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Glossary
Jobs to be Done
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a demand-side framing that explains customer choices by the progress people seek in a circumstance — the “job” they hire a product or service to do — rather than by demographic segments or product feature lists alone.
Why it matters
Feature comparisons miss why buyers switch. JTBD focuses strategy on the job, the context, and the outcomes customers measure, which reshapes value propositions, roadmaps, and competitive sets.
Distinguish JTBD from customer discovery. Customer discovery is a process for testing business-model and customer hypotheses through engagement with the market. JTBD is a lens for understanding the progress customers seek. Discovery may use JTBD interviews; the concepts are not synonyms.
Christensen’s jobs framing and outcome-driven / Ulwick-associated practice are related schools — useful, but not identical methodologies. Do not collapse them into one interchangeable brand.
Example (enterprise): A collaboration vendor stops segmenting only by company size and maps the job “prepare executives for a board decision under time pressure.” Roadmap priority shifts from chat novelty to brief assembly, evidence linking, and export quality — the progress buyers actually hire.
Mechanisms
- Identify the progress the customer seeks in a situation, including constraints and success criteria.
- Map competing solutions customers “hire” and “fire,” including non-consumption and workarounds.
- Design offers and messaging around the job and outcomes, not only persona demographics or feature matrices.
Boundaries
- Jobs to be Done ≠ customer discovery; JTBD is a demand framing, discovery is a hypothesis-testing process.
- JTBD ≠ a single proprietary canvas or workshop brand; multiple schools use jobs language differently.
- Listing “jobs” as renamed features is not JTBD analysis.
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