When you are building a new product or service, you will need to be laser focus on trying to solve for your customer needs. The challenge with this is that the customer needs are generally of two different types. Any customer has functional as well as emotional needs.

This tool will be crucial to make sure the team is aligned around what the customer need is. It is interesting to note that, historically the primary cause of failed products and services is a complete misalignment with the customer needs.

Caveat: Please note that here we are only focusing on the job executor, the person that will be using the product, and are not, at the moment considering the purchase decision maker neither the product lifecycle support team. It is important to understand that each customer will have a different set of needs.

Who could use this

The JTBD framework could be used by anyone that is trying to build a new product or service and is trying to solve a problem for a group of people. The definition of customer is broad and we should consider external and internal customers.

Framework explanation

The JTBD framework will help us understand the different types of jobs the user of the product typically goes through. Those jobs are described as follows:

• The functional jobs
• Related jobs
• Emotional jobs

Depending on the type of product and service that we are building, we might also have to consider:

• Support team jobs
• Purchase team jobs

Caveat: At the moment we are only considering the user of the product jobs but we are planning to have a more holistic framework.

The goal of any product or service is to get a core functional job done better and more cheaply than competing solutions.

When building a product or service we need to understand what are the jobs that the customer is trying to get done either before or after - related jobs - what we are currently trying to solve.

The customer will likely describe the job to be done as an emotion or perceived feeling he would like to have when executing the core functional job. This is important in order to design a product that strongly connects with the customer.

To help crystallise the previous concepts we could express them around the following themes:

• Job statement: In one sentence, what is the key need or problem that this customer has? What they want to get done?
• Customer quote: Write down any quote the customer said about their job-to-be-done.
• Compensating behaviours: What does the customer currently do to solve the job?
• Context & Circumstances: Why does the customer what to get the job done? In what situation?
• Customer's priority areas: What kind of performance is the customer emphasising in getting the job done (time, accessibility, costs, etc ...) ?

It could be interesting and helpful to also check the Interviewing Framework

Slide

Here you will find a slide example. Soon we will implement a feature for anyone to download all the tools that we are building.