Jobs to Be Done
Outcome-driven product thinking
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a theory of customer motivation. People don't buy products — they 'hire' them to make progress in their lives. Understanding the 'job' a customer is trying to accomplish (functional, social, and emotional dimensions) leads to better product decisions than persona-based or demographic-based thinking.
Developed by Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) and Tony Ulwick in the 1990s. Popularised by Christensen's 'The Innovator's Dilemma.'
Use Jobs to Be Done when
- ✓You're doing early discovery on a new product or feature and need to understand root motivations
- ✓Existing user research keeps producing feature requests rather than problem insights
- ✓The team is debating 'what to build' without a shared framework for prioritisation
- ✓You're repositioning a product and need to understand adjacent competition
Avoid it when
- ✗You need quick user feedback on a specific UI — usability testing is more efficient
- ✗The team is in delivery mode and needs a prioritisation framework, not a discovery framework
Key Concepts
The progress a customer is trying to make in a particular circumstance. 'Help me feel calm before a presentation' is a job. 'A slides app' is a product.
The practical task the customer wants to accomplish. 'Get from A to B.'
How the customer wants to feel during or after the job.
How the customer wants to be perceived by others.
In Ulwick's ODI, desired outcomes are the metrics customers use to measure job success.
A research method (Bob Moesta) that reconstructs the timeline of a customer's decision to switch to your product.
How it works
Interview recent customers about the context of their purchase/switch. Identify the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the job.
Use the job statement to generate a list of desired outcomes customers use to measure success. Prioritise by importance and satisfaction.
Outcomes that are important but underserved are your product opportunities. Outcomes that are over-served are where you can cut scope.
Design features that directly address the highest-opportunity outcomes. Validate with customers before building.
Tools that support Jobs to Be Done
Industry standard for software development teams — most PMs will encounter Jira in their career
Unmatched flexibility as an all-in-one workspace — combines docs, wikis, databases, and project management in a single tool
Best-in-class infinite canvas experience — the gold standard for collaborative whiteboarding with real-time multiplayer editing
Best-in-class behavioral analytics with powerful event segmentation, funnel analysis, and retention charts that go far deeper than Google Analytics
Best-in-class event-based analytics with intuitive funnel, retention, and flow reports that surface actionable insights quickly
Retroactive analytics — captures all user interaction data from install without requiring pre-defined event tagging, so PMs can answer questions about past behavior immediately
Extremely fast setup — just add a single JavaScript snippet and start collecting heatmaps and recordings within minutes
Best-in-class customer feedback aggregation — centralizes insights from Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce, and email into a single repository linked to features
Frequently Asked Questions
Many practitioners say yes — personas focus on who the customer is demographically, while JTBD focuses on what they're trying to do. Personas can lead to stereotyping; JTBD forces you to think about motivation and context.
Bob Moesta's switch interview is the most structured approach: map the customer's timeline from 'first thought' of switching to 'first use' of your product. Ask about the moment they decided to look for a solution and what tipped them to actually switch.