After reading my article about what jobs to be done, you have a basic knowledge about what it and the benefits it can bring to your products. This article will now give you a step-by-step guide on how to create your jobs to be done, and how you can use it to discover underserved needs. It will also help you identify business opportunities, define your product’s maturity, and analyze your competitors.

Stage I – Get your information

The first and more important step in the whole process is to talk to your customers. Organize open interviews, not the typical surveys. Prepare discussion guidelines to facilitate the conversation and follow it. Organize it with themes, with some trigger questions/assumptions in order to cover what you’re looking to know about the participant’s job. Don’t feel pressured to follow your guideline if the participants start changing subjects. As long as it has to do with their jobs, let the conversation go and use your guideline as a compass when you need to get back on track. Here some tips for your interviews:

  1. Make an introduction to explain the objectives of the conversation and ask the interviewed persons to be completely honest, even though you’re partners (if your running interviews with current customers).
  1. People don’t know what they need, and neither do you. Your main focus is to always go back to their needs and jobs to be done. If you get them talking about a job, ask them about it, try to understand their needs and other smaller jobs that they must accomplish so that they get the main job done. People will try to talk about solutions, and about the product, and when this happens, ask the participant to leave those questions to the end and get back to talk about the jobs they need to get done.
  1. Make sure you don’t talk too much. Create some trigger points for them to talk about their job, their goals, how they perform their daily tasks, why, and which tools they use. 
  1. Ideally, bring a colleague with you to take some notes and to have a second interpretation. This way you can focus on asking the right questions, listening carefully, and driving the conversation always in the direction of the participants and their jobs.
  1. After the interview, make sure you and your colleague directly review the feedback, take some notes, and process all the information while it’s still fresh. If you have the chance to record the interviews, do it. This will allow you to come back to that time whenever you need it. Try to organize the information bearing in mind the JTBD elements: find main jobs, little jobs, micro jobs, emotional and social jobs, needs, and write these down aligned with the different circumstances. And that’s it, now you have a well-organized database to start working with.

Stage II – Define your job performers and formulate their main jobs

Once you have interviewed several customers and users give them a title. These are your job performers. In some cases it’s very easy to attribute just a job title, however, when you’re working with different companies (B2B) you will very likely have different job titles with a different distribution of jobs to be done. Don’t get stuck there. Define your job performers titles the way you find that fits better and focus on attributing the jobs to be done accordingly. The most important here is to not forget to attribute any of the jobs that our customers want to get done. 

Now you can create concise job statements. To form these follow the instructions below:

Verb + Object + Clarifier

Some examples of this could be clean vehicles for my clients or deliver food in the city center

Things you should take into consideration when you’re writing the jobs:

  • Ensure there is an objective from the job performer’s point of view
  • Reflect an end state, avoiding verbs as manage or maintain
  • Make sure you’re not mixing up needs with jobs. Always focus on the job that the job performer wants to get done
  • Keep your phrasing simple and one-dimensional

After finishing writing down your jobs, ask yourself the following questions in relation to them, in order to understand if our job statement is well written Jim Kalbach gives us in his book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook the following question you may ask yourself:

  • “Does the statement reflect the job performer’s perspective?
  • Does the job statement begin with a verb?
  • Is there a beginning and endpoint of the goal?
  • Are the statements one-dimensional without compound concepts?
  • Would people have phrased the job to be done like this 50 years ago?” (Kalbach, 2020)

Stage III – Coping with Granularity 

One of the most common issues you will find when defining your JTBD is its granularity. Is this the main job? How does the job performer want to do this job? And there it goes, if you keep asking questions, you keep finding new jobs…

There are many different levels of granularity when it comes to jobs to be done. Normally, we start on the Big Jobs, also known as Main Jobs. Then you have the little jobs and micro jobs. Smaller than a micro job would be too detailed, bigger than a big job would be an aspiration.

By understanding this, it’s up to you to decide on how granular you want to go. If you want to move upwards ask the question why. On the other hand, if you want to have smaller jobs and go more into detail, ask the question how. 

Let me phrase a couple of examples for you:

Aspiration: To be the best food delivery driver in the country.

Big Job (Main Job): Deliver food in the city center.

Little Job: Pick up food 

Micro Job: Get notified when food is ready.

When you’re defining different jobs, always remember to form them using the same structure as you did with the main jobs. To guarantee the quality and reliability of the information you’re building, it is very important to keep it simple and to respect the semantics rules.

Moreover, my advice for you is, don’t go too much into detail. When you’re finished with the main jobs, and little jobs, you already have a good basis to work with. If you feel you need more information about the little jobs, then create also micro jobs. More granular than that, will be overloading you with information and make your job harder and longer.

Stage IV – Map the Main jobs

Once you have defined your main jobs, try to say out loud:

“The {job_performer} main job is {main_job} is to {defined_job_statement}”. Does it make sense? No? Go back and think again. Yes? Alright! We can go ahead and start mapping our main jobs.

Mapping the main jobs is a process that will help you to find out about all the underlying jobs that have to get done, in order to enable the user performer to successfully accomplish his or her main job. These are divided into little jobs and micro jobs if you want to dig deeper.

A common piece of advice is to start mapping your main jobs chronologically. 

This would like somehow like the following board:

As you can see I didn’t fill up the post with little jobs. That will be your job! The best way to learn JTBD is to practice, so go ahead and try to think of all the little jobs that will help the delivery driver to deliver food in the city center. Where does he or she have to start?

When you’re finished defining the chronology, use the same board and the little jobs defined by you, and re-organize them in different stages. Start with the universal structure’s stages and ideate as it fits your map better:

It really doesn’t matter if you use all the stages or not. Nevertheless, it is important that you spend some time refining the labels so that it makes sense. Semantics are very important in the whole process of the JTBD framework. 

After finishing this, and if you have the chance, double-check with the job performers. Talk about your job mapping, your results, and try to understand if they are confused or if they can directly relate to it. Ask some more questions about the little jobs, so that you make sure you are heading in the right direction.

“With a job map in hand. organizations can create better products and services that people actually need.” (Kalbach, 2020)

Once you have your jobs mapped, you can ask yourself the question: “How can I be able to help the job performer get those jobs done?” 

To make it easier, you can work by stage. It will let you think of your product and the way it is helping the job performers to get their jobs done. This is also a great opportunity to innovate and find new ideas to help your customers to achieve their goals more efficiently. 

Also here Jim Kalbach gives us a hand full of questions you may ask yourself to get started: 

  • Is there a more efficient order of stages in performing the job?
  • Where do people struggle the most to get the job done?
  • What causes the job to get off track?
  • Can you eliminate stages or steps along the way?
  • How might the job be carried out in the future, given current trends?
  • How might you get more of the job done for customers?
  • What related jobs can your offering address or tie in to the job? 

“The job map ultimately defines the scope of your business.” (Kalbach, 2020)

Stage V – Define needs

When analyzing the jobs, you might have feature ideas, however, try to stick to the job and ask yourself the question: 

What does the job performer need in order to get this job done? What kind of underserved needs are there?

You will find many needs, however, the unmet needs are going to be the ones bringing value faster, both to your customers and to your organization, with a higher likability of market success.

So how do we quantify and better understand unmet needs? Tony Ulwick in his company’s Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) methodology, quote that if you know how the customer measures their needs, you can work on solutions in a more controlled way. It makes pretty much sense to me.

Now let’s create concise need statements using the following format: 

Direction of change + Unit of measure + Object of need + Clarifier

An example of this could be improve velocity of communication with restaurants e.g. to deliver faster.

Most need statements start with verbs as increase, maximize. decrease or minimize.

Create your own set of need statements for each job. Write them down and preferably validate them with the job performers.

Stage VI – Use JTBD & Needs to Identify Opportunities, Better Prioritize, and Measure the maturity of your product

You are all set by now:

  • You have defined your job performers, your main jobs, and little jobs;
  • You have defined different stages where you can help your customers and users get their jobs done;
  • You have written down need statements that will give you enough information to help the job performers to achieve their goals.

With all this researched and validated information, you can think of ideas to innovate and find opportunities that you didn’t know that were there. Validate opinion-based features that are confusing your users, and use the jobs also to measure your product’s maturity on several levels. 

In order to put all of it into practice, you want to be able to understand and quantify how your job performers perceive your product. To do this you may use several models, however, I will stick to the previously mentioned Tony Ulwick’s ODI (Outcome-Driven Innovation). 

Here are some steps you may follow, in order to finally understand what is more important for your customers and users, as well as, how satisfied they are with your solutions:

  1. Identify and gather your job performer’s need statements;
  2. Check and double-check the semantics and form of each need statement. Ask your colleagues that were in the interviews to review them;
  3. Create a survey focused on the importance and satisfaction;
  4. Run the survey by your customers and users (job performers).

It is of vital importance that the people answering the survey are the job performers. Otherwise, you will not get reliable results, or worse, you will be misleading the whole product development.

Not less important is to make sure you have enough participants in your survey to guarantee the credibility of the results. As a rule of thumb interview at least twice the persons as the desired need statements.

Analyze the results

To measure your outcomes you must find your satisfaction gap (importance – satisfaction) and then sum it to the overall importance result. Out of this, you’ll get your opportunity score, which will tell you how good you are helping the job performers to get their jobs done.

Let me give you an example:

Need Statement:Minimize the steps to find the app on search engines”

Final Results

Importance: 8

Satisfaction: 4

Calculate Satisfaction Gap

8 – 4 = 4

Calculate Opportunity Score

8 (importance) + 4 (satisfaction gap) = 12 (opportunity score)

The higher the opportunity score, the lower is your maturity solving this need, and the higher you should prioritize it. 

If you want to make it more visual, which commonly helps you with fast decision making, you can put it in a matrix as below using a scale that you believe will better fit your goals.


If you identify high opportunities in a specific product area, its maturity is low, and you should prioritize working on it (if you’re measuring maturity based only on customer feedback).

Challenges you might find using ODI

There are different methods to understand how you are helping your customers to get the job done, each of them has its challenges and advantages. I like Tony Ulwick’s ODI because it’s very clear and focussed on details, however, it requires not only a lot of customer validation but also doing it with a very large participant sample, to guarantee reliable results. It’s also hard to keep the participants focused and motivated, so my advice is, before you start talking to your job performers, think of something that will incentivize them to keep focused and give you honest answers.

Stage VII | Competitor Analysis 

By now you have seen that the JTBD framework is way more than just a list of jobs that our customers want to get done. Because this framework processes a structure that has in its core what customers need in order to get to their desired outcomes, you have a clear and validated focus. If you ask yourself any question, you can always come back to its core information (the jobs) and find out many other important aspects for your business to become successful.

Competitor Analysis vs Customer Focus

Sooner or later every business is comparing its products to the competition. You need to understand what they are doing, how they are innovating, and compare it to your solutions. However, this 1 to 1 comparison is not taking into consideration what customers want. Maybe your toughest competitors have developed a very expensive new feature that does outstanding fancy things. It may be impressive, and you might be willing to give them an answer with something even better. Think again. 

Is this really important for our customers? Will this help them by getting their jobs done? 

This is a myth that is misleading companies to develop the wrong products and to lose millions of dollars. As Jim Kalbach writes “(…) companies are not competing against other companies or their products. They are competing for the customers, and their one goal is to create value for them. And there is only one way to do that: by offering a product or service that is better than any other at helping them to get their job done.

Competitive analysis, when seen through a JTBD lens, is not about head-to-head comparisons. Instead, it’s about assessing how much better or worse a product is at helping the customer to get a job done.”

4 steps to your competitor comparison

  • Get a list of companies or products you consider to be competitors (the ones that are trying to help companies getting the same jobs done as you are)
  • Select needs statements that are relevant to your job performers
  • Make your analysis on “how well the selected competitors are helping their customers to get their jobs done”. Ideally, you would get this information directly from job performers, by asking them about other products. If this is not possible, you can estimate within your team based on your knowledge about your competitors

Always keep in your mind that “the aim isn’t to find a feature that hasn’t been built, but rather to find out what needs are being underserved. When designing a new solution or when improving an existing one, use this insight into which opportunities to tackle first” (Kalbach, 2020)

Enjoyed the read? Take a look at the articles below!

What is Jobs-To-Be-Done

A Good Book About JTBD

What are User Personas? We explain it to you in detail.

What is Product Management?

Agile – What is it?

Agile Coach helps you moving to Agile