Knowing what users want, prioritizing the right features, identifying competitive differentiators, and developing your market positioning is hard.

It can also be extremely complicated – inputs from customers may differ from inputs from developers and product managers, the competitive landscape is changing all the time, and creating a truly innovative product that results in obsessed users sometimes feels like a shot in the dark in the midst of all this noise.

The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory keeps product development simple. The overarching premise is this: your customers are hiring your product to get a job done. A straightforward and perhaps obvious concept.

And part of the beauty of the JTBD framework is that it is obvious – all product teams should have a basic understanding that their customers are hiring them to get a job done in the same way someone hires a plumber to fix their pipes.

But too often the explicit customer need a product was built to solve becomes obfuscated by the furious chaos of development as new features and bells and whistles are added to core product functionality. Many product teams lose sight of the job they are ultimately trying to complete for their customers.

Worse still, plenty of product teams can’t agree on the specific need they’re solving for. This leads to a lack of alignment, tons of wasted dev time on features that do little to relieve relevant customer pain points, confused prospects, and, ultimately, products that fail to find an eager market of buyers.

Following JTBD theory and its accompanying framework keeps product development focused on customer needs. When engineering, product, and marketing teams are aligned on customer needs, they’re in a much better position to not only build innovative products focused on achieving desired outcomes for users, but also to communicate and prove the value of their product in a compelling way.

Already know the basics of JTBD theory? Skip to an analysis of how this theory changes the way your product teams think.

The basics of JTBD theory

There are 9 basic tenets of the JTBD theory as described by the pioneer of the concept, Strategyn founder Tony Ulwick. Each one helps companies keep their focus on getting a job done, accurately measuring their ability to get that job done as well as possible, and keeping their mind open to innovative approaches for completing that job.

1. People buy products and services to get a job done

It’s important here to clarify what “jobs” means in this context: the job doesn’t describe the need, what the customer is doing, or product functionality. The job denotes what the customer is trying to accomplish.

Ulwick advises defining the customer and the job as the market. For example, if you’re selling a hammer, the market is professional and DIY builders who are trying to secure nails in construction projects.

2. Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components.

This widens the scope of how developers and product teams think about their solution. When a customer gets a job done, they want to feel and be perceived in a certain way.

For example, professional and DIY builders want to complete construction projects, but they also want to feel like they’ve built someone a forever home, or built a piece of furniture that makes their own home more comforting and warm. They may want to be perceived as a provider, or a an agent of progress in society.

Conducting qualitative analysis across your customer base to identify the feelings associated with the job-to-be-done can elicit job statements, or statements about how completing that job makes customers feel, that inform marketing value props and product development decisions.

3. A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time

The job-to-be-done should be something customers have been trying to achieve for a long time and will likely still need to achieve in the future. This ensures your target market is stable. While new products may arrive on the market, the job stays the same.

Building the product strategy around a stable job-to-be-done ensures the strategy stays consistent over time and enables the product team to stay focused on a singular, static north star.

4. A Job-to-be-Done is solution-agnostic

This tenet reinforces that the “job” at the core of the company never changes, even if your teams create new solutions to address the job in the future. It also keeps the door open for innovation: if your company identifies a new way to get the job done in an even better or cheaper way, that solution should be pursued.

Ensuring your product teams are married to the job and not the product is key to maintaining an eye for innovation. For example: Amazon has always been focused on making online shopping and delivery more convenient. They never consigned themselves to selling books.

This is also useful for informing competitive analysis: rather than focusing on similar solutions in the marketplace, your teams should focus on companies that help customers complete the same job.

5. Success comes from making the job, rather than the product or the customer, the unit of analysis

This focuses your metrics on how well your customers can get the job done. In other words: do you deliver the customer’s desired outcomes.

Ulwick suggests that teams create a job map rather than a process map or a customer journey map. A job map describes what the customer is trying to get done rather than what they’re doing.

A job map invites product teams to define the company vision and direction, discover opportunities for innovation and improvement in the market, and guide the process of identifying customer needs.

Teams following JTBD theory should identify the customer’s needs as the metrics customers use to measure their success when completing a job. These needs are defined as customer’s desired outcomes.

“A desired outcome statement is a specially constructed need statement that has a unique set of characteristics: desired outcomes are devoid of solutions, stable over time, measureable, controllable, structured for reliable prioritization in a quantitative customer survey, and are tied to the underlying process (or job) the customer is trying to get done,” clarified Ulwick.

Customer outcome statements identify where and why customers are struggling to get the job done, enable companies to think about new ways to help them get this job done in a better or cheaper way, and identify the ideas most likely to help the customers complete the job in the best way possible.

6. A deep understanding of the customer’s “job” makes marketing more effective and innovation far more predictable.

Building and refining a deep understanding of the customer’s job ensures all teams within a company have a holistic view of all customer needs. They no longer need to waste time identifying a need – instead, they all know the need and direct their efforts to solving for this need.

Another benefit of having an understanding of the customer’s job is that it ensures the countless user interviews product manager’s conduct do not derail innovation. Certain customers may have certain ideas for features, but their personal opinions don’t speak for an entire market.

Furthermore, customers often don’t know what they want – they think they do, but a good product team will develop a surprising but inevitable solution that gets the job done in a new way. Consider the car and its inception as an innovation in transportation. Before cars, customers thought they needed a faster horse.

7. People want products and services that will help them get a job done better and/or more cheaply

According to Ulwick, people largely aren’t loyal to brands. They’re looking for whatever product or service will get the job done better, or get the job done for cheaper. Some are willing to pay more for the best, while others are willing to take ‘good enough’ at a lower price.

8. People seek out products and services that enable them to get the entire job done on a single platform.

When solutions only get part of a job done, customers are required to integrate several different other solutions to get the entire job done. Customers would prefer a one-and-done approach that gives them everything they need to complete a job in one tool or platform.

This tenet is also useful for informing product strategy – as technology evolves, new opportunities to build innovative solutions to getting a job done become possible. This is why it’s important to keep product strategy consistent over time when using the JTBD framework: developers and product teams can continue to innovate, identify opportunities to build new functionality or solutions, and improve the product to get the job done better for their customers over time.

9. Innovation becomes predictable when “needs” are defined as the metrics customers use to measure success when getting the job done.

This last premise is the most compelling reason to implement the JTBD framework – innovation, especially in a market as crowded and fast as tech, is key to standing out in any meaningful way.

Creating innovative products is often characterized as a spontaneous stroke of luck rather than a predictable outcome that can be achieved through an intentional, measurable process. JTBD posits that the latter is true – any company can achieve innovation, and in fact innovation is the predictable outcome of adhering to this framework.

How thinking in terms of JTBD helps product teams

JTBD can help inform product strategy, guide user interviews, inform competitive analysis, and keep the door open for innovation while staying true to the goals and values of your company.

Thinking of JTBD theory as an anchor tying your team back to what’s most important can help you avoid common pitfalls that can ultimately lead product teams to failure.

Below are three common mistakes that a deep understanding of JTBD theory can help your product teams avoid.

The customer is always right

Product teams knee-deep in user interviews are getting tons of different suggestions about ‘must-have’ features, roadblocks to adoption, UI preferences, and countless other aspects of their product.

While customer feedback is invaluable, everyone’s individual tastes are different. Even more significantly, customers are rarely thinking in truly innovative ways. And that’s okay – it’s not their job to come up with your true differentiator.

Customers are more often thinking in terms of products that already exist and how your team can improve on or integrate features they’re familiar with. Moreover, if you’re building a product within an existing market, they’re framing your solution in comparison to what they currently use.

For true innovation to blossom, product teams need to think as far outside the box as possible. This is easiest when thinking about a solution in relation to the job you’re trying to complete, rather than the product you’re already building.

JTBD theory assists in fostering this kind of thinking by shifting the focus away from the products within a certain marketplace and fixing the market securely on the job customers want to accomplish. In the famous Henry Ford example referenced earlier, Ford wasn’t competing in the horse-and-buggy market. He was competing in the transportation market.

Hinging feature prioritization or product improvements on customer feedback alone can lead your teams to develop solutions that closely mirror the products in a particular market, rather than revolutionizing that market entirely.

Product changes warrant changes to the product strategy

As teams frantically build new features, shift their product messaging, and gather inputs on how products can improve, it’s easy to drift from the initial customer needs and pain points onto which the company is predicated.

But two tenets of JTBD theory emphasize the importance of maintaining a stable focus on a single job regardless of the products you build.

There are related jobs that spring forth from that initial job, and ample opportunities to launch new solutions to get that job done better. But the importance of staying true to your companies’ product strategy cannot be overstated.

The fact is, when market disruption occurs, companies tethered to their existing product will fall to the wayside. On the contrary, companies open to innovation that are willing to abandon their existing products in favor of whatever gets the job done better are well-positioned to find ways to maintain vitality even when competition heats up.

Maintaining a solution-agnostic approach to your product strategy and building your company around a stable job-to-be-done keeps your product team nimble.

With a JTBD mindset, new technologies don’t threaten the existence of your company. They simply raise the bar for the solutions that complete the job, and motivate your teams to think differently about how you serve customer needs.

Your competitive analysis should only includes products similar to yours

When conducting a competitive analysis, it’s tempting to include only five or six companies with solutions very similar to yours.

But this approach limits your ability to innovate. If you’re only thinking about your product in relation to similar solutions, feature prioritization and product improvements will ultimately only yield improvements that your competitor is likely to also implement in the near future. This leads to an endless cat-and-mouse game where you and your competitors are simply innovating on the narrow capabilities of existing products.

Furthermore, products that seem similar to yours may not even be trying to accomplish the same job. Figma and Trello may both be productivity tools, but Figma is focused on helping design teams deliver products faster while Trello helps teams stay organized.

Aspects of these products may be similar – they keep teams organized, they allow for async collaboration, et cetera. But the jobs they are trying to complete are quite different.

That’s why it’s so important to spend time zeroing in on who and what you’re competing against. If you’re building a tool to help a certain cohort of customers get something done faster, a cursory surveyal of productivity tools is not incisive enough. You need to define your customer and your specific job, and drill into competitors in that space.

The JTBD theory ensures your focus stays both broad and focused enough: your approach to solutions stays broad, but your approach to solving needs for your customers stays specific.

Integrating the JTBD theory into your approach to product strategy and product development keeps innovative thinking alive even in mature companies and ensures changes in the product and company stay in line with your initial mission.

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