Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a popular framework that helps individuals and companies identify which real “job” customers use a product or service for.
Simply put, it’s the driving need behind a purchase that a product has to fulfil, or be junked.
“Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold—not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. When you buy an automobile you buy transportation. When you buy a mattress you are buying comfortable sleep. When you buy carbon paper you are buying copies.” - Percy H. Whiting, the 5 Great Rules of Selling
In this article we’ve collated 10 real world Jobs to Be Done examples, that show different approaches, different methodologies, and different ways of getting down to core user needs.
List of Jobs to be Done examples
We’ll talk you through each of these jobs to be done examples one by one, what makes them useful, and the learnings you can apply.
We’ve also included a Jobs to Be Done Examples & Templates Miro board, which contains our jobs to be done template and all of these examples, in a simple format.
“JOBS-TO-BE-DONE is best defined as a perspective — a lens through which you can observe markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments differently, and by doing so, make innovation far more predictable and profitable.” - Tony Ulwick, The Official Jobs to be Done Playbook
The Hustle Badger Jobs To Be Done Miro Board
Sunita Mohanty of Meta’s jobs to be done example
Sunita Mohanty, angel investor, ex-Meta, shared a lightweight JTBD framework used by product teams at Instagram and Facebook on First Round Review.
It included a template, how she approaches JBTD, some jobs to be done examples, plus some tips on how to incorporate these into robust product management principles that can inform conception to launch.
Products personally developed by Mohanty using this framework include Oculus (now MetaQuest) social features, Facebook Preventive Health, and Tuned (now shut down), a social messaging app for couples.
She starts with 3 common symptoms that demonstrate the need for a clear JBTD statement:
- The team is relying too much on their own vision: limited discovery and leaning in hard to confirmation bias
- The team is more excited about the technical challenge than their users: the challenge of the build trumps utility to the customers
- The team have no shared value proposition, and everyone describes what it differently: meaning that the true user pain point isn’t clear
A good jobs to be done statement covers context, trigger and underlying need for the product.
It’s one of the hardest and most critical things to shape, since once it’s in place, the team should champion it, and direct their work accordingly.
She recommends using a jobs to be done example statement which is commonly used within Facebook and Instagram. It follows the below format:
When I [the customer] experience…… (context)
But [this thing prevents me]…… (barrier)
Help me [the customer] do/achieve..…. (goal)
So I [the customer] can gain / achieve….. (outcome)
She also recommends adhering to the following guide when it comes to thinking about the framework:
- It’s its own thing: Don’t confuse mission, values or vision with JBTD
- Start with the customer’s drivers: Describe the human needs behind the product purchase, not the product features
- Be open to surprising findings: Focus on what customers tell you about their true motivations, rather than cherry picking those insights which align to your business objectives
- Must be a big need that enough people have: The JBTD you select should represent a true need, and a large enough market opportunity
See our Product Market Fit Guide for the intersection between market size and customer need
Finally Sunita walks you through how to define your JBTD. She recommends a simple process that starts with identifying and interviewing with your audience and then supplementing insights with market research.
She then uses a prioritization matrix that looks at market size, and depth of unfulfilled need to identify which opportunities to prioritize.
An example of a jobs to be done prioritization matrix
She then supplements all of this good advice with some more real jobs to be done examples, using companies like Discord, Mutiny, Segment to illustrate the framework.
Finally she suggests some practical tips for implementing it within your product organization.
Tips include starting with ‘How Might We’ statements to articulate your value prop, prioritizing according to those needs, and monitoring reception at launch, and iterating thereafter with data.
“Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions.” - Sunita Mohanty
Every Intercom PRD contains a section called ‘Job Stories’, the Intercom version of JBTD.
“When I worked at Google, I created dozens if not hundreds of personas across many projects….Universally, I found their value was limited. They often helped with building empathy amongst employees who were disconnected from their users, but they rarely led to breakthrough ideas or fresh thinking about a problem.” - Paul Adams
Paul Adams, CPO of Intercom, writes at length about how personas or demographic differences can be deeply misleading, lead to incorrect assumptions about user needs, and even artificially limit your product’s capability and appeal.
“Personas explain who people are and what people do. But they never fully explain why people do something. Why people do things is far more important.” - Paul Adams
Having had this realization, Paul then goes on to explain how Intercom came up with the concept of “Job Stories”.
Another major insight came from routinely conducting user interviews.
They observed that customers more naturally described a solution, rather than articulating their true need.
This got them thinking about how they could create a process for capturing user motivations, that would be robust, systematic and do the job.
In order to do this, they came up with the user motivation format:
[ When _____ ] [ I want to _____ ] [So I can _____ ]
The phrasing breaks down as follows:
- When: sets the context
- I want to: describes the motivation
- So I can: describes the user’s desired outcome
Overall Paul advocates for 3 things
- Researching people’s motivations: this is fast to do, and simply requires the right type of digging
- Articulating those needs in short form: 1 pager briefs, and using snappy sentences to make them clear and memorable
- Sticking them on the wall: to maintain focus
In 2016, Clayton Christensen, supported by Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan published what has become to be known as a landmark essay in Harvard Business Review.
Later, Clayton Christensen went on to popularize the term ‘jobs to be done’ in his book, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.
“When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again. And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative.” - Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
They were driven to publish by a strong conviction that demographic and behavioral segmentation of users was leading to too great a focus on a customer’s characteristics. This was increasingly being privileged over a user’s true needs and motivations for using a product, service, or essentially doing anything in their lives.
Their essay was a powerful push back against the false safety created by innovation decisions based on the availability of data on different segments.
“The fundamental problem is, most of the masses of customer data companies create is structured to show correlations: This customer looks like that one, or 68% of customers say they prefer version A to version B. While it’s exciting to find patterns in the numbers, they don’t mean that one thing actually caused another.”
They then go on to bring the concept of true user needs, or jobs, to life through a story about the learnings of Bob Moesta, with an example from his work as an innovation consultant tasked with increasing 2 bedroom condominiums designed for retirees in Detroit.
The company was seeing a lot of viewings, and limited purchases. The question was why.
The answer turned out to be the psychological difficulty of moving out of the family home, and in particular, giving up the family dining table, site of many memories.
They adjusted the condominium spec to make room for the dining table, increased prices to cover 2 years of storage and moving costs, and even created a sorting room in the complex, where customers could take time to decide what belongings to discard.
““I went in thinking we were in the business of new-home construction,” [Bob Moesta] recalls. “But I realized we were in the business of moving lives.””
They then go on to provide some solid advice about how to best shape any JBTD analysis and statements:
- It’s a shorthand: the articulated ‘job’ stands for a much bigger motivation and experience. Example: quarter inch drills < quarter inch holes < new shelves for your daughter < supporting your family
- Focus on customer needs over other inputs: what users are trying to achieve and their blockers is more critical than demographic, behavioral, platform data or any other factors
- Truly successful innovations solve problems without solutions: they meet needs that are being unmet or failing to be met elsewhere
- Don’t focus on tasks and forget the feeling: every job is about social factors and how it makes you feel rather than the actual thing someone says they are trying to accomplish
There’s a whole host of other good advice in this essay (give it a detailed read), including not forgetting implementation: how you’ll install processes to embed JBTD throughout your organization.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack (then Tiny Speck) sent his team a memo in July 2013, 2 weeks before they launched the product.
The essay was centred around 2 major themes, that Slack should
- Relentlessly focus on “Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not)”
- Bridge product and marketing: “Communicating the above more and more effectively (so that they know they want it)”
The essay covered 6 key points:
- Build something people want: he argued that the burden of delivering effectively and explaining the value of the product should be shared across the whole company
- “Marketing from both ends”: that the product should inform the market and the market inform the product
- Sell the innovation, not the product: orientate around what the product does for users, and the product should follow along, rather than vice versa
- Who do we want our customers to become: the feelings and response customers should have from using Slack
- How do we do it? By being on our A-game and being honest about user experience
- Why? Because aiming to shoot the lights out is why you should get out of bed in the morning
It’s become a seminal essay on JTBD, an impassioned call from a CEO to understand the user and convey that understanding to the user in word and deed.
“What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product….However, if we are selling “a reduction in the cost of communication” or “zero effort knowledge management” or “making better decisions, faster” or “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go” or “75% less email” or some other valuable result of adopting Slack, we will find many more buyers.” - We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Stewart Butterfield
We’ve written before in our product vision examples essay and our product management principles article about how rigorously Gitlab apply the core pillars of a best-in-class product management toolkit across their organization.
We have taken multiple jobs to be done examples from their Handbook, individual squads, and from UX research chains.
Within Gitlab, jobs to be done canvases are created and validated as part of a playbook process. Needs are scored according to severity. Only needs that pass a threshold where severity = 10+ are included - as per the example above.
Jobs to be Done are also integrated into persona segmentation: where needs and motivations, plus jobs to be done are foregrounded over any demographic information.
The JBTD methodology extends beyond core company materials to squad led innovation. Here you can see an example of hypothetical jobs to be done from a specific squad, which are being sent to the UX research squad for validation:
Gitlab UX researchers validate or overhaul JBTD based on need scoring.
They also may use a method called job hierarchies, where they articulate a ladder of jobs - showing how small needs when interacting with a product ladder up to big jobs.
Think of this job to be done example as similar to opportunity solution trees.
It helps to maintain eyes on the core prize, even if hypotheses at the lower level are adapted or evolved.
Become a more technical product manager
In 2001 Bosch wanted to enter the North American professional circular saw market. It was a highly competitive and commoditized space.
With that in mind, they retained Tony Ulwick, one of the founding figures of JBTD. founder of Strategn, and author of Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice, to help them stand out competitively.
It’s a great example of systematically deploying JBTD to find an underserved market.
“Drawing on one-on-one and group interviews with about 30 circular saw users, I worked with the Bosch team to (i) create a job map for the job of “cutting wood in a straight line,” and (ii) uncover 85 customer desired outcome statements (the metrics tradesmen used to measure success when getting the job done).”
They then took a statistical sample of underserved desired functionality and clustered these according to how the customers rated the topics.
This resulted in establishing 4 different segments of potential users, and selecting a target group (finish carpenters). Similar to Gitlab’s jobs to be done example, where personas followed identified needs.
This group, the finish carpenter persona, had 14 underserved needs, while the other customer segments were served.
Having done this they went to work on finding solutions to those needs and refined them via concept testing. Examples included extension cords that connected directly to the saw, meaning that they could easily be replaced if they got cut, a cover to protect against debris and cutouts that helped carpenters see whether they were cutting on track.
By the time of launch their differentiated value messaging was clear, and Bosch’s circular saw won innovation awards.
Anna Naumenko, a lead market analyst at BP Mobile, part of Aiby Group, an American mobile app creator and acquirer, breaks jobs to be done into a 9 step process.
She suggests:
- Setting goals: creating hypotheses which you want to test
- Selecting your target audience for the exercise: via demographic characteristics, such as gender or age, and screening them to test for affinity with product area
- Creating a questionnaire: that uncovers what you want to discover, tests your hypotheses and makes space for new hypotheses
- Interviewing: creating a rapport and leaving space for them to talk
- Collect artifacts: these are stand out or key phrases or statements from the interviews
- Create job focused canvases: this includes number of people raising the issue, barrier analysis and so on
- Create a value matrix: a visualization of barriers and jobs raised as workshop preparation to help stack rank and ideate solutions
- Workshop and output: holding an ideation sessions and then putting ideas into action
She supplements this with a lot of helpful personal insight, suggested screening tips, and general good advice about conducting open ended, unbiased interviews. While the value matrix canvas is complex, overall the process is clear, and helps to get to a jobs to be done output.
“For example, while conducting research for Plantum (formerly NatureID)–an app that helps you identify plants by photos,–we selected people using the main parameters (location and age) and asked them a few questions to see whether these potential respondents like plants. In particular, we asked them if they enjoy taking photos of plants, learning more about them, taking care of them, etc.” - Anna Naumenko, Understanding Users Needs
Tony Verbist of Achilles Design provides a helpful Miro board that walks users through the process of constructing jobs to be done value statements.
JTBD value statements are a way of articulating a users’ needs and motivations in personal, and emotion led language.
An example like this can help steer teams away from product or feature led language, and help them stay focused on the user.
This board is a useful starting point for an internal workshop, where squads were looking to ideate some jobs to be done hypotheses. It contains lots of emotion verbs, and framing around context and motivation, plus tips on how to construct actionable JBTD statements.
Chaz Mee’s Customer Journey Map x Jobs to be Done example in Miro
Chaz Mee provides 2 Miro templates to help with JBTD workshops. The first is a JTBD / customer journey map template mash up, where user needs and motivations, from the macro to the micro JTBD are mapped along the purchasing journey. The second is a higher level, summary view.
The strengths of this approach is that similar to many customer journey map examples it allows you to map user motivations and emotions onto your existing solution, and look for friction points.
The weakness is that it’s a zoomed in view of the user experience, focused on micro jobs, and misses broader motivations and context.
The Hustle Badger Customer Journey Map also reflects JBTD on the user journey, but we don’t replace our jobs to be done framework with this mapping. It’s more a micro job augmentation.
The Hustle Badger Customer Journey Map Template in Miro
