“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” - Mark Twain*
How could these four letters capture my everlasting devotion? JTBD. So beautiful, you could hang it on the walls of a museum. Jobs to Be Done isn't exactly paparazzi material. What gets the attention is the end result: an ad that hits just right or a product that finds its market so convincingly it all looks effortless. But it isn't. Behind that work is research, and I argue there's no better framework for understanding customers than JTBD. IMO, it's the bedrock for great marketing and products that stick.
Its beauty is in its simplicity. Sometimes I'm almost embarrassed to explain JTBD because when I’m rambling, it sounds a bit like, "No sh*t, Sherlock." But the work behind something so seemingly obvious is anything but simple.
Full warning: I have heart eyes for JTBD. You may have guessed, eye-rolled, or felt a sense of dread when you saw this is only Part 1. How many parts will there be? You (and I) may just have to wait to find out. For now, let's start with why I love it.
So what even is JTBD?
I don’t want to get too academic and will have to rein in my nerdiness and penchant for being a know-it-all. Jobs to Be Done is nothing new. Conceptually, she's approaching middle age (no under-eye bags here. She’s like a fine wine, getting better with time). I think it's applicable across all sorts of fields - Marketing, Sales, CS - it's really about understanding your buyer, your customer, your users.
At its heart, JTBD is about the progress people are trying to make in a particular circumstance. What are people actually trying to accomplish when they buy your product? Satiate hunger? Make themselves appear smart to their boss (I’ll get into this more later, but emotional and social jobs carry more weight than most people give them credit for)? It's about what people are trying to accomplish, and why. It’s not rocket science. The magic of JTBD is what you do with it. Knowing these jobs helps you build products people actually want and messaging that makes buyers think, “Wow, they just get me.”
Knowing the jobs isn't enough. You need to understand what gets in the way and, better yet, what happens if someone can't get the job done. How powerful is that? Knowing the consequences your buyer is trying to avoid? Marketing gold right here. And for product teams, it's a way to find the problems painful enough to be worth solving.
What can you do with a well-mapped JTBD exercise? The better question is, what can't you do? Buyer personas, user personas (and yes, there is a difference), messaging, value propositions, content maps. Booya! But the part I love most comes before any of those deliverables.
Why I love it: less navel-gazing
Why else do I love JTBD? It forces you to stop the navel-gazing. Boy, do companies love thinking about themselves. It's an easy trap. We think we're great, our products are great, and it's easy (and lazy) to tell the world all about it. JTBD makes you think about the customer first. Only much later do you bring your product into the conversation, and even then, barely. Practice makes permanence, and I suggest we all work harder to make this permanent.
It blows up job titles (sorry, demand gen friends)
My demand gen friends will hate this. I'm wincing as I write this because I know the reaction and I’ve heard it before: “How will this ever be usable if we don't have job titles to target?” I get it. I don't have a perfect solution (perhaps that's Part 2). But I think jobs, not titles, should define the boundaries of your personas. Titles vary wildly across industries and companies. It's lazy to assume a job title tells you everything you need to know about a persona. Titles can help you target people, but they don't necessarily explain what drives them. What binds people together is the jobs they're struggling to accomplish, along with their motivations, requirements, objectives, and objections.
Sidebar: I'm tempted to make exceptions for Finance, Operations, and Legal because apparently I've decided they're universal human archetypes. I'm not sure I can defend that scientifically. What about the CTO you ask? I have worked with so many that I’m not confident in putting them in the universal personas list. There are different CTOs with different perspectives and JTBD, they are not the same.
The jobs you don't see are often the most interesting
Ok, so what is a “job”? Jim Kalbach defines it as “The process of reaching objectives under given circumstances.” Pretty accurate and easy to understand. It's why people do what they do. Is it that simple? If you want it to be. But let's go down the rabbit hole, if you're a sucker for pain like I am.
You can stick to the functional job, what someone is literally trying to accomplish. To make this easy, I’ll use an example of when I was a buyer a year ago trying to find a competitive intelligence tool. My literal/functional jobs were:
I want to know what my competitors are up to, the second it happens
I want to get this information to my stakeholders quickly and in a digestible way
I want to easily make battlecards
I want to stop the rumor mill and the water cooler speculation
Notice how these all start with “I want”? There's no hard-and-fast rule, but I've found this phrasing easier for colleagues to digest. “I don't want” can be just as powerful, especially for emotional and social jobs.
But imagine how much better a competitive intel tool vendor could market and sell to me if they understood my emotional, social, and aspirational jobs.
An emotional job is how someone wants to feel (best marketers know how someone doesn’t want to feel). Sticking with this competitive intel example, and pardon my vulnerability here, but I’m just being honest:
I want to feel like I’m doing my job
Inverse: “I don’t want to feel like I suck at my job”
I want to feel like I am bringing competitive intel first to the org
Inverse: “I don’t want the cold sweats when I see someone else break a competitive news story.” Bonus points for a vendor to know is the anxiety a PMM feels when you hear the “ping, ping, ping, ping” in Slack when someone else is breaking the news.
A social job is how someone wants to be perceived. More competitive intelligence examples:
I want people to think I’m the expert
I want people to think I have it all under control
Aspirational goals, which were new to me from the Jobs to Be Done Playbook (thank you, Jim Kalbach), are now absolutely part of our JTBD analysis. These are about who you want to become. Example:
I want a promotion
A love letter, not a short letter
Now imagine two competitive intelligence vendors. One tells me how easily I can build battlecards. The other understands that I'm terrified of being the last person in the company to know what a competitor is doing. Which one do you think has my attention?
That's why I have heart eyes for JTBD. It's hard work to understand what people are really trying to accomplish, but it changes how you think about your own product. Instead of starting with everything you want to say about it, you start with what matters to the person on the other side. Apparently, I didn't have time to write you a short love letter about JTBD, so I wrote you a long one instead.
Stay tuned for Part 2 about how to do this, and my answer isn’t AI. I’ll share how I do this the good old-fashioned way. So when the robots rebel, you’ll be able to JTBD the heck out of butter churning.
Note on Mark Twain, er, Blaise Pascal
As I was googling the exact Mark Twain quote, I had my world mildly rocked. There's no good evidence he said it! But we can trace a version of the sentiment to French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. In a letter dated December 4, 1656, he wrote: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” So the quote isn't Twain's, at least as far as the evidence shows. The French really did invent everything!
Source: Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters, Letter XVI (December 4, 1656), available through Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/73959/73959-h/73959-h.htm