Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
A framework that explains purchases as people hiring a product to make progress on a goal in a specific circumstance.
JTBD shows why customers switch or stay, which helps teams identify their real competitors, including spreadsheets or doing nothing, and write positioning around the outcome buyers want rather than a feature list.
A payroll SaaS company interviews 12 customers who switched in the past 90 days, maps the trigger, the old solution and the worries at each step, and finds the job is closing month-end without errors, which becomes the homepage headline.
JTBD has several competing schools and vocabularies, so teams often disagree on how to write a job statement. Interviews can produce jobs too broad to act on, and the method does not size markets or replace usability testing.
The theory, associated with Clayton Christensen, holds that customers hire a product to get a job done and fire it when it fails. Each job has functional, social and emotional dimensions, and the circumstance matters more than demographics. Switch interviews reconstruct the timeline of a purchase to reveal the forces that pushed the customer toward or away from a decision. Findings complement a User Persona and inform the Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
Revenue Operations
Christensen Institute — Jobs to Be Done Theory — https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/; Harvard Business Review — Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done — https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done