2. What is a "Job-to-be-Done" (JTBD)?

A "job-to-be-done" is a customer's goal, objective, or problem to be solved.

What is a JTBD?

A JTBD is a customer’s goal, objective, or problem to be solved. In the end, it turns out that customers don’t really care about products. They are not concerned with brands or technologies. They only care about getting their jobs done. This is a similar a more traditional marketing concept, that customers buy benefits, not products. However, with the JTBD, we introduce a language, a precision, that we can use to define markets and segments. It provides the framework that we can apply to understand any market – while ensuring that we see it from the customer’s point-of-view.

Job Attributes

A JTBD statement should always begin with a verb. For example: Learn a skill. Prepare a meal. Finance a home. It is a statement of action, defining what the customer seeks to accomplish. Further, it should be as solution-independent as possible. The more solution-independent it is, the more stable it will be over time. For example, the job "Travel from point A to B" has been around as long as men have walked the Earth. But the job "Travel from point A to B in a car" is a narrower job, limited to the context of a car. 

The best job statements should be unambiguous and not open to interpretation.