Understand your customers

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 pitch. Speak to the progress the customer wants, not your feature list, and prioritize whatever removes the biggest obstacle to that progress.

Go deeper

2 resources, 2 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

This is the canonical piece that put jobs to be done on the map, written by the people who coined it. It uses the famous milkshake story to show that customers do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific situation, which is the exact lens this question is about. Read it as the clearest short starting point before going deeper into JTBD.

Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done

From Harvard Business Review by Clayton Christensen et al. ~20 min read

  • Customers hire a product to make progress in a specific circumstance, so the job, not the customer profile, is the unit of analysis.
  • The same product can be hired for very different jobs, which changes how you build and market it.
  • You find the job by studying the struggle and the context, not by asking people to rank features.
Open hbr.org →
📖 Book
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The most practitioner-friendly deep dive into JTBD, with interviews and case studies on applying it to real products. Free to read and written by a leading JTBD practitioner.

When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy

From jtbd.info / alanklement.com by Alan Klement ~230 pages

  • A job is the struggle to turn a current situation into a preferred one
  • Seemingly unrelated products (coffee vs kale) compete for the same job
  • Study switching moments, the push and pull that make people change
  • Attach value to what the product does for the customer, not to features
Open alanklement.com →

People also ask

What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean? 2 → How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs? 2 → How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for? 3 → Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done? 3 → How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the job I've found is real? 3 → Customers say they want feature X, but is that the job or just a solution they've imagined? 3 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Market Research.

How do founders validate a startup idea with AI in a weekend? 20 → How do I use AI to map competitors, pricing, and positioning? 24 →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Who you sell to, and why they care, our GTM track.

What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing. 4 → What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong? 3 →
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →