Here is an excerpt from an article written by Lance Bettencourt and Anthony Ulwick for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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This post is part of HBR’s Creating a Customer-Centered Organization.

We all know that people “hire” products and services to get a job done. Office workers hire word-processing software to create documents and digital recorders to capture meeting notes. Surgeons hire scalpels to dissect soft tissue and electrocautery devices to control patient bleeding. Janitors hire soap dispensers, paper towels, and cleansing fluid to help remove grime from their hands.

While all this seems obvious, very few companies use the perspective of “getting the job done” to discover opportunities for innovation. In fact, the innovation journey for many companies is little more than hopeful wandering through customer interviews. Such unsystematic inquiry may occasionally turn up interesting tidbits of information, but it rarely uncovers the best ideas or an exhaustive set of opportunities for growth.

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Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently. For example, when an anesthesiologist checks a monitor during a surgical procedure, the action taken is just a means to an end. Detecting a change in patient vital signs is the job the anesthesiologist is trying to get done. By mapping out every step of the job and locating opportunities for innovative solutions, companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings.

Anatomy of a Customer Job

Over the past 10 years, we have mapped customer jobs in dozens of product and service categories that span professional and consumer services, durable and consumable goods, chemicals, software, and many other industries. Our work has revealed three fundamental principles about customer jobs.

All jobs are processes.

Every job, from transplanting a heart to cleaning a floor, has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and comprises a set of process steps along the way. The starting point for identifying innovation opportunities is to map out—from the customer’s perspective—the steps involved in executing a particular job. Once the steps are identified, a company can create value in a number of ways—by improving the execution of specific job steps; eliminating the need for particular inputs or outputs; removing an entire step from the responsibility of the customer; addressing an overlooked step; resequencing the steps; or enabling steps to be completed in new locations or at different times.

When mapping the job of washing clothes, for example, a company would quickly discover that the step of “verifying that stains have been removed” often comes at the end of the job sequence, after the clothes have been removed from the washing machine, dried, folded, and put away—too late to do much of anything about it. If the washing machine itself could detect the presence of any remaining stains before the wash cycle ended—resequence when verification takes place—it could take the necessary actions at a much more convenient point in the job. If the machine could be designed to remove the need for inputs such as stain removers and bleach, that would be even better.

All jobs have a universal structure.

That universal structure, regardless of the customer, has the following process steps: defining what the job requires; identifying and locating needed inputs; preparing the components and the physical environment; confirming that everything is ready; executing the task; monitoring the results and the environment; making modifications; and concluding the job. Because problems can occur at many points in the process, nearly all jobs also require a problem resolution step.

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Lance A. Bettencourt (lbettencourt@strategyn.com) is a senior consultant with Strategyn, an innovation management consultancy based in Aspen, Colorado.

Anthony W. Ulwick (ulwick@strategyn.com) is the founder and CEO of Strategyn. He is the author of What Customers Want (McGraw-Hill, 2005).