Why are customers paying for your service ?. They hire your service because they need to solve certain problems or to complete certain jobs.

With that in mind, If we are providing customers with tech services. We can ask ourselves what job are my customers hiring my app to do.

For example, people hire Uber to provide them transportation to get around, it’s also cheaper, they know the fees upfront instead of a taxi, or people hire Airbnb to provide them with a place to stay on vacation because it is cheaper or they want to get to know the real local experience.

Taken the two examples above, we can get to know the ultimate end goals of what people hire our apps to do. With this approach, we can develop better products to serve a specific purpose well. This switch of mindset alone in my opinion would be more useful in this instance than dividing users into persona such as John is 30 /a software engineer/fit/well-paid and Sarah is 23/student/ likes to play the guitar. Having 1000s of these data don’t give us powerful insights of what product/features to develop, if anything they create more noise for us to shift through.

Customers can and do come from different shape, sizes, different countries, paygrade and varying level of skillsets. If we apply personas data then it is hard to identify what they have in common. By asking the question of what are my customers hiring my app to do. We can group the entire subset of users with the same end goals. Focusing on the job rather than the persona helps us highlight useful features, how well would those features perform in certain jobs.

Using this approach we can get a good sense and understanding of who our real competitors are. For example, you need to meet your colleague to discuss business matters. Do you get in your car? Uber to a coffee shop/office to meet him/her in person ?. Or do you hire Zoom?. There are pros and cons to both options but those are some of the contenders to be hired to get the job done.

Coming back to the Uber and Airbnb examples, we established some customers preferred to hire those 2 companies because they deem it to be a better hire or fit for the job.

This is another advantage to applying this frame of mind to develop better products/features so we can get hired next time our customers need a particular job to be done again.