Personas have long been a popular way to represent customers in product research. They typically bundle user traits like age, job title, income level, habits, and preferences into one profile – for example, “Sarah the 35-year-old marketing manager who is tech-savvy and values work-life balance.” While helpful to build empathy or keep teams aligned on a target user, personas alone can fall short when it comes to creating truly innovative products that solve real problems.

Why Personas Can Be Limiting

The main issue with traditional personas is that they often focus on the surface – who the customer is – rather than what drives their behavior. This creates several challenges:

• Generic representations: Personas can lump together individuals with different goals into one average profile, which oversimplifies user behavior.
• Demographics don't equal intent: Just knowing someone is 30 years old and works in tech doesn’t tell you what they’re actually trying to get done.
• Assumption-based: Personas can rely heavily on fictional traits rather than real data from actual users.

Missing Customer Motivations

Personas often ignore the context in which people make decisions. For example, people don’t buy a power drill because they want a drill – they want a hole in the wall. This is a classic illustration of how focusing on motivations rather than profiles leads to clearer product direction. As a result, relying solely on personas can lead teams to design features based on static identities rather than dynamic needs or progress customers are hoping to make in their lives.

How This Impacts Product Development

In practice, this can cause a lot of wasted effort. A team might design features based on an assumed behavior of “busy moms” without understanding what specific outcome those moms are looking for. This can lead to:

• Low product-market fit
• Unclear design priorities
• Missed innovation opportunities

In contrast, using modern market research frameworks that center on real human behavior – like the JTBD method – gives a more accurate, actionable view of the problem space.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a practical market research framework that focuses on what people are trying to achieve in specific situations – their goal or “job.” Instead of asking, “Who is our user?” JTBD asks, “What is our customer trying to accomplish, and under what circumstances?” This small but important shift brings powerful clarity into product innovation and customer insight work.

Understanding the Core Idea of JTBD

The JTBD method is rooted in the idea that people don’t buy products just to own them – they “hire” products to get a specific job done. That job can be functional, emotional, or social in nature. For example, a customer might hire a meal kit service not just for convenience, but also to avoid grocery shopping stress, save time during hectic work weeks, or feel like a better parent by cooking at home.

With JTBD, the focus is on:

• Context: When and why the customer needs to make progress
• Motivation: The deeper reason behind their decision
• Desired outcome: What success looks like from the customer’s point of view

This framework helps product teams go beyond features and functions, unlocking the true reasons customers make choices.

Why JTBD Works Better for Product Innovation

Compared to static personas, JTBD offers more dynamic and actionable insights. By understanding the job, you get a clearer roadmap for decision-making in product development. This can lead to benefits like:

• Higher product-market fit because solutions address real-life use cases
• Avoiding assumptions tied to demographics or roles
• Greater confidence in prioritizing product features based on outcomes

Example in Action

Let’s say your company makes fitness apps. A persona might say, “Mark is 40, lives in the suburbs, and cares about his health.” Helpful – to a point. But if you take a JTBD approach, you might discover that Mark uses fitness apps to feel energized before work, reduce anxiety, and stay accountable while traveling. That tells you much more about what features and experiences he actually needs.

Beginner-Friendly but Deeply Effective

For product managers, marketers, and even startup founders, JTBD is a flexible and intuitive tool that builds stronger alignment between customer insights and innovation strategy. It can be easily paired with other market research frameworks and is especially valuable for teams looking to better understand user needs and consumer behavior in evolving markets.

Ultimately, the big strength of JTBD lies in its human-centered approach – it reveals how and why customers make choices, helping businesses design around real intent instead of idealized profiles.

At the heart of every great product is a deep understanding of what the customer is truly trying to achieve. The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) method goes beyond surface-level traits to uncover real customer motivations, needs, and contexts. Rather than assuming what users want based on demographic profiles, JTBD focuses on the specific problems customers are trying to solve and the outcomes they aim for—what they are “hiring” the product to do for them.

For example, instead of saying “Our user is a 35-year-old marketing manager named Sarah,” JTBD asks, “What job is Sarah trying to accomplish when she uses your product?” This leads to a much more actionable and meaningful understanding of behavior.

JTBD shows why people make the choices they do

The JTBD framework excels at drawing a clear line between intent and action. It looks at the emotional, social, and functional forces that drive customer behavior, which are often invisible to traditional personas.

Let’s say a customer buys a smoothie. JTBD doesn’t stop at surface assumptions like age or health goals. It digs deeper to discover that the customer “hires” the smoothie to replace breakfast during their busy commute. That’s the actual job. With this insight, product teams can improve packaging for convenience, enhance nutrition, or add features like mobile pre-ordering.

This insight is only revealed when you understand:

• The situation: Where and when is the job happening?
• The motivation: What’s pushing or pulling the customer toward a decision?
• The desired outcome: What result is the customer truly after?

In this way, JTBD helps bridge gaps between data and design. It shows that behind every choice is a trigger point—a problem someone is actively trying to resolve. It provides a framework that turns theoretical consumer behavior into real-world application for product development.

This granular, human-centered insight is essential for teams aiming to enhance user needs, optimize market research frameworks, or rethink their innovation strategy. It brings empathy and clarity forward—two pillars of successful innovation. JTBD doesn’t just answer “who” your user is; it answers “why” they need your solution in the first place.

While both personas and Jobs To Be Done offer valuable perspectives, JTBD becomes especially powerful when your goal is product innovation and designing around real customer intent. So, when should you prioritize JTBD over traditional personas?

Use JTBD when you want to design around real problems – not profiles

If your team is asking questions like:

• “What unmet needs are we not seeing?”
• “Why aren’t users sticking with our product?”
• “What are customers trying to do when they choose a competitor?”

…then JTBD is likely the better fit. This framework guides product teams to understand the underlying goals behind behavior—ideal for identifying innovation opportunities.

Situations Where JTBD Shines

Consider these common scenarios where using JTBD can directly impact business outcomes:

1. Launching a new product or service: JTBD helps identify white space in the market by uncovering the 'job' customers are struggling to get done with current options.

2. Repositioning or innovating an existing offering: If users are disengaging or going elsewhere, JTBD helps explore what triggers dissatisfaction and where your product may be missing the mark.

3. Competing in a crowded or evolving category: JTBD supports more precise targeting—focusing on outcomes rather than user types—especially when demographics don't predict behavior.

4. Aligning cross-functional teams: Because JTBD focuses on shared outcomes, it's a powerful tool to create cross-department understanding during product development and go-to-market planning.

JTBD and Personas Can Coexist

It’s also worth noting: you don’t always have to choose – it’s not JTBD vs personas in opposition. In some cases, personas can help bring JTBD insights to life by offering a sense of tone, lifestyle, or context. But when building features, redesigning experiences, or introducing breakthrough ideas, personas alone often lack the depth and specificity JTBD provides.

By complementing or replacing static personas with dynamic “job stories,” teams can move from assumptions to evidence-based action. JTBD offers a way to innovate based on what really matters: the tasks people care about, in the moments that matter most.

The impact of the Jobs To Be Done framework becomes clearest when put into practice. Across industries, from food delivery to healthcare, leading brands have harnessed JTBD to uncover deep customer insights and reimagine their offerings in powerful ways.

Case Example: Streaming Platforms Competing for Evening Relaxation

When one global streaming brand applied JTBD thinking, they discovered users weren’t just “watching video content” – they were hiring the platform to help them unwind after a stressful day. The job was to “help me relax without putting in effort.”

This insight recalibrated their strategy. Instead of building features based solely on watch history, they explored AI-powered recommendations to reduce decision fatigue, introduced ambient background content, and improved interface simplicity. By designing for the real job, usage and satisfaction increased dramatically.

Case Example: Quick-Serve Restaurant Reframing “Grab-and-Go”

A national food chain used JTBD interviews to understand why morning traffic was declining. It turned out customers weren’t just dropping the habit—they were hiring newer competitors for a quicker, calmer pre-work moment. The job wasn’t just “buy coffee”; it was “start my day feeling in control.”

With this perspective, they redesigned their drive-thru flow, added mobile ordering, and scaled back stressful menu clutter. JTBD delivered a strategic lens that moved the brand beyond assumptions toward true customer motivations.

What These Examples Show

These aren't just tweaks based on preferences—they're strategic pivots rooted in a better understanding of user needs. Through JTBD, teams are able to:

• Uncover hidden behavior drivers that traditional personas miss
• Redesign features around intent versus identity
• Align product development with what consumers are actually trying to accomplish

The takeaway? Great products solve specific jobs in moments that matter. When you uncover what those jobs are—through market research frameworks like JTBD—you build with purpose. You create offerings that not only meet needs but feel built precisely for the task at hand.

JTBD in action connects strategy directly to action. And when paired with expert consumer behavior research, it becomes one of the most effective tools in the modern product development toolkit.