Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a framework in product development that assumes people buy (“hire”) products to accomplish a particular goal (“job”).
This framework helps product and marketing teams understand why consumers buy the products they do and how to create a product that effectively meets customer needs.
What Is Jobs to Be Done?
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a product development framework stating that customers don’t buy products, they “hire” products to complete a certain goal or “job.” For example, someone doesn’t buy a screwdriver because of its features, they buy it to help assemble home furniture.
One example can be seen in the popular Snickers’ slogan “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” This slogan — and accompanying marketing campaign — helps us understand the Jobs to be Done framework.
People aren’t actually buying a bar of chocolate and nougat when they buy a Snickers, they’re buying an end to the rumbling stomach of hunger. Snickers performs a job: to satisfy you when you’re hungry and give you energy to help you feel like yourself.
What Is Jobs to Be Done?
The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework looks at consumers’ desires as “jobs” to be fulfilled.
In product development, the JTBD theory is “based on this notion that people buy products to get a job done,” according to Tony Ulwick, an innovation strategist, former IBM senior product planner and one of the developers of the JTBD framework. “So instead of studying the products and asking people what products they want, let’s talk to them about what they’re trying to achieve and how they measure success at each step of the way.”
Or as Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt put it: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
The JTBD framework was developed in collaboration by Ulwick, Bob Moesta, the president and CEO of Re-Wired Group, and Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor.
Why Jobs to Be Done Matters
The Jobs to be Done framework helps to reveal a customer’s true desires and aspirations when they make a purchase, which can inform both product design and marketing.
For instance, focusing on customers’ underlying motives helps companies more clearly assess potential markets and competitors.
A cup of Starbucks coffee and a meditation app — though they appear to be very different products on the surface — may serve the same purpose. Each gives a morning commuter five minutes of peace to focus and reset. That’s how Mindy Cultra, vice president of creative analytics at The Sound, sees it.
“If you focus on the motives,” Cultra said, “your possibilities and your adjacencies are so much bigger.”
But there’s another, lesser-known aspect of the approach that’s important too: The idea that consumers are great at identifying and articulating their struggles, but have no idea what the solution looks like until they see it.
Jobs to be Done allows companies to zoom out from a specific product or market segment and reveals the full field of possibilities. This allows for room to make products that have become nearly indispensable.
For example, before the invention of the microwave, consumers were comfortably rooted in the notion that food was cooked on a stovetop or in an oven. But now, doing either over an open flame seems impractical.
Jobs to Be Done Examples
Talking about JTBD in theory is one thing, but here’s a few examples of how the framework is actually used in the real world.
Hey Email Service
Basecamp’s email service Hey is a prime example of how Jobs to be Done can frame a product development and brand positioning strategy poised to shake up a calcified market.
In an attempt to make email less of a chore, Hey uses JTBD to flip the traditional conception of the service on its head. It begins with the premise that email should be designed for receivers, not senders. The core insight of Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, as Moesta interpreted it, is “that your inbox is like your living room — and you don’t let everybody in your living room,” came from focusing on users’ struggles.
JTBD aims to simplify user inboxes by grouping people’s struggles into buckets of “things you need to respond to, things you want to read and receipts,” as noted by Casey Newton in The Verge.
The Sound Brand Strategy Agency
Another example of how Jobs to be Done has been used can be seen at The Sound. The brand strategy agency applied JTBD when working with two large streaming audio companies who merged. As part of a broader brand positioning and messaging campaign, Cultra said, company executives wanted to understand the human motivations for why people choose to listen to the things they do and identify listeners’ “jobs.”
The Sound conducted in-depth interviews of more than 3,000 people, leading to the identification of 10 different jobs in a massive U.S. market, in which users listen to an average of 50 hours of audio every week.
While multivariate analysis showed factors like age or family status influenced listening behavior, Jobs to be Done revealed the share of the total available market the recently merged audio companies were capturing.
“Say 10 percent of listening hours are devoted to a particular job,” Cultra said. “Well, within that job, what’s the share that your brand has, compared to your key competitors. Which also gets you to whitespace because there may be a share of listening hours that isn’t captured by a paid service.’”
Ontrack’s Data Recovery
Ulwick also pointed to Strategyn’s work with Ontrack as an example of how to use the Jobs to be Done framework. The data recovery firm recognized an opportunity to provide electronic discovery services for the paper-heavy legal industry. The core “job” lawyers wanted the technology to serve was to locate evidence to support or refute a case.
After defining the market around Ontrack’s legal team and this job, Strategyn conducted qualitative interviews with 40 lawyers. This formed the basis for the creation of a jobs map plotting 73 outcome statements describing how the lawyers would like the technology to serve their needs. Lawyers at Ontrack prioritized these statements to reveal 20 underserved outcomes related to e-discovery and information management during the litigation cycle.
Ontrack developed the product in response to these outcomes and, five years later, had grown its revenue by an estimated $200 million.
Types of Jobs to Be Done Models
There are two types of models or schools of thought for the Jobs to be Done framework. Each is based around what the definition of a “job” is:
- An outcome-driven model that defines a job as fairly functional (modeled after strategists like Christensen and Ulwick)
- A model that defines jobs through a deeper psychological lens (modeled after strategists like Moesta and growth operations analyst Alan Klement, the author of When Coffee and Kale Compete).
1. Ulwick’s JTBD Model
Ulwick’s JTBD approach attempts to distill whether there is demand for a product to begin with, rather than concerning itself with messaging and demand generation. It aims to understand as many unmet customer needs as possible in order to figure out which are most underserved and “where people might be willing to pay more to get the job done better,” said Ulwick.
By understanding these job steps and where people struggle, Ulwick explained, “our focus is on creating products that customers want, as opposed to positioning products that are already out there.”
In Ulwick’s model, a market is defined as a group of people and the job they’re trying to get done. This model calls for identifying the customer’s needs, measuring the needs, formulating a production strategy and using surveys to document customer experiences. Ulwick recommends this eight-step job map to help get started.
2. Moesta’s JTBD Model
Moesta’s application of JTBD parallels Ulwick’s in many ways, though it differs in its definition of “jobs.”
Jobs are not just functional goals, Moesta told Built In, but social and emotional ones as well. They are similar to the jobs Cultra refers to: using music, for instance, to “disconnect and reset.” Through this lens, a customer’s motives may be largely unspoken or unobservable, though they are still important to purchasing decisions.
The first step of Moesta’s JTBD model is to identify customer struggles, then to target moments of non-consumption (times in which customers want to buy a product but can’t). Think about how you can make a product more accessible, whether that is by making it more affordable or easier to use.
Moesta’s model also suggests assessing trade offs and categorizing jobs by their purpose. Assessing trade offs can be done by identifying when and where people are willing to devote more time and money into what they buy. Overall, Moesta’s model is rooted in the belief that breaking down consumer behavior into Jobs to be Done, distinct from demographics or personas.
How to Apply Jobs to Be Done
As illustrated in the book, The Jobs to be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach, head of customer experience at Mural, Jobs to be Done can be applied practically using the following steps:
1. Create a Job Map
According to Kalbach, a logical first step to using Jobs to be Done is to create a job map — a low-grade visualization that separates a job into steps needed for completion. This is entirely different from a customer journey map that tells a “go-to-market” story, from product discovery and onboarding to habit forming and renewal. It completely removes the product from the field of inquiry.
Another way to understand how to apply JBTD is to think about what questions a product or service solves for a customer. Christensen previously explained that you can identify Jobs to be Done — or problems to be solved — by completing three key phrases:
- “Help me _____.”
- “Help me to avoid _____.”
- “I need to _____.”
2. Use Market Research and Set Constraints
Using market research is a key element to the Jobs to be Done framework. These insights are used to help determine the market, job and desired outcomes. Though during this step, be mindful of research constraints — while a large company may do 60 qualitative interviews over a six-month period, a startup may do five or 10 interviews over a week.
3. Know How to Talk to Customers
While Jobs to be Done can be an excellent framework for envisioning a product roadmap through a strategic lens, it is not for everyone. For the method to work, it is crucial to have a product team that is comfortable talking to customers, according to Todd Boes, chief product officer at Thought Industries.
“This framework does not work for inside-focused, technology-led organizations,” he said. “People need to know how to interview customers in a way to pull this information out. You’re not going to just ask the customer ‘Hey, what do I build?’ You have to tease it out.”
4. Start Small
Boes suggests testing the water with product roadmap software.
“Don’t try to boil the ocean,” he said. “Start with a small customer segment and get some quick wins. Then you can continue to expand the usage.”
Why Jobs to Be Done Is Popular in Tech
Software companies have been using Jobs to be Done for decades, taking cues from early evangelists like Ulwick. Until recently, however, it was largely overshadowed by iterative, fail-fast methodologies such as agile, which are grounded in the idea that the key to competitive advantage is building products quickly, putting them in front of customers and improving them over time.
In contrast, Jobs to be Done, which front-loads the product innovation process, appears to be gaining traction as major players such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Basecamp and Intercom embrace it.
Theories differ on why tech giants are embracing the framework now, but an underlying motif seems to be that JBTD drives at something authentic in what customers actually want, and uncovers the scrappy, unbridled nature of competition. This doesn’t mean it’s just one mobile phone company duking it out against another, but a larger, shape-shifting landscape where one’s potential competitors may be lying in wait, unseen.
Boes believes JTBD’s growing popularity is likely due, in part, to the convergence of the marketplace. And high-growth emerging markets — such as the one for licensing customer training software — are flooded with new entrants eager to win customers. Not only can customers leave when something better comes along, but a business can miss emerging opportunities because its focus is too myopic, zeroing in on customer support tickets or user interface analytics, rather than panning out to where real disruption is taking place.
As more tech companies utilize Jobs to be Done, there will likely be more products and services available that take consumer needs into account.
In the end, successfully adopting Jobs to be Done requires a product development mindset that moves the focus away from the product itself and places it on the needs and desires of the customer.
“Jobs to be Done is about doing the right things,” Ulwick said. “If we can take the guesswork out of innovation, we can do the right things — then do things right.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a job to be done framework?
The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework is an approach in product development that focuses on what problem consumers need to solve (“job”) and what kind of product they would buy (“hire”) to solve it. JTBD aims to analyze the “job” and understand what a group of people are trying to achieve, and use these insights to guide product development and value creation.
What is an example of Jobs to be Done?
Zoom is an example of a product that can fit the Jobs to be Done framework. In this case, the “job” to be done is needing to connect remotely with peers and coworkers, whereas Zoom is able to be “hired” to achieve this goal.
What is the difference between a job-to-be-done and a functional description?
In the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework, a job-to-be-done is a goal or task a customer wants to get done, and it can encompass functional, emotional and social components that are linked to reaching that goal. The core type of “job” under the JTBD framework is a functional job, which is a tangible goal a customer seeks to solve and what value creation is centered around.
