The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework helps teams look beyond what users are doing and focus instead on why they’re doing it. Instead of merely tracking usage data or demographic habits, JTBD uncovers the underlying motivations – the “job” a customer is hiring a product or service to do in their life.

Understanding the Customer’s “Job”

So, what exactly is a “job” in JTBD? It’s not a task or checklist item. It’s the progress someone is trying to make in a given circumstance. For instance, a parent buying a minivan isn’t just purchasing transportation—they may be hiring that vehicle to safely move their family, stay organized on the go, or reduce daily stress.

JTBD aligns products with true customer needs

By identifying these real-life jobs, companies gain insights that are much deeper than “people aged 30-45 prefer X.” It lets businesses understand:

• What progress customers want to achieve
• The outcomes customers define as success
• Emotional and practical needs driving decision-making

From Features to Outcomes

When prioritizing product development or marketing strategies, JTBD shifts the focus from features to outcomes. Asking, “What outcomes matter to our users?” helps teams build solutions that better address pain points, friction, or unmet needs.

Examples of meaningful customer outcomes:

• A sense of relief or control (e.g., financial apps that help users reduce stress)
• Saving time or staying efficient (e.g., productivity tools helping teams hit deadlines)
• Improved knowledge or skills (e.g., learning platforms offering visible personal progress)

Rather than guessing what users want, JTBD lets teams measure what customers actually value. This includes emotional satisfaction, perceived control, progress made, or impact on their day-to-day lives. These insights help businesses align offerings with real-world needs, driving customer loyalty and stronger product-market fit.

A Strategic Foundation for Growth

At SIVO Insights, we’ve seen how JTBD-based research can bring clarity to product and service development. When organizations rethink how to define success through the lens of the customer’s job, it becomes easier to innovate around what really matters. It’s a shift from designing for features or personas to designing for outcomes and progress – the things that keep customers coming back.

In the past, many businesses relied heavily on usage data to determine product performance. How often are people logging in? How many clicks per page? While these metrics have value, they don’t always tell the full story. They signal activity, but not necessarily impact.

That’s where Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) comes in. By focusing on user outcomes instead of usage, JTBD helps organizations understand whether their product is actually helping customers achieve something important – not just use it frequently.

The Difference Between Activity and Success

Let’s use an example: Imagine a fitness app. High usage might show that users are opening the app daily, logging workouts, and checking content. But do those behaviors mean users are meeting their fitness goals? Not necessarily.

Measuring outcomes means asking questions like:

• Do users feel more confident or healthier?
• Are they seeing real improvements in fitness or energy?
• Has the product helped them stick to their routines over time?

These are deeper indicators of whether the “job” is being done, and whether the product is delivering on its promise. Usage may be a signal, but it’s not the full measure of success.

JTBD Helps You Measure What Customers Actually Care About

The goal of JTBD research is to uncover and track what matters most to customers in specific situations. With that insight, teams can define customer outcome metrics using JTBD – such as progress made, satisfaction achieved, or emotional relief gained.

This outcome-driven approach is especially useful when:

• Evaluating product-market fit
• Prioritizing product features or roadmap decisions
• Defining what a successful customer experience looks like

Benefits Over Usage Metrics

Some of the top benefits of measuring outcomes instead of just usage include:

• Clarity around customer value: You know what value means to the user, in their own terms.
• Improved retention strategies: You can design better journeys that support goal completion, not just ongoing use.
• Competitive differentiation: Stand out by solving real problems that competitors may overlook.

JTBD in Action

At SIVO, we often use JTBD frameworks in our qualitative and quantitative research to surface real-world outcomes across industries – from healthcare to tech to financial services. We’ve seen how focusing on customer needs and progress allows businesses to develop smarter strategies, improve product experiences, and enhance long-term loyalty.

In short, usage tells you what users are doing. Outcomes tell you why they’re doing it – and whether it’s working. With JTBD as your guide, you can measure customer success in a way that’s far more meaningful than just numbers on a dashboard.

Too often, product development is driven by assumptions or internal goals—like improving features, reducing bugs, or keeping pace with competitors. But these efforts don’t always translate to happier or more successful customers. The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework offers a different lens: build around what your customers are actually trying to accomplish. In short, JTBD guides teams to focus on user outcomes over just feature output.

The core idea is simple: Customers 'hire' products and services to help them get a job done. That job is not defined by the product itself, but by the goal the customer needs to achieve. By understanding that goal—including the emotional and functional elements—you can align your product development efforts with real customer value.

How JTBD Helps Product Teams Stay Focused

When product teams center their planning around customer jobs, they prioritize features and improvements that directly help users make progress. This ensures that what you're building ties back to defined customer needs—not just internal roadmaps or usage trends.

Ways JTBD Improves Product Development

• Clarifies priorities: JTBD highlights the outcomes that matter most to customers, making it easier to decide which ideas to pursue.
• Bridges gaps between teams: A clear customer job can serve as a shared goal across design, engineering, and marketing.
• Reduces waste: Instead of adding generic features, teams focus on features that drive real customer outcomes.

For example, instead of thinking “We need a faster app,” JTBD reframes the goal to “Help users accomplish their task with less frustration.” That shift changes how you measure customer success—from technical performance alone to actual user happiness and progress. This distinction is a critical difference between JTBD and traditional usage metrics.

The JTBD approach also opens up new ways to measure impact. Rather than tracking log-ins or time spent in the app, teams can define customer outcome metrics using JTBD, such as task completion rates, emotional satisfaction, or perceived value. These are much closer to what your customer actually cares about.

When product development is anchored in JTBD insights, solutions feel more intuitive, relevant, and designed with purpose. This alignment with what customers are truly trying to achieve sets the foundation for long-term loyalty and customer success.

While the Jobs To Be Done framework sounds like theory, it's highly practical—and widely used by leading companies. Real-world JTBD examples show how organizations apply it to design better products, improve services, and deliver more meaningful user outcomes.

JTBD in Consumer Apps

Consider a popular meditation app. Many users don’t download it simply because they “want to meditate.” Their deeper job might be to “manage stress during a demanding workday” or “fall asleep faster at night.” When the company discovered these jobs through market research, they shifted focus from generic content to tailored stress-reduction and sleep routines. Usage spiked not because the app added more features, but because it better aligned with what users were actually trying to achieve – a clear example of JTBD and customer value alignment.

Physical Products with Hidden Jobs

Take a high-end blender brand. Most customers didn’t just want smoothies—they wanted to feel healthier every day with minimal effort. Understanding this customer job inspired the brand to develop pre-packaged ingredients, one-touch blend programs, and faster cleanup features. Instead of competing on motor power alone, the company focused on making daily health convenient—helping users make smoother progress toward their wellness goals.

Service Industries Adopting JTBD

JTBD is especially useful in service-based industries. For example, a bank might think its job is offering loans. But deeper research might find the true job is “give me peace of mind about buying my first home.” This subtle shift reshapes how services are delivered—prioritizing trust, education, and a simplified approval process. That’s where JTBD helps measure customer success based on how confident and informed someone feels, not just their loan volume or app usage.

These real-world JTBD implementation examples show how powerful it can be to revisit what your customers are really trying to accomplish. Instead of improving only functions or interfaces, organizations can boost satisfaction, loyalty, and growth by delivering customer outcomes that truly matter.

At the core of good market research is one question: what do your customers need to succeed? Using the Jobs To Be Done framework provides a structured way to answer that question. Whether you're conducting qualitative interviews, surveys, or ethnographic studies, JTBD offers a lens for uncovering what truly motivates customer behavior—and how to act on it.

Unlike traditional personas or demographic segmentation, JTBD doesn't stop at who the customer is. Instead, it gets to the heart of why they use a product or service, and what defines success in their eyes. This mindset shift helps researchers move beyond measuring usage patterns and toward capturing measurable and emotional progress—key elements of customer outcome metrics using JTBD.

How to Use JTBD for Customer Insights

When planning your next research initiative, JTBD can shape both your questions and analysis:

• Frame questions around progress: Instead of asking what people do, ask what they’re trying to accomplish, and what obstacles stand in their way.
• Explore emotional jobs: Identify not only the functional goals (e.g., complete a task) but also the emotional drivers like feeling confident, secure, or prepared.
• Test solution fit: Evaluate whether your product or service actually helps customers complete their job—and in a way that feels easy and satisfying.

For researchers and business leaders alike, incorporating JTBD helps make findings actionable. You’re not just collecting data—you’re identifying opportunities to improve lives.

Partnering with a team like SIVO Insights ensures that your JTBD research is both grounded in human empathy and supported by rigorous methods. We help organizations uncover unmet needs, clarify the difference between reported behavior and real motivations, and build out frameworks that make the complex simple—so your team knows exactly how to move forward.

JTBD can be applied across qualitative and quantitative methods:

Qualitative research:

Deep-dive interviews and in-context observations help surface the hidden jobs customers are hiring a product or service to solve. These sessions can capture emotional context and unmet needs that usage stats alone often miss.

Quantitative validation:

Once jobs are identified, surveys and performance tracking can reveal how widespread these needs are and which opportunities carry the most impact for your business strategy.

Whether you’re developing a product, improving a service, or entering a new market, JTBD brings your focus to what ultimately matters—helping your customer succeed.