Jobs to be done is a way of understanding why people buy. It treats a purchase as hiring a product to get a job done in a particular situation, and firing whatever the buyer used before. The framework shifts attention from who the customer is to what they are trying to achieve, which often explains competition and demand better than demographics do.
The core idea
A job statement describes a situation, a motivation and an expected outcome. It does not mention your product. Writing it this way reveals competitors you might not have considered, including spreadsheets, an agency, an intern or doing nothing at all.
When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].
When a new hire starts on Monday, I want every account set up before they arrive, so I can avoid a lost first day.Using jobs in positioning and content
Jobs translate well into search because people search for the job, not the product category. Someone rarely types the name of a category they have never heard of. They type the outcome they need or the problem in front of them. Content built around jobs meets buyers before they know which category solves their problem.
Jobs also help sort features. A product page organized around the jobs a customer hires the product for is easier to follow than a list of features in the order engineering built them.
How to find the jobs
The standard method is interviewing recent customers about the moment they decided to switch: what was happening, what they tried before, what nearly stopped them and what made them commit. Patterns across interviews reveal the main jobs. Sales call notes and the exact wording of support tickets are useful supplements.
Example
A job reveals the real competitor
Hypothetical company Cindervale sells employee onboarding software and assumed its competitors were other HR platforms. Switch interviews showed most customers were replacing a shared checklist document maintained by one overloaded office manager.
The team rewrote its homepage and search content around the job of getting a new starter productive on day one, and created pages on onboarding checklists that matched what those office managers were already searching for.
Common mistakes
Writing jobs that are really features
“I want to export to CSV” is a task. Ask why, and keep asking, until you reach the outcome the person cares about.
Skipping the interviews
Jobs invented in a meeting tend to mirror the product. Real switch stories are what make the framework useful.
Questions
Not necessarily. Many teams use jobs to explain why people buy and personas to describe who takes part in the decision. They answer different questions.
