Jobs-to-be-done
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a product-discovery framework, popularised by Clayton Christensen, that frames features in terms of the 'job' a customer is hiring the product to do — the underlying outcome they want — rather than demographic personas or feature lists. The classic example: customers 'hire' a milkshake to make their morning commute less boring, not because they're in the 35-45 male segment.
JTBD's strength is shifting product conversations from 'who is our user' to 'what are they trying to accomplish' — which generalises across segments and surfaces non-obvious competitors (the milkshake competes with bagels and boredom, not other milkshakes). The practical artefact is a job statement: 'When [situation], I want to [motivation] so I can [outcome].' JTBD pairs well with user-story mapping (which translates jobs into delivery slices) and with discovery research (which validates that the proposed job is the one customers actually have). Critique: JTBD can over-abstract — at some point you do need persona-specific decisions about UI, language, and channel.
Related terms
- User-story mapping
User-story mapping, formalised by Jeff Patton in his 2014 book of the same name, is a workshop technique for organising product backlogs around the user's journey rather than as a flat list.
- North Star metric
A North Star metric is a single quantitative measure that captures the value a product delivers to its users — chosen to align an entire organisation's decisions toward customer value rather than vanity metrics.