Understanding the 'Job' Behind the Product

Benefits of JTBD for Product Teams

• Focuses on outcomes: JTBD helps teams prioritize problems that consumers are actively trying to solve, rather than building features for features’ sake.
• Informs roadmap decisions: By understanding which jobs are most underserved, product leads can focus their resources where the market has the greatest need.
• Reduces guesswork: Rooted in qualitative research, JTBD insights offer clarity around what’s driving user behavior – creating better alignment within product teams.

Real-World Example: From Concept to Product-Market Fit

Seeing Beyond the Journey Map

Benefits of JTBD for Customer Experience Teams

• Centers CX around human intent: Instead of optimizing touchpoints in isolation, JTBD helps teams look holistically at what customers are trying to achieve across moments.
• Creates empathy and alignment: By showing the emotional and motivational aspects of experience, JTBD fosters stronger alignment between CX, UX, and other business teams.
• Prioritizes meaningful improvements: Once the real "job" is understood, changes to journeys, messaging, or digital tools can be more focused and effective.

A JTBD Lens in Action: Improving a Retail Experience

From Insights to Strategy

Understanding Jobs to Be Done from a Research Team's Perspective

For market research and consumer insights professionals, the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework offers a structured way to uncover the “why” behind customer behavior. While traditional qualitative research often focuses on attitudes or preferences, JTBD dives deeper into the underlying motivations and outcomes people are trying to achieve – their ‘job’ to be done.

This mindset helps research teams produce more actionable and future-focused insights that align closely with what customers actually need, rather than what they say they want. It reframes research objectives around customer intent – a valuable shift that leads to more targeted strategies across product development, customer experience, and marketing.

How JTBD Enhances Market Research

• Goes beyond demographics: JTBD research emphasizes context and intent over surface-level traits, helping teams segment audiences by purpose, not just profiles.
• Drives innovation insights: By identifying unmet needs and functional, emotional, or social jobs, research teams can pinpoint whitespace opportunities for innovation strategy.
• Supports cross-functional clarity: JTBD findings are easy to share across departments, offering unified consumer insights that inform business conversations from UX design to executive decision-making.

When JTBD Methodology Makes the Greatest Impact

JTBD excels when you're exploring what's motivating customer choices in complex or crowded categories. If recent initiatives are falling short, market research teams can apply this framework to clarify problem-solution fit and uncover demand patterns that traditional surveys or segmentation might miss.

For example, rather than asking “Which snack brand do you prefer?”, a JTBD-aligned study might explore, “What are you hiring a snack to do for you during your commute or afternoon slump?” That shift can lead to new product formats, packaging ideas, or messaging strategies anchored in real-life context.

Market research professionals can use JTBD to complement other qualitative or quantitative methods – generating rich, narrative insights that fill in the human story behind the data. This ultimately strengthens their role as strategic partners inside the organization, delivering customer intelligence that drives innovation and growth.

Why Decision Makers Need Jobs to Be Done Research

Business leaders don’t need to be research experts to benefit from JTBD research – they just need to understand what it reveals: clarity around what customers are truly trying to accomplish and why. This is mission-critical information for leaders shaping strategy across product, customer experience, or marketing.

For decision makers, JTBD research serves as a lens to evaluate current offerings, uncover unmet demand, and align teams around initiatives that drive value. When markets become saturated or growth slows, revisiting your value propositions through the JTBD framework can reveal new paths forward.

Strategic Benefits of JTBD for Business Leaders

• Sharpens innovation strategy: JTBD helps you focus investment on what people are truly trying to solve – identifying ideas with long-term traction, not just short-term trends.
• Improves cross-functional alignment: When your teams agree on what “job” the product or brand fulfills, everyone from product managers to marketers can pull in the same direction.
• De-risks decisions: JTBD insights reduce guesswork in roadmap prioritization and go-to-market planning by anchoring decisions in customer context.

From Insight to Action

Jobs to Be Done is particularly useful in moments of change – such as entering new markets, launching a product, or rethinking brand positioning. It gives leaders a way to prioritize consumer needs that matter most, without relying on instinct alone.

For example, if you’re evaluating whether to expand into a new segment, JTBD can show whether that segment has an unsolved job and how your brand might be uniquely positioned to meet it. Or, if you're seeing customer churn, JTBD interviews might reveal breakpoints in the journey where alternative solutions feel easier or more effective.

Ultimately, JTBD research gives decision makers a more reliable view of the customer landscape – helping leaders avoid shiny-object distractions and instead focus on impactful, customer-led growth strategies.

Knowing the Right Moment for JTBD Research

While Jobs to Be Done insights are powerful, they’re most effective when applied at the right time and place in your organization. Because JTBD reveals motivations, unmet needs, and context-specific behaviors, it’s particularly useful during moments of change, risk, or innovation.

This makes JTBD a go-to method across different departments, not just for product teams. From customer experience and UX teams to brand leaders and marketers, many groups can benefit from uncovering the deeper reasons people choose – or reject – products and services.

Key Use Cases for JTBD Research

Here are some examples of when applying Jobs to Be Done methodology can provide the biggest payoff:

• Early-stage product development: Use JTBD to identify which problems are worth solving before committing to a new feature or product line.
• Innovation strategy: Explore whitespace opportunities across categories by uncovering unmet needs consumers are trying to solve in unconventional ways.
• Market expansion decisions: Evaluate new audiences or geographies by understanding if and how their job contexts differ.
• Brand positioning or messaging refresh: Reframe how your brand shows up by aligning with the functional and emotional ‘jobs’ your audience cares about.
• Customer retention efforts: Identify pain points and motivators at key journey stages where customers might switch to competitors.

Making JTBD a Cross-Team Tool

Because JTBD insights connect so directly to customer experience, they can – and should – be shared across departments. When product, marketing, UX, and research teams have a common understanding of the customer’s job, they can build more cohesive solutions and messages.

You don’t need to re-structure your team to adopt JTBD. Instead, use it as a problem-framing tool: one that supports clearer questions, better ideation, and stronger cross-functional collaboration.

Whether your goal is to fine-tune current offerings or plan what’s next, Jobs to Be Done equips you with the kind of consumer insights that reveal not just what people do – but what they’re striving to achieve.