Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product.

People want their lives to be better. They have a vision of where they want to go. But there are obstacles in their path. Customers hire products to help them move forward; to make progress towards their vision of a better life.

You can think of it this way: users “hire” software to help get their job done. My friend Alan Klement defines it this way:

“Customer + Product = Progress”

Building successful products isn’t just about creating a groundbreaking technology! As Clayton Christensen explains in his book, Competing Against Luck:

The word “progress” might not spring to mind when you’re trying to innovate. Instead, you obsess about creating the perfect product with just the right combination of features and benefits to appeal to customers. You think you know just what your customers would like, but in reality, it can feel pretty hit or miss. Place enough bets and, with a bit of luck, something will work out.

Jobs to be Done helps you understand why a user might hire your software to get their job done.

Who is using it?

Companies such as Intercom and Basecamp have made significant investments in JTBD and incorporated it into their product development processes.

Jason Fried, of Basecamp, reported that interviewing their customers generated valuable product insights:

What’s most interesting is the situations people find themselves in before they’re our customers. It’s not about this industry or that one. It’s not about demographics, either. It’s not even about the competitive set, yet. It’s all about the situation they’re in, the reality they’re trying to wrangle, and the progress they’re trying to make.^

Describing a job to be done

Here’s an example of how Freshbooks might define their JTBD:

Free me from the agony of creating and tracking invoices manually so that I can get paid faster.

Alan Klement has three criteria for defining a JTBD:

1. Make sure you’re not describing a task or activity. It’s not about getting a drill so you can drill a 3/4” hole. It’s about how your life gets better after you use the drill: hanging a beautiful painting and having your friends admire it.
2. Describe how the customer has solved that job in the past, and how they might solve it in the future.
3. Understand what motivates the customer. How will the user's life improve when they overcome the struggle?

How do you figure out the JTBD for your product? You’ll need to get a deeper understanding of the customer’s journey and their motivation for change.

Seeing the customer journey

Understanding the initial trigger and the events that lead up to the purchase will help you design an effective marketing strategy for your product.

You can visualize the process like this:

Back in 2012, I was a Product Manager. I convinced my team that we should use Sprintly as our project management software.

But how did that happen? How does someone go from not hearing about a product to buying it?

Here is the timeline of events:

• May 2011: The SaaS company I worked for adopted Scrum for our team. We hired a consultant to get us started. Soon after, we stopped using Basecamp and started using Pivotal Tracker as our project management tool.
• June 2011: My boss saw Joe Stump speak at FOWA. He raved about the talk, especially Joe’s line: “Starting a business is really, really, really fucking hard.”
• January 2012: I watched an episode of TWIST with Joe Stump. I’d remembered my boss had liked his talk at FOWA. I listened to it on the way to work and learned about Joe’s new company, Sprintly. I believe I signed up for a trial account.
• February 2012: During this time, the CTO and I were getting frustrated with Scrum. It just didn’t seem to fit our team’s workflow. I started reading about the benefits and flexibility of the Kanban philosophy.
• April 2012: During my Kanban research, I started googling for “kanban project management software.” One result that emerged: a blog post by Joe Stump about Sprintly’s digital Kanban board.
• May 2012: Pivotal Tracker was becoming increasingly difficult for us to use: again, it did align with our team’s workflow. I invited our CTO to my trial Sprintly account and proposed switching. We decided to use Sprintly and Pivotal simultaneously to assess whether we preferred it.
• June 2012: The CTO and I decided to switch to Sprintly. We championed the idea to the rest of the team, sold them on it, and started paying for Sprintly.

As you can see, my exposure to Sprintly starts with my team adopting Scrum. Over the next 13 months, several events culminated in the “hiring” event, when we signed up for a paid plan.

Understanding the customer’s JTBD will help you optimize how people discover (and eventually buy) your app. In my example, I was looking for a way to make Scrum easier to implement in our team. I tried hiring Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker for the job, but they fell short. Eventually, I found Sprintly, which gave me the progress I wanted.

How can you use Jobs to be Done?

Customer interviews

One way to understand someone’s Job to be Done is to conduct an interview.

Alan Klement has written an excellent guide to conducting interviews, including sample questions.^

He recommends starting with these questions:

1. When did you purchase the product?
2. Where were you?
3. What time of day was it? (daytime/ nighttime?)
4. What was the weather like?
5. Was anyone else with you at the time?
6. How did you purchase the product?
7. Did you buy anything at the same time?

If you don’t yet have a product, you can ask a competitor’s customers these questions.

The interviewee’s answers will help you understand the context of the actual buying decision.

Observation

In addition to interviews, you can observe people making purchasing decisions, both in person and online.

Folks often leave clues on social media, in forums, and in blog posts that help us understand the timeline behind a purchase.

Here’s an example from Twitter user @dakotaw:

He mentions he is buying a new book almost every day. Five days later, he tweets this message:

In this case, purchasing numerous books serves as a trigger to consider the Kindle Unlimited service.

How would we define Dakota’s JTBD?

“Give me unlimited digital books so that I can read more self-help books.”

What else could Dakota hire to accomplish this task? Kindle Unlimited isn’t his only option. He could also hire:

• The public library
• Audible audiobooks

Kindle Unlimited also competes with other options that might attract Dakota’s attention, such as Netflix, podcasts, and college courses.

Optimize for the job to be done

In 10+ years of doing product marketing, I haven’t found a better framework for understanding why people buy software.

JTBD shows us that we’re not in the business of making products; we’re trying to make superhumans. In the words of Kathy Sierra^, the purpose of a product is to make a “badass user:” your app should give users abilities they never had before.

You can use JTBD principles to observe human beings and gain two valuable insights:

1. How do they want their life to be better?
2. What obstacles stand in their way?

Once you understand this, you build products that help people improve their lives. You’re not guessing; you’re delivering the progress they desire.

It’s crucial that you organize all of your efforts around helping users make progress. Whether it’s marketing, coding, or customer support, everything should contribute to their forward movement.

JTBD is particularly useful when you’re deciding which features to build. Think about what John Palmer is saying here:

“Jobs to be Done does not describe what the product must do; it describes what the customer must do.”

A new feature should enable users to do something they weren’t able to do before.

For example, I use Canva.com to design book covers, podcast art, and header graphics for blog posts. Previously, I had to hire a designer to do those things. It was costly and impeded me.

But now, with Canva, I have a new superpower: I can design assets myself. We might describe the JTBD like this:

“Give me the ability to do design work myself, so that I can publish my work sooner (without waiting for a designer.”

More resources

I’ve just scratched the surface of the Jobs to be Done theory.

To dig in deeper, I recommend:

• When Coffee and Kale Compete, a book by AlanKlement
• Competing Against Luck, a book by Clayton Christensen