What is the job to be done? The job to be done is a concept invented by Clayton Christensen in his book "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice". It is a new way to look at the needs of customers and why they are "hiring" a product to fulfill their needs. The key concept is to focus on the customer and to avoid the viewpoint of the product. By doing so, you get a wider view what the needs of the customers are, what the customer should hire to help him and who your real competitors are.

How does it influence tool design? As soon as you know the job to be done and the context of the customer, you are able to design a product or service that has maximum value for the customer. As mentioned in an earlier blog, the context of an M&A professional is his office, the work environment on his desk, his smartphone, desk phone and computer. An M&A process platform must respect and enhance this work environment, not add another tool. So let us use this approach to define two requirements for M&A process tools.

From tool to pain reliever: One pain i heard most from fellow M&A professionals is to fill the same data like target valuation data into several different Powerpoint presentations which have different formatting but basically should reflect the same data. So an M&A platform must store the financial data of a business case and generate data into different powerpoint templates. An end-to-end M&A process platform should have a data management component for the financial data of the transaction that can intelligently export parts of the financial model into presentation formats.

From tool to productivity boost: assistive technology helps you to perform better. The pain of the M&A professional is that he has to research market and company data, bring them together and evaluate the opportunities. How can an end-to-end M&A platform help here? Market data feeds are provided automatically for business case creation. The platform offers research as a service data feeds to accomplish that.

Summary

End-to-end platforms supporting M&A processes are the basis for the digital future of M&A processes. The job-to-be-done approach helps to define service of these platforms. These value creating services, which are built on top of this platform, help M&A professionals to get their job done.