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

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

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

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

✓ 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 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

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

Also in GTM

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

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