Organizations are constantly looking to grow by offering new products and innovations.
However, there is a harsh reality. A significant portion of new products fail to achieve success in the market.
This often occurs from a lack of market research. Or, research too heavily focused on the customer rather than the specific problem the product should be solving.
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Framework is an approach that shifts the focus to understanding true customer motivation and opportunity in the market.
By understanding the “job” a customer is trying to hire a product for, organizations can focus on prioritizing innovation that truly resonates with consumers and succeeds in gaining market share.
Essentially, Jobs to Be Done or JTBD is an approach to understanding customer demand. It operates on the idea that customers don’t simply buy products or services, they hire them to move from a painful “current state” to a desired “future state”.
The theory, originally developed by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, helps both product and research teams look past the surface level desires of consumers and uncover deeper reasons behind their behaviors.
One of the most famous examples of JTBD is the “morning drink,” often told as a milkshake but just as easily a smoothie or iced coffee.
A customer is not just buying a beverage, they are “hiring” it to make a boring morning commute more enjoyable or keep them full until lunch.
In this scenario, the drink is not only competing with other beverages, but also with options like a bagel, a banana, or a breakfast bar.
Traditional market research often relies heavily on B2C or B2B buyer personas.
These personas can do a good job of describing who the customer is demographically, however, they often fail to fully capture the true reasons behind a purchase decision.
JTBD shifts the focus onto the circumstance and motivation behind a purchase (i.e., the “when” and the “why”).
Ultimately, the same “job” (such as making a morning commute less tedious) might be hired by two completely different demographic personas.
With this in mind, a job can be a much better predictor of purchase behavior than demographics such as age, location, or income.
Many organizations fall into the trap of feature creep and continually adding incremental features to their products based on what competitors are doing or internal ideas.
When this happens, the customer often sees a product that is overly complex or difficult to use, instead of one that will lead them to their desired outcome.
The JTBD approach fundamentally shifts the development process from adding features to improving the overall job performance of the product.
This is achieved by directing market research to identify parts of the product’s job that are underserved (where importance is high, but satisfaction is low) or over-served.
By focusing on resolving underserved pain points, organizations can deliver value and improve critical points of a customer journey.
❌ Mistake: Assuming all users in a defined demographic segment (e.g., “parents with young children”) are driven by the same job.
✅ Solution: Instead, segment customers by their desired outcome (i.e., the specific progress they are attempting to make by using a product).
For example, one segment of parents might be wanting to instill creativity in their children with a product they’ve purchased, while other parents might be hoping for a few minutes of quiet time while their child uses the product.
Segmenting by progress, not demographics, is the key to actionable research.
❌ Mistake: Focusing on the function a product serves while ignoring any underlying social and emotional context.
✅ Solution: Utilize research to dive deeper into the social and emotional dimensions related to product usage.
These non-functional jobs, such as the desire to feel secure, proud, or respected, are often the key drivers behind a product purchase or brand loyalty.
❌ Mistake: Relying solely on anecdotal evidence from a small number of internal stakeholders or qualitative interviews with customers.
✅ Solution: After initial qualitative research uncovers the potential jobs of a product, it’s critical to validate those findings using quantitative surveys.
This step ensures the identified jobs and pain points are statistically significant for an entire target market, minimizing the risk of building a product for an outlier.
Recommended Reading: Hybrid Research: Combining Qualitative & Quantitative Methods
Adopting the JTBD strategy means making it an organizational habit, steering the direction of both product development and research.
To uncover the true job a product is hired for, organizations should leverage qualitative research such as focus groups or interviews.
When conducting qualitative research with customers, it should focus on understanding the motivations and context of purchase decisions, and what circumstances lead to a customer hiring a product for a job.
The phase of the research should ultimately uncover a customer’s current state and their desired future state.
The research should be focused on actions to achieve the job, and not be specific to a product they might be using. This process is referred to as Job Mapping and it allows market research teams to pinpoint opportunities and identify pain points where a job might be inefficient or overly complex.
After completing the qualitative discovery phase, the insights need to be validated by a larger scale online survey. For the JTBD approach, a technique known as Opportunity Score is often employed.
This metric looks at two data points for each identified outcome:
By focusing on these opportunities (which have now been validated by statistically significant research), the JTBD approach provides clear direction for organizational strategy:
Ultimately, conducting market research through the lens of the The Jobs to Be Done framework is critical for gauging demand and ensuring your product meets the needs of consumers.
By tying innovation to the customer’s desired progress and outcomes, organizations can minimize the risk and maximize their returns for new product launches.
If you are ready to move beyond personas and feature lists and start making decisions grounded in Jobs to Be Done, our team can help.
We design and execute JTBD research that combines deep qualitative interviews with robust quantitative validation, so you can confidently prioritize the jobs, pain points, and outcomes that matter most to your customers.
Share a bit about your product, target audience, and decision timeline, and we will recommend the right-sized JTBD research approach for your team.
