to name just a few.

The larger point is that the market definition process is obscure, random, and often left ...