In short
Jobs to be Done is a framework that asks which job customers want to get done with a product, rather than grouping them by demographics alone.
What is Jobs to be Done?
Jobs to be Done, or JTBD, starts from a simple observation: people do not buy products for their features. They buy them because they want to make progress in a specific situation. In other words, they "hire" a product for a job. The framework was popularized above all by Clayton Christensen.
A job usually has several layers: a functional one (what needs to get done), an emotional one (how I want to feel while doing it) and a social one (how I want others to see me). The job often stays stable for years, even as the solutions change.
Why Jobs to be Done matters
Age, industry or company size rarely explain why someone buys or switches. The job does. It also shows you who you really compete with. For a reporting tool, the competitor might be a spreadsheet someone updates by hand every Friday. Once you understand the job, you can prioritize features and shape your messaging with far more focus.
How to use Jobs to be Done in practice
- Run switch interviews: Talk to people who recently bought or switched and reconstruct the moment they decided.
- Write job statements: Use a pattern like "When I …, I want to …, so I can …".
- Map current solutions: Note the workarounds and makeshift fixes customers relied on before.
- Judge features by the job: For every idea, ask whether it clearly improves progress on the core job.
- Align onboarding: Get new users to their first completed job as fast as possible.
Example
A project management SaaS assumes customers mainly want to plan tasks. Interviews reveal the real job: having a reliable status update ready in five minutes before the weekly team meeting. The team builds an automatic weekly report and puts it at the center of onboarding.
written by
Benedikt Geisberger
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