Rosenverse
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps

Gold
Friday, March 12, 2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Share the love for this talk
Craft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
Speakers: Sean Fitzell , Sarah Han and Kayla Farrell
Link:

Summary

Join Sean Fitzell (User Research Manager), Sarah Han (Sr User Researcher), and Kayla Farrell (Sr User Researcher) as they walk through the process of creating effective and actionable job maps that are used to educate, align, and inspire.

Key Insights

  • Compass identified 'Triple D' challenges with scale: duplicated efforts, disjointed workflows, and distance from users.

  • They chose to map jobs to be done rather than user journeys to capture agents’ needs beyond product-specific interactions.

  • The focus was narrowed initially on the seller-side context due to identified growth opportunities and clearer stakeholder alignment.

  • Existing research artifacts were scattered, inconsistent, and often biased by individual experiences or product domains.

  • A taxonomy of scenes, jobs, and tasks clarified conversations and helped distinguish stable contexts from changeable actions.

  • Collaborative digital whiteboarding (Miro) enabled iterative messy-to-clean synthesis of fragmented research data remotely.

  • The jobs map became a 'single source of truth' that helped product teams prioritize by workflows rather than siloed features.

  • Maintaining the map is a manual ongoing process involving weekly reviews and monthly stakeholder meetings.

  • There is recognition that mapping agent jobs alone isn’t sufficient; understanding clients of agents is an emerging focus.

  • Though initial samples were large and varied, survey-based quantification of jobs to be done was smaller and supplemental.

Notable Quotes

"The product team and the product organization are not real estate agents and we don’t speak the same language."

"We started to reference something that became to call the triple D challenges: duplicated efforts, disjointed workflows, and distance from users."

"One workflow might touch five different product areas but from the customer's perspective, it’s just one product."

"We wanted to surface agents day-to-day jobs, not necessarily how they were using Compass products."

"Mapping jobs gives a view into behaviors and needs that may or may not include your solution."

"Agents do a lot of jobs simultaneously with completely different mental contexts."

"We treated the different types of information about jobs as transparency layers, like in an anatomy textbook."

"This jobs map became the single source of truth deliverable anyone in the organization could reference."

"As we grow, it becomes difficult for everyone to deeply engage with research or remain close to users."

"While we love Guy Fieri, we prefer to watch him on Food Network and not experience our own version of Triple D any longer."

Ask the Rosenbot
Zariah Cameron
Streamlining an Inclusive Design Practice
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Kevin M. Hoffman
Theme 2: Enterprise Team Journey
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Key Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”
2024 • DesignOps Community
JJ Kercher
A Roadmap for Maturing Design in the Enterprise
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Rachel Garb
Exit Interview #7: Facing a blank slate in retirement when constraints are all you’ve ever known
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Frances Yllana
D.E.A.R.R. Diaries (Discipline, Experience, Architecture, Reflection + Revolution)
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Bruce Gillespie
Learning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Connect with the Advancing Research Community
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Carol Scott
Avoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Etienne Fang
Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Sarah Fathallah
Beyond insights: Rethinking the role of researchers as stewards of organizational wisdom
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Bria Alexander
Theme Two Intro
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Ebru Namaldi
Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Jon Fukuda
The Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Jaskiran Kang
Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
2022 • Civic Design Community
Jorge Arango
Scale Smart: AI-Powered Content Organization Strategies
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold

More Videos

Mark Templeton

"Legacy is a gift: gifts of insight, leadership, experience that last long beyond anyone remembering who gave them."

Mark Templeton

Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience

June 9, 2017

Dagmara Kukawka

"Teams openly said they didn’t know how to ask questions before and discovered research is cool afterwards."

Dagmara Kukawka

Tiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents

March 10, 2026

Leah Buley

"The silver bullet for all things UX is talking to real customers."

Leah Buley Joe Natoli

Ask Me Anything with Leah Buley and Joe Natoli, co-authors of The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition)

October 8, 2024

Gregg Bernstein

"We know users are important, but there are very few user research roles compared to design or engineering."

Gregg Bernstein

Opportunistic Research with Gregg Bernstein

July 11, 2019

Sarah Williams

"Our design group is positioned under marketing, so marketing leaders become key advocates and decision-makers for design in our org."

Sarah Williams

Verizon_A Framework for CX Transformation

January 8, 2024

Ebru Namaldi

"Sustainable teams require visible shared growth paths; designers’ growth should be supported, not accidental."

Ebru Namaldi

Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps

September 11, 2025

Joshua Graves

"Clarity and cruelty are different things; you want directness without belittling."

Joshua Graves

We Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)

April 28, 2025

Renee Reid

"Let me just take you along this journey, where it began."

Renee Reid

Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)

June 3, 2019

Marc Fonteijn

"Having 'service design' in your official job title does not give you an advantage in salary globally."

Marc Fonteijn

First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report

December 4, 2024