Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Jobs To Be Done

Thursday, February 25, 2021 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Jobs To Be Done
Speakers: Jim Kalbach
Link:

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

  • Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is fundamentally a market innovation framework rooted in business theory, not a design methodology.

  • JTBD maps focus on the customer’s objective and process independent of products, brands, or technology, unlike customer journey maps which are company-centric.

  • Separating the functional job from the outcomes allows for more granular understanding of what customers truly want to achieve.

  • JTBD’s language forbids references to products or technology and requires statements to start with verbs, ensuring clarity and normalization.

  • JTBD serves as a stable logical nucleus that can be layered with empathy, emotions, and aspirations to create richer experience maps.

  • In B2B contexts, starting JTBD analysis from the end user 'downstream' and working back toward buyers creates more effective product-market fit.

  • JTBD helps break siloed thinking by providing a shared language across design, product management, marketing, and customer success teams.

  • JTBD favors inference and normalization during research, trading some qualitative fidelity for consistency and predictive power.

  • JTBD is applicable not only for innovation and design but also for guiding go-to-market strategies and customer success efforts.

  • 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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Bria Alexander
Theme Two Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Melinda Belcher
Insider preview of Enterprise Experience 2020
2020 • Enterprise Community
Onur Kocan
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Sara Conklin
A UXer’s 12-Month Journey from Climate Concern to Climate Credibility
2025 • Climate UX Interest Group
Amahra Spence
Designing for Liberation, Rehearsing Freedom
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Mandy Drew
What Role(s) Can Research Play in Responsible Design?
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Jason Mesut
Unmasking Design Leadership: Navigating leadership without neglecting ourselves
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Frances Yllana
The Big Question about Impact: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Theme Four Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Elizabeth Churchill
Exploring Cadence: You, Your Team, and Your Enterprise
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Ashley Cortez
Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Anna Avrekh
Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Matt Bernius
Learnings from Applying Trauma-Informed Principles to the Research Process
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Brian T. O’Neill
Does Designing and Researching Data Products Powered by ML/AI and Analytics Call for New UX Methods?
2022 • QuantQual Interest Group
Ashley Sewall
Exit Interview #5: Designing My Life After Tech
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Daniel Korczynski
From generic to contextual research insights with AI | Live Q&A
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold

More Videos

Louis Rosenfeld

"This is a great opportunity. This is a gift to yourself to dig in with other design ops peers and really learn together."

Louis Rosenfeld Bria Alexander

Day 1 Welcome

September 23, 2024

George Abraham

"All our components can be data bound so the developer can point to any data source like CMS or JSON to populate UI elements naturally."

George Abraham Stefan Ivanov

Design Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)

October 1, 2021

Jess Greco

"The more generous you are, the more those around you shine and everyone benefits."

Jess Greco

Claiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice

March 13, 2025

Robert Schwartz

"We didn’t do this with arrogance. We did it with great respect, understanding who we’re delivering to, shareholders, patients, customers."

Robert Schwartz

We're Here for the Humans

June 9, 2017

Nicole Aleong

"There are over 7 billion futures of right now."

Nicole Aleong

Future Orientations to Everyday Life: Futures Anthropology as a Methodology

March 26, 2024

Mila Kuznetsova

"Matching researchers by language and culture makes children more comfortable and improves consent."

Mila Kuznetsova Lucy Denton

How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices

March 9, 2022

John Mortimer

"It was the first time I’ve actually seen this work all put together like this."

John Mortimer Milan Guenther Lucy Ellis Patrick Quattlebaum

Panel Discussion

December 3, 2024

Sam Proulx

"With cloud apps, users don’t get to choose when to upgrade, which challenges maintaining accessibility continuity."

Sam Proulx

To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility

November 18, 2022

Josh Clark

"Sentient Scenes doesn’t just talk about the scene, it becomes the scene, adapting continuously to user input."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Scenes and Radically Adaptive Experiences

June 11, 2025