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Summary
The concept of jobs to be done (JTBD) provides a lens through which we can understand value creation. You’re probably familiar with the basic principle: people “hire” products and services to accomplish an objective. By providing a language for discovering problems independent of solutions, JTBD helps organizations identify new opportunities for growth, get aligned, and make human-centered decisions. JTBD provides a lingua franca to shift your collective mindset. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the core concepts of JTBD and how you can unleash human-centered insights across your company, from product to marketing to sales and more. We will also be doing a collaborative exercise during the call, focused around recently submitted proposals for the upcoming Design at Scale conference (formerly known as Enterprise Experience.)
Key Insights
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Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is fundamentally a market innovation framework rooted in business theory, not a design methodology.
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JTBD maps focus on the customer’s objective and process independent of products, brands, or technology, unlike customer journey maps which are company-centric.
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Separating the functional job from the outcomes allows for more granular understanding of what customers truly want to achieve.
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JTBD’s language forbids references to products or technology and requires statements to start with verbs, ensuring clarity and normalization.
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JTBD serves as a stable logical nucleus that can be layered with empathy, emotions, and aspirations to create richer experience maps.
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In B2B contexts, starting JTBD analysis from the end user 'downstream' and working back toward buyers creates more effective product-market fit.
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JTBD helps break siloed thinking by providing a shared language across design, product management, marketing, and customer success teams.
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JTBD favors inference and normalization during research, trading some qualitative fidelity for consistency and predictive power.
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JTBD is applicable not only for innovation and design but also for guiding go-to-market strategies and customer success efforts.
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JTBD can coexist with and complement existing methodologies like Agile, Lean, Design Thinking by providing a clear problem framing.
Notable Quotes
"The customer journey map is really an egotistical document — it’s my story, not the chicken’s story."
"People don’t want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole."
"Jobs to be done expunges technology and products from its language to focus on what the individual is trying to achieve."
"The best way to have a solution that ‘sucks’ is to solve the end user’s problems so the solution pulls through the organization."
"Empathy is not a good starting point for innovation because it’s unstable and doesn’t provide a clear problem to solve."
"Jobs to be done gives us a normalized, structured, and stable unit of analysis to then add emotion, brand, and price on top."
"Design thinking starts too high with empathy; jobs to be done starts with the functional core and grounds innovation."
"You don’t have to call it jobs to be done — you can white label it or integrate its logic into your existing maps."
"Jobs to be done can be a catalyst for conversations and change by connecting teams across an organization."
"Understanding the problem independent of the solution is key to finding the solution that somebody will actually adopt."
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