Understand your customers

Understanding the problem (JTBD)

People hire products to do a job, find the job.

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What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean? People don't buy products, they 'hire' them to make progress in a specific situation, the famous milkshake was hired to make a boring commute beara... Beginner 2 resources → How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs? Personas describe who; JTBD describes the progress they're trying to make and the struggle that pushes them to switch. Features are your answer; th... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for? Interview people who recently switched to or bought something in your space and reconstruct the timeline: what triggered the search, what they used... Intermediate 3 resources → Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done? Anything the customer currently 'hires' to get the same job done, including a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a competitor, or doing nothing at all.... Intermediate 3 resources → How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions? Write the job as a struggling-moment statement ('when I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___') and use it as the filter for what to build and how to pi... Advanced 2 resources → How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the job I've found is real? There's no magic number, but the honest signal is repetition: when your last three interviews stop surprising you and start confirming the same str... Intermediate 3 resources → Customers say they want feature X, but is that the job or just a solution they've imagined? Almost always it's a solution they've imagined, and building it verbatim is how founders ship features nobody uses. The job hides one layer beneath... Intermediate 3 resources → I'm a domain expert building for my own industry. Does knowing the field too well make me worse at spotting the real job? It can, because expertise makes you assume you already know the answer and skip the listening. The trap is confusing your job (what you struggled w... Advanced 3 resources → How do I find the job when my customers can't articulate it themselves? Stop asking them to explain the job and start reconstructing the moment they last switched from one solution to another. People are bad at abstract... Advanced 3 resources → Different customers seem to hire my product for completely different jobs. Do I pick one or serve them all? Pick one to lead with, at least until you have traction, because messaging that speaks to three jobs speaks clearly to none. Multiple jobs is commo... Advanced 3 resources → My product is for Indian small businesses who mostly run their operations on WhatsApp. How do I frame the job against a free tool they already love? The job isn't "replace WhatsApp", it's whatever WhatsApp does badly at scale: losing track of orders, no records, chaos when volume grows. Frame yo... Advanced 3 resources → How do I write survey questions that surface the job instead of just confirming what I already believe? Surveys are terrible at discovering jobs and decent at sizing ones you've already found through conversation, so don't lead with them. When you do ... Intermediate 3 resources → What are the most common ways founders get JTBD wrong in practice? The big three: treating a demographic as a job ("millennials want convenience" is not a job), writing the job so broadly it fits any product, and m... Beginner 2 resources → As a solo technical founder, how much time should I really spend understanding the job before writing any code? Enough to talk to ten or fifteen people, which is days, not months, and far less than the time you'll waste building the wrong thing. The technical... Intermediate 3 resources → When is the job someone hires my product for actually an emotional or social one, not a functional one? More often than founders assume, because we default to functional explanations and miss the feeling underneath. People hire products to feel compet... Advanced 3 resources → How do I know if the job I'm solving is a painkiller people will pay for or just a vitamin they'd like? Watch for what they're already doing about it: a painkiller job has people spending money, cobbling together workarounds, or losing sleep, while a ... Intermediate 3 resources → I'm a non-technical founder validating an idea. How do I map the job before I've built anything to demo? You don't need a demo to understand a job, you need conversations, and the lack of a product is actually an advantage because people talk more free... Beginner 3 resources →

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