Customers & Research

How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions?

A starting point

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

Read

📄 Article
Freemium Intermediate

Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'

From Harvard Business Review by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan ~20 min read

Why we picked it

The canonical HBR article that formalizes JTBD from its originators, the authoritative reference every founder citing 'jobs to be done' should have actually read.

  • A 'job' is the progress a customer is trying to make in a circumstance
  • Jobs have functional, social, and emotional dimensions
  • Innovation succeeds when it's organized around the job, not the product category
  • Understanding the job reveals who and what you truly compete with
Open hbr.org →
📖 Book
Free Intermediate

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

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

Why we picked it

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.

  • 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? 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 →