No one buys things for the sake of buying things. Intercom illustrates that point perfectly with skateboard sales.
Avid skateboarders don’t choose to buy a skateboard based on the fact that it’s made of carbon and has Swiss bearings, polyurethane wheels, and hollow trucks. They choose the skateboard that will help them perform cooler flips and tricks.
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework was born from the idea that features don’t matter as much as results. And that customers’ goals should guide product development and positioning, because a product is only as good as the problem it solves.
Again, your customers don’t want cool features. They want results. Let the JTBD framework lead your product development and marketing teams to craft a product and message that better resonates with your target audience.
In this article, I’ll cover:
What is Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)?
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework is a perspective that forces you to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. It answers the question “What ‘job’ is my customer using my company to accomplish?”
The kicker here is that the answer may not be what you want. Your brand, marketing, sales, and PR teams might want to frame your company as X for Y, while your actual customers are using your company as A for B. This disconnect makes your messaging less effective, and hurts your bottom line.
Most developers and marketers look at the product and messaging with a developer’s eye — what cool features can you highlight to differentiate yourself or what colors should you use to make your logo and website more memorable.
The JTBD framework uses a customer lens, asking questions that focus more on customer experiences and problems.
- What can I do to help my customers “level up” and get better results?
- What roadblocks are they facing that I can remove?
- What are the social, emotional, and functional aspects of the desired outcome?
By doubling down on what your target audience wants, you can achieve outcome-driven innovation (ODI) — which is a fancy way of saying for innovating based on your target audience’s desired results.
JTBD example: Arm & Hammer baking soda
Let’s use a well-known JTBD example to illustrate how the framework operates.
Despite the name, baking soda has multiple uses outside of baking. Understanding that consumers used baking soda in their laundry, cupboards, fridges, carpet, and more, Arm & Hammer decided to address these different use cases (AKA jobs) with their packaging.
The company packaged their same product — baking soda — into boxes designed for deodorization, laundry detergent, and even cat litter. They expanded their reach to cater to multiple jobs to be done, and as a result expanded their product applicability.
Arm & Hammer began making these JTBD observations in the late 1960s, and by 2005, their original baking soda packaging (JTBD: to be used in baking) made up less than 10% of their overall sales.
Why the customer lens is important
The JTBD framework emphasizes that your customers should be your single source of truth. If you get to know your customers and their goals (i.e., jobs) beyond customer personas, you can create a product or service that sells better, because it performs better.
There are three benefits to using the customer lens to lead product development and positioning:
1) It uses different perspectives to encourage innovation
The JTBD framework doesn’t just ask, “What job did you buy my product to achieve?” It also looks at, “Why haven’t you finished that job?”, “How well do existing solutions help you do that?”, and “What or who influenced you to try our solution?”
While most lenses focus on the “who,” JTBD focuses on the “why,” leading you to smaller problems that you can solve, that you might not have found otherwise.
2) It focuses on the customers to keep you on track
Your product is only great if your buyers think it’s great. If you’re not selling because people don’t appreciate your unique selling point (USP), then you might need to change your USP, not push harder.
3) It aligns the entire team behind one single truth
The JTBD framework gives you one single job story that your sales team, marketing team, and engineering team can rally behind.
When you’re lost and losing sales, turn to your customers. They’ll put you back on the right path.
How to find JTBD: Defining a job using three dimensions
A job is anything that your target audience wants to achieve within the context of a certain situation. It’s not a solution, it’s an aspiration within a specific motivation.
Jobs can be anything:
- Become an influencer
- Save money on everyday household products
- Get healthier
The JTBD framework forces you to dig deeper by looking at the motivations behind each goal.
- WHY does your customer want to become an influencer?
- WHY does your customer want to save money on everyday household products?
- WHY does your customer want to get healthier?
By knowing both the job and the motivation behind the job, you can find out where your customer still needs a better solution. And then you can create that solution.
But there’s a catch. If you define a job too narrowly, you restrict innovation. If you define it too broadly, you can not-so-actionable insights. To get an actionable definition of a job, you need to use its three dimensions: functional, social, and emotional.
1) The functional job statement
Jobs are inherently functional—meaning they always have an end goal. But each product can have different functional jobs depending on the target market.
Laptop purchasers, for example, aren’t all students who need a device for the sudden shift to online schooling. Let’s use two lenses to look at laptops as a solution to a problem.
From the developer point of view, the more powerful the laptop the better. Which is why laptop developers focus on improving graphic cards, processor chips or cores, and screen resolution. And yet—most people have mid-range laptops and not gaming computers with higher computing power.
That’s because everyone has a different functional job statement in mind when buying a new laptop device.
- Do my job as a content creator on a daily basis
- Play online games to earn money
- Participate in remote learning classes from Monday to Friday
As a developer, it’s not enough to say, “People want better laptops that are faster, newer, and can handle more apps.” And as a marketer, your positioning shouldn’t be, “Our laptops are the newest and fastest in 2022.” You need to dig into what your customers want to use your product for, and then develop a product and message based on that.
People who need computers to play online games, for example, will need a laptop with better graphics and a stronger processor chip than a 10-year-old who just uses their device for video calls.
2) The social jobs statement
Next, the social dimension of a job deals with who the job affects. These are the friends, family members, co-workers, and other people in your customers’ lives.
So in the example above, the social job statement for buying a laptop could be:
- Finish my job faster so that I can impress my boss and get a promotion
- Stop lagging in games so that my peers see me as a reliable player and choose my as a teammate
- Have a better computer than my friends so I can look cooler
Developers and marketers who capitalize on the social dimension of jobs can position their products better for their specific target audiences. So instead of just touting speed, marketers can position a laptop as, “The surefire way to get the job done and get that promotion.”
3) The emotional job statement
Lastly, the emotional dimension of a job looks at how your target audience feels—or wants to feel after they try your solution.
In the case of a laptop, an emotional job statement could mention security and stability. Your buyers want to be sure that their laptops won’t give them the blue screen of death and delete all their files.
Combining all three dimensions to create a single job story will give you a clearer insight into what your customers truly want. And that job story can then guide your development and keep you on-track to developing a product or service that gets jobs done better than anyone else.
How to use JTBD: 4 steps to identify and act on JTBD
Most companies lean on data to find out what customers want.
For example, a fast fashion clothing company releases more hoodie designs in the fall because historical data shows that people buy more hoodies when the leaves change.
While that trend is right — seasons do influence sales — it disregards all the other reasons behind the buying decision. Which is why H&M has enough clothing left over to burn at a Swedish power plant.
To avoid misunderstanding their motivations, learn what your customers innately desire from your brand using the JTBD framework.
1) Identify the jobs your customers want to get done
Don’t assume. The biggest problem with gathering data and then creating a solution is all the assumptions that happen in between. When you see sales rise with the seasons, don’t assume that seasonal change is 100% responsible for the bump in sales.
Luckily, the solution is simple — talk to your customers. Simply ask them what they want to get done and then consolidate your findings. Do this through:
- Surveys that ask why they chose your company and how well you’ve been solving their problems
- Emails that start conversations about the product experience and what you can do better
- Customer calls that help you understand who your specific customers are and what their background is
- Informal social media surveys that ask people for reactions instead of answers
Your customers are your greatest source of information. Don’t waste the opportunity to learn more about them, what motivates them, and what you can do to help.
2) Create your job statement
After you gather information, put everything in a single spreadsheet and look for trends and common answers.
Format your job statement to focus on context, motivation, and desired outcome:
When [trigger], I want to [desire], so I can [JTBD].
When Bill Bowerman co-founded Nike, he had a goal: To create the best running shoes available. He didn’t know what that looked like at the time, but as a coach, he knew what runners wanted.
So in his head, his job statement for runners was probably something along the lines of; “When I run a race, I want to have comfortable shoes, so I can win without injuring myself.”
He then created the Cortez, a shoe that had a soft sponge midsole to absorb road shock and keep the legs from becoming too tired too quickly.
Because the shoes were lighter and shaped more ergonomically, they reduced injury while still allowing runners to fly with the wind. The shoes rose to fame and were featured in the 1970s that Runner’s World magazine.
The most remarkable thing is that the Nike Cortez still lives today — Whitney Houston used it in concerts and Forrest Gump used them to run across the country. Solve your customers’ problems and they’ll thank you for it.
3) Build out your job story
When you’ve got your job statement, create your full job story that takes into consideration the functional, emotional, and social aspect of a job.
In the example above, we have a job statement that points towards winning races. The social aspect of that job is making your fans and family proud, and getting a trophy that you can show off. The emotional aspect of that is the happiness runners feel when achieving a lifelong goal.
The format of a job story should be:
Your job statement
- Your functional job statement
- Your social job statement
- Your emotional job statement
In the example above, your job story would be:
When I run a race, I want to have comfortable shoes, so I can win without injuring myself.
- I want to win races around the world without worrying about my shoes
- I want to win so that I can make my friends and family proud, and do so without injury so that I don’t worry anyone
- I want to win so that I can be proud of myself and see my efforts come to fruition
Notice a trend? No one cares about how soft the soles of Nike shoes are. They care that the shoes help them achieve a certain goal.
4) Spread the word
Now it’s time to align your company behind a single source of truth — your job story.
Share your job story with every team in the company and gather opinions, input, and ideas. Ensure everyone from marketing to sales to UX to engineering is on the same page and working toward solving the same problem.
Create a shareable JTBD document through Notion, Trello, or other project management tools, and share that document with your team. Include links to the research and customer conversations in your document so that your team has the direct voice of customer to refer to when they have questions.
Wrapping up — Use the JTBD framework to let your customers guide development and positioning
Don’t fall into the trap of innovating for innovation’s sake. Or worse, stagnating and losing all your customers to better solutions. Instead, focus on what your customers want by approaching development and positioning with the JTBD framework.
Use the jobs to be done framework to put your customer motivations at the center of your positioning, messaging, and product. When you align what your company does with what your audience wants to do, everyone wins.