Jobs To Be Done

Jobs To Be Done is a research method for uncovering the needs and characteristics of the target audience to predict target group behavior. Or in more simple terms - the gaps between actual self and desired self and what's pulling people in either direction.

My personal opinion is that JBTD is just a more fancy way of doing win-loss interviews (sales have been doing it at least for a hundred years if not since the dawn of commerce).

What Is It Exactly?

In other words, products are not the goal of any purchase. A new, better self is the actual "job to be done". Products just enable customers to get a job done (e.g. to reach a better self). The job is about the customer, features and benefits are about the product.

"Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras — build better photographers." — Kathy Sierra

At the same time, there are things pushing customers toward this new solution and things pulling them back to the old habits.

This is the job of the interviews - to bring out what those exact forces are.

May the forces diagram be with you, always.

The "forces diagram" is an artifact from Jobs-to-be-Done interviews. It frames the energy involved in switching from a current way of doing something to a new way. The "current way" and the "new way" represent a solution of some sort.

jtbd.info

May the forces diagram be with you, always.

Source

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Two Jobs To Be Done There are at least two versions of JTBD going around. One looks jobs as activity (also called outcome-driven innovation) and the other one jobs as progress (from the point of view of personal development). It makes more sense to use the second one because: - Be-goals are more stable than do-goals (which are determined by be-goals) - Be-goals leave more room for innovation (rather than for incremental improvements) - Be-goals appeal to emotions first (the Elephant) There's a very good article about how to map jobs as activities, complete with a formula for describing jobs. Tho, again - I'd stick with jobs as personal progress.

Jobs-As-Progress aims to answer several social phenomena such as:

What causes someone to purchase a product for the first time?
Why and how do consumers use markets to adapt in a changing world
Why and how do consumers shop (search for new products, services, and technologies)?
Why and how do consumers switch between products?

Source: https://jtbd.info/know-the-two-very-different-interpretations-of-jobs-to-be-done-5a18b748bd89

Interview Targets

Chris Spiek recommends starting with 10 interviews:

People who purchased your product
People who fired your product (purchased a competing product)

You'll want to record their story, not talk about your product.

It's very important that you interview both groups. People who ditched your product are harder to interview, so, you might have to use a stronger motivator (such as an Amazon gift card). These interview are sometimes also called switch interviews.

Interviewing

Eventually, you will want to put together the entire timeline (story) - from first thought to buying and satisfaction:

Source: A script to kickstart your jobs to be done interviews (Alan Klement)

However, in order to break the ice you could start with the point of purchase:

When did you purchase the product?
Where were you?
What time of day was it?
What was the weather like?
Was anyone else with you at the time?
How did you purchase the product?
Did you buy anything else at the same time?

Finding the first thought:

When did you first realize you needed something to solve your problem?
Where were you?
Were you with someone?
What were you doing, or trying to do when it happened?

What happened between first thought and purchase - during consideration:

Tell me about how you looked for a product to solve your problem
What kind of solutions did you try? Or not try? Why or why not?

Being curious about emotion:

Did you ask anyone else about what they thought about the purchase you were about to make?
What was the conversation like when you talked about purchasing the product?
Before you purchased did you imagine what using the product would be like? Where were you when you were thinking this?
Did you have anxiety about the purchase? Did you hear something about the product that made you nervous? What was it? Why did it make you nervous?

Presenting Interviews

Name + Nickname
Story
Takeaways
Quotes
Job journey (from which tool to which tool etc)
Change events
Other players
Push events
Pull events
Who decided
How they learned about the tool

Presenting the Job

Job
Alternate wording for the job
More about
Less about
Story
Quotes

What you'll end up having is:

Be goal
Push (motivations)
Pull (problems, fears)
Customer profile
Category

Examples

Nathan Kontny from Basecamp/Highrise shared videos while he was going through the process of finding out jobs. Some good tips about interviews there.
When Coffee & Kale Compete by Alan Klement is a free book about JBTD which also contains examples of interview questions and other tips.
ExtendsLogic provides an example of switch interviews - questions and initial template for getting people to sign up for interviews.
Chris Spiek on increasing SaaS feature adoption with Jobs To Be Done.

Jobs To Be Done & Personas

JBTD can be used together with personas (see Udemy's example). In fact, they compliment each other - personas provides attitudinal information and JBTD situational information. In other words, personas can say whom to target and JTBD where and when to target and how to convince them. When we convince them to use the product, they start a journey or experience.