Introduction
What Is the Jobs to Be Done Framework?
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework is a way of understanding consumer behavior by asking this simple but transformative question: What job is the customer hiring this product or service to do? Rather than relying solely on traditional demographics or broad persona types, JTBD focuses on the underlying goals a customer is trying to achieve when they make a purchase or interact with a brand.
This idea stems from the recognition that people don’t just buy products – they ‘hire’ them to complete a task in their lives. For example, someone may buy a smoothie not just to drink something healthy, but to replace breakfast during a busy commute. The real ‘job’ isn’t just nutritional intake – it's saving time in the morning without sacrificing health.
Breaking Down the Core Concepts of JTBD
Understanding JTBD involves a few key principles that help businesses see beyond the surface:
- Jobs are goals: JTBD defines a 'job' as the progress a customer seeks in a given situation. It's a goal they want to achieve, not just a task or chore.
- Context matters: The same product may be hired for different jobs by different people depending on the situation. Customer context is crucial.
- Solutions change, jobs remain: While products evolve, the core jobs people need done often stay consistent over time.
What sets JTBD apart in market research is how it blends both function (what people want to do) and emotion (how they want to feel while doing it). This duality is key to crafting better customer experience strategies and product development roadmaps.
Why JTBD is Useful for Business Strategy
For businesses exploring how to use JTBD for product development, the framework offers a clear lens through which to view innovation. It reveals unmet needs, helps prioritize features based on purpose, and aligns teams around customer experience strategy without relying on vague personas or assumptions.
As a market research tool, JTBD simplifies complexity. It supports teams in asking better questions and uncovering deeper motivations – reducing risk when launching new offerings and increasing the likelihood of product-market fit.
Ultimately, Jobs to Be Done helps businesses step into their customers’ shoes in a more meaningful way – not just asking what they want, but why they want it and what success looks like from their perspective.
How JTBD Helps You Understand Customer Needs
One of the biggest challenges in improving customer experience is understanding what your customers actually want – beyond just features or price points. This is where the JTBD framework becomes especially valuable. By identifying the deeper motivations behind purchasing decisions, the framework reveals unmet customer needs that can become opportunities for innovation and growth.
Moving Beyond Surface-Level Data
Traditional customer research often focuses on what people do. You might know, for instance, that a certain segment of shoppers tends to buy online during lunchtime. But that data only scratches the surface. JTBD helps you dig deeper and ask: Why are they shopping at that time? What’s pushing them to purchase? What problem are they trying to solve in that moment?
Using JTBD to understand customer needs allows businesses to shift from a transactional mindset to a more empathetic one. This leads to clearer insight into what causes frustration, drives satisfaction, or sparks loyalty.
Uncovering Functional and Emotional Jobs
The strength of the JTBD approach lies in its ability to explore both functional and emotional dimensions of consumer behavior. For example:
- Functional Job: A customer buys an ergonomic chair to reduce back pain while working from home.
- Emotional Job: That same purchase also fulfills the desire to feel more professional and productive during the workday.
Understanding both types of jobs leads to more holistic solutions and is critical to improving CX with market research tools. This dual insight helps teams refine not just their products, but how they are positioned, marketed, and supported throughout the customer journey.
Identifying Unmet Needs with JTBD
Using JTBD in your market research efforts provides a structured way to discover gaps between current solutions and what customers really want to achieve. This is essential when identifying pain points or answering questions like:
- What jobs are customers using our product for today – and which jobs are we missing?
- Are there points in the customer journey where their goals are going unfulfilled?
- How can we support those goals better than the competition?
For instance, a fictional grocery delivery company might find through JTBD research that many customers aren’t just looking for fast delivery – they’re seeking help with meal planning during hectic weekdays. This insight opens the door to experience improvements like recipe suggestions and pre-selected weekly bundles.
JTBD prompts businesses to see value from the customer’s perspective, making it an excellent foundation for crafting more personalized, effective customer experience strategies. It’s particularly helpful for teams exploring market research for customer experience, offering a strategic way to turn findings into meaningful action.
By applying the JTBD framework, companies aren’t just collecting data – they’re learning how to meet customers where they are, delivering on jobs that matter most and reinforcing brand trust along the way.
Why Jobs to Be Done Matters for Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) is more than just a touchpoint or transaction – it’s the full journey a person has with your product, service, or brand. In today’s competitive market, delivering a seamless and satisfying experience can be a major differentiator. That’s where the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework becomes valuable.
Traditional approaches to CX often focus on demographics or product features, but JTBD asks a more meaningful question: What is the customer trying to accomplish? By understanding the job a customer hires your product to do, businesses can design experiences that feel more personal, relevant, and effective at solving real problems.
JTBD helps uncover unmet needs and pain points
Every customer is trying to make progress in some area of their life or work. When businesses identify and support the specific outcomes customers are striving for, they can enhance loyalty, ease, and satisfaction. The JTBD lens highlights gaps in experience that might otherwise be missed – like emotional frustrations or contextual barriers that keep people from success.
For example, imagine a meal kit service. The job isn’t just “having dinner” – it might be “feeling like a capable home cook despite a busy schedule.” If the company only focuses on recipe variety but overlooks how difficult it is to prep meals in under 30 minutes, the customer experience suffers. JTBD redirects attention to what truly matters.
Aligns CX strategy with true user motivations
Using Jobs Theory as a foundation for experience design ensures you’re not just optimizing features – you’re aligning experiences with core human motivations. This shift can have meaningful business results:
- More personalized product development
- Improved usability across channels
- Emotional resonance that builds brand trust
Ultimately, when you understand why customers engage with your brand, you can proactively shape experiences that support them – leading to higher customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy.
As market research continues to evolve, the JTBD framework offers a powerful way to combine data, consumer behavior, and empathy – placing your customers at the center of every decision.
The result? Experiences that don’t just meet expectations, but help people achieve meaningful success – a win for both your users and your business growth strategy.
Examples of JTBD in Action Across Industries
Jobs to Be Done isn’t limited to tech-driven products or large corporations – it’s a flexible framework that applies across industries and customer types. When done right, it brings focus to what truly drives behavior and satisfaction, regardless of the market or offering.
Retail: Designing for mission-oriented shoppers
Consider a fictional home improvement store. Customers don’t just “buy tools.” One customer might be “trying to quickly fix a leaking sink before guests arrive,” while another is “looking to upskill in DIY to save money over time.” Each of these jobs suggests different merchandising layouts, communication styles, and in-store services. JTBD helps clarify these underlying drivers to craft a more responsive user experience.
Healthcare: Humanizing digital experiences
In telehealth, a JTBD-informed approach can transform design. Rather than focusing solely on appointment logistics, a healthcare provider might recognize the core job as “seeking peace of mind quickly for a sudden health concern.” Knowing this, they could streamline onboarding and reduce wait times – boosting emotional confidence and patient satisfaction.
Financial services: Supporting future planning
A fictional bank looking to attract younger users might realize its app isn’t just used to “check balances” – it’s being hired to “feel in control of personal finances while learning to save.” This insight can inspire features like budget coaching or milestone visuals that deliver emotional rewards as well as functional outcomes.
Subscription services: Minimizing hassle and friction
Imagine a pet food subscription company. JTBD might reveal that customers are really trying to “ensure my pet stays healthy without frequent trips to the store.” With that clarity, the company can improve its value through better delivery tracking, pet profile personalization, or refill reminders that avoid overstock – each enhancing the perceived user value.
Across all these examples, the common thread is identifying a customer’s real motivation and tailoring the product or service around that goal – even if it's emotional, contextual, or indirect. JTBD helps create a more intuitive, supportive, and complete customer experience by focusing on the goal, not just the actions.
By applying JTBD across your research and strategy, your team can move from guesswork to clarity – turning blurry customer feedback into clear, actionable insight.
Getting Started: How SIVO Can Help You Apply JTBD
Whether you’re building a new product, refreshing your customer experience strategy, or exploring unmet customer needs, the Jobs to Be Done framework provides a practical foundation. But implementing JTBD effectively takes more than simply asking customers what they want – it requires deep listening, structured interviews, and interpretation that aligns with business strategy. This is where SIVO Insights can help.
Tailored research that’s grounded in people
At SIVO, we specialize in uncovering the human needs that drive behavior. Our consumer insights services include qualitative and quantitative research approaches designed to identify and validate customer jobs across industries. Whether you're exploring early concept development or rethinking UX, we help you interpret what your customers are really “hiring” your product to do.
From exploration to action with JTBD
Using our full-service custom research toolkit, we guide you through key JTBD applications:
- Uncovering unmet needs: We help you identify where current offerings fall short and why customers are switching between solutions.
- Segmenting by job, not just demographics: Organizing your market by motivations opens the door to more relevant targeting and messaging.
- Validating opportunities: Our rigorous insights turn qualitative ideas into measurable hypotheses that can support product development, go-to-market planning, and CX innovation.
We don't deliver generic reports – we provide clear, actionable insights shaped for your organization’s goals, stakeholders, and execution needs. SIVO’s research is always human-led, bringing empathy and observation together with data, while recognizing where AI tools can enhance speed and scale.
A partner in strategic growth
Getting started with Jobs to Be Done doesn't have to be overwhelming. With SIVO’s experienced insight team and flexible support options, including On Demand Talent, your team gains the guidance and bandwidth to build successful, research-backed strategies.
We work with brands and organizations of all sizes, across all industries – because at the core, people everywhere are making choices, solving problems, and seeking progress. JTBD gives you the lens to help them do just that, and SIVO brings the tools and talent to put it into action.
Summary
The Jobs to Be Done framework offers a clear, focused way to understand what truly drives customer behavior. By asking what job your product or service is being hired to do, companies can move beyond features and functions and start creating customer experiences that solve real problems. From identifying unmet customer needs to building more meaningful user journeys, JTBD helps align product strategy with what matters most to your audience.
As we’ve explored throughout this post – from the basics of JTBD to its role in market research, to examples across industries – this approach simplifies complex consumer behavior and delivers insights with real business impact. Whether you're new to market research or refining an existing CX strategy, JTBD helps put your customer’s goals at the center of your decision-making process.
SIVO Insights brings this framework to life through custom research, expert interpretation, and actionable recommendations to support long-term business growth. When you understand what customers are really trying to achieve, your brand becomes not just useful – but essential to their success.
Summary
The Jobs to Be Done framework offers a clear, focused way to understand what truly drives customer behavior. By asking what job your product or service is being hired to do, companies can move beyond features and functions and start creating customer experiences that solve real problems. From identifying unmet customer needs to building more meaningful user journeys, JTBD helps align product strategy with what matters most to your audience.
As we’ve explored throughout this post – from the basics of JTBD to its role in market research, to examples across industries – this approach simplifies complex consumer behavior and delivers insights with real business impact. Whether you're new to market research or refining an existing CX strategy, JTBD helps put your customer’s goals at the center of your decision-making process.
SIVO Insights brings this framework to life through custom research, expert interpretation, and actionable recommendations to support long-term business growth. When you understand what customers are really trying to achieve, your brand becomes not just useful – but essential to their success.