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Jobs To Be Done
Summary
The concept of jobs to be done (JTBD) provides a lens through which we can understand value creation. You’re probably familiar with the basic principle: people “hire” products and services to accomplish an objective. By providing a language for discovering problems independent of solutions, JTBD helps organizations identify new opportunities for growth, get aligned, and make human-centered decisions. JTBD provides a lingua franca to shift your collective mindset. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the core concepts of JTBD and how you can unleash human-centered insights across your company, from product to marketing to sales and more. We will also be doing a collaborative exercise during the call, focused around recently submitted proposals for the upcoming Design at Scale conference (formerly known as Enterprise Experience.)
Key Insights
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Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is fundamentally a market innovation framework rooted in business theory, not a design methodology.
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JTBD maps focus on the customer’s objective and process independent of products, brands, or technology, unlike customer journey maps which are company-centric.
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Separating the functional job from the outcomes allows for more granular understanding of what customers truly want to achieve.
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JTBD’s language forbids references to products or technology and requires statements to start with verbs, ensuring clarity and normalization.
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JTBD serves as a stable logical nucleus that can be layered with empathy, emotions, and aspirations to create richer experience maps.
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In B2B contexts, starting JTBD analysis from the end user 'downstream' and working back toward buyers creates more effective product-market fit.
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JTBD helps break siloed thinking by providing a shared language across design, product management, marketing, and customer success teams.
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JTBD favors inference and normalization during research, trading some qualitative fidelity for consistency and predictive power.
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JTBD is applicable not only for innovation and design but also for guiding go-to-market strategies and customer success efforts.
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JTBD can coexist with and complement existing methodologies like Agile, Lean, Design Thinking by providing a clear problem framing.
Notable Quotes
"The customer journey map is really an egotistical document — it’s my story, not the chicken’s story."
"People don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole."
"Jobs to be done expunges technology and products from its language to focus on what the individual is trying to achieve."
"The best way to have a solution that ‘sucks’ is to solve the end user’s problems so the solution pulls through the organization."
"Empathy is not a good starting point for innovation because it’s unstable and doesn’t provide a clear problem to solve."
"Jobs to be done gives us a normalized, structured, and stable unit of analysis to then add emotion, brand, and price on top."
"Design thinking starts too high with empathy; jobs to be done starts with the functional core and grounds innovation."
"You don’t have to call it jobs to be done — you can white label it or integrate its logic into your existing maps."
"Jobs to be done can be a catalyst for conversations and change by connecting teams across an organization."
"Understanding the problem independent of the solution is key to finding the solution that somebody will actually adopt."
Or choose a question:
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