At Digital BIAS, our team has over 20 years of experience working with technology and services companies across product, marketing, and sales. This experience, combined with our HubSpot expertise, helped craft the approach. Below, we introduce the JTBD framework, how it works and how it impacts ARISE®.
The ARISE™ GTM framework—Assess, Research, Ideate, Strategise, and Execute—provides a structured approach to bringing products to market. Integrating the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework into each stage of ARISE™ can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy by ensuring that every step is deeply rooted in understanding and addressing customer needs.
This article will show the advantage of bringing JTBD to our proprietary ARISE® methodology to uncover unique market opportunities. It’s a comprehensive framework that enables B2B technology and service companies to launch new products and services or to optimise their current GTM approach.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework is a powerful approach to understanding customer needs and motivations by focusing on the "jobs" that customers hire products or services to accomplish. Unlike traditional methods that emphasise product features or customer demographics, JTBD centres on the underlying goals and outcomes that drive customer behaviour. Here’s a detailed look at what the JTBD framework entails:
The first step in applying the JTBD framework is identifying the core job customers are trying to accomplish. This involves understanding the context in which the product is used, the desired outcomes, and the barriers customers face. For example, in Clayton Christensen's famous milkshake case study, the job was not just to enjoy a milkshake but to provide a convenient and satisfying breakfast for commuters.
A job statement succinctly describes what the customer is trying to achieve. It typically follows a structure that includes an action verb, the object of the action, and the context. For example, "Find the right music vibe for working out" is a job statement that captures the essence of what a customer might hire a music streaming service to do.
The JTBD framework involves breaking down the job into discrete steps, known as a job map. This map outlines the entire process the customer goes through to get the job done, from start to finish. Each step is analysed to identify pain points, desired outcomes, and opportunities for improvement.
Desired outcome statements are specific metrics that customers use to measure success in getting the job done. These statements are stable, measurable, and controllable, providing clear targets for innovation. For example, a desired outcome for tax preparation software might be "Minimise the time spent on data entry".
This section of the article discusses how JTBD impacts each framework stage and why it’s important to understand.
During the first stage of the framework, we undertake a deep dive into the business. We start with a content review, then analyse your website performance, HubSpot portals, and tech stack for friction and costs. We review your personas and assess your documented GTM strategy, team skills, and product and reporting performance.
How JTBD Helps:
At this stage, we conduct competitive analysis (SWOT, Porter's 5 Forces), customer feedback, win-loss interviews, and reassess the market size.
How JTBD Helps:
As part of the ideation stage, we get creative and data-driven. We address your positioning, messaging, storytelling, and value proposition. Additionally, we bring JTBD into the mix and our own service design workshops to redesign a customer-centric approach to your GTM strategy.
How JTBD Helps:
During the penultimate stage of ARISE, we examine your goals and objectives, content strategy, personas and segmentation, keyword strategy, website requirements, asset requirements, paid marketing strategy, reporting, Hubspot optimisation, sales enablement, and, of course, leveraging the outcome of your jobs to be done work.
How JTBD Helps:
Finally, we execute. At this point, we segment the pipeline, begin content updates and production, optimise or redesign the website, strategically employ and deploy your Hubspot, run your paid ads, deliver your KPIs and associated reporting and run regular quarterly reviews.
How JTBD Helps:
Integrating the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework into the ARISE® GTM strategy enhances every stage by ensuring that all efforts are aligned with a deep understanding of customer needs. This customer-centric approach leads to more effective market assessments, targeted research, innovative ideation, strategic planning, and successful execution.
By focusing on the jobs customers are trying to accomplish, businesses can create products and marketing strategies that deliver real value, driving customer satisfaction and business success.
But did you know that there are nine tenets of JBTD? Understanding these can deepen your perception of how and why you employ jobs to be done to enhance your go-to-market strategy.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) theory, developed by Clayton Christensen and further refined by other thought leaders, provides a robust framework for understanding customer needs and driving innovation. The theory is grounded in nine core tenets that explain how people make purchasing decisions based on the job they are trying to accomplish. Here are the nine tenets of JTBD theory:
Customers don’t buy products or services for their own sake; they hire them to accomplish a specific job. This job is the progress they try to make in a given circumstance. For example, people don’t buy a drill bit for the bit itself; they buy it to make a hole.
Every job has functional, emotional, and social dimensions. The functional aspect is the practical task the customer wants to complete. The emotional component relates to how the customer feels about getting the job done, and the social dimension involves the impact on the customer’s social standing or relationships.
The core job that customers are trying to get done remains stable over time and across different contexts. While technologies and solutions may change, the fundamental job stays the same. This stability makes the job a reliable focal point for innovation.
The job itself is independent of any particular solution. This means the job remains unchanged regardless of the product or service used. Companies can uncover a wider range of potential innovations by focusing on the job rather than the solution.
To achieve success, companies should make the job the primary unit of analysis rather than the product or the customer. This shift in focus allows for a deeper understanding of customer needs and opens up new opportunities for innovation.
Companies can create more effective marketing strategies by understanding the customer's job. This deep understanding helps craft messages that resonate with customers and clearly communicate how the product helps them get their job done.
Customers seek out products and services to make progress in their lives. This progress can be functional (completing a task), emotional (feeling a certain way), or social (gaining social approval). Understanding this broader context helps companies create more meaningful and impactful solutions.
Customers prefer solutions that allow them to complete the job without needing to cobble together multiple products or services. This preference drives the demand for comprehensive, integrated solutions that simplify the customer’s life.
Defining customer needs in terms of the metrics they use to measure success makes innovation more predictable. These metrics, known as desired outcomes, provide clear targets for product development and help ensure that new solutions effectively address customer needs.
The nine tenets of the Jobs-to-Be-Done theory offer an easy-to-adopt framework for understanding customer needs and driving innovation. By focusing on the jobs customers are trying to accomplish, companies can develop products, services, and GTM strategies that deliver real value, leading to higher customer satisfaction and business success.
These tenets provide a stable, customer-centric foundation for innovation, making it more predictable and effective. Next, we’ll examine how JTBD and GTM combine and some of the challenges you may face in applying them.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework is a powerful tool for understanding customer needs and driving product innovation. However, applying it effectively within a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy comes with its own set of challenges. Here are some of the key obstacles and how they can impact the GTM process:
Challenge: One of the primary challenges of the JTBD framework is that it can lead to too abstract or high-level insights. While the framework excels at uncovering deep customer motivations and desired outcomes, translating these insights into specific, actionable steps can be difficult.
Impact: This abstraction can make it challenging for product teams to prioritise features and for marketing teams to craft precise messaging. Without clear, actionable insights, the strategic roadmap can become muddled, leading to ineffective product development and marketing efforts.
Challenge: JTBD research often involves qualitative methods such as interviews and observations, which can yield ambiguous or contradictory data. Customers may express their needs in unclear terms, or different customers may have varying and conflicting priorities.
Impact: Misinterpreting this data can lead to incorrect assumptions about customer needs, resulting in products that do not fully address the target market's requirements. This can also complicate developing a cohesive GTM strategy, as teams may struggle to align on the most critical jobs to address.
Challenge: Implementing JTBD insights often requires shifts in organisational processes and priorities. Employees may resist adopting new frameworks or changing their existing ways of working, especially if they believe their current methods are effective.
Impact: This resistance can hinder the integration of JTBD insights into the GTM strategy, reducing the approach's overall effectiveness. Without buy-in from all stakeholders, the organization may struggle to fully leverage the JTBD framework's benefits.
Challenge: Applying the JTBD framework effectively requires significant resources, including time, personnel, and financial investment. Balancing these requirements with other competing priorities can be challenging for organisations.
Impact: Limited resources can constrain the depth and breadth of JTBD research, leading to incomplete or superficial insights. This can result in a GTM strategy that does not fully address the most critical customer jobs, reducing its overall effectiveness.
Challenge: While the JTBD framework emphasises the importance of understanding functional, emotional, and social jobs, teams may focus too heavily on the functional aspects at the expense of the others.
Impact: This narrow focus can lead to products that meet functional requirements but fail to resonate emotionally or socially. As a result, the GTM strategy may miss opportunities to connect with customers more deeply, reducing engagement and loyalty.
Challenge: Measuring the success of JTBD initiatives can be complex, as it often involves tracking qualitative outcomes and long-term customer satisfaction rather than immediate quantitative metrics.
Impact: Without clear metrics, it can be challenging to demonstrate the value of JTBD-driven initiatives to stakeholders, making it harder to secure ongoing support and investment. This can limit the ability to iterate and improve the GTM strategy based on JTBD insights.
While the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework offers significant advantages for understanding customer needs and driving innovation, its application in a GTM strategy is not without challenges. Overcoming these obstacles requires careful planning, clear communication, and a commitment to customer-centricity.
By addressing the abstract nature of JTBD insights, interpreting data accurately, managing internal resistance, allocating resources effectively, balancing functional and emotional jobs, and establishing clear success metrics, organisations can harness the full potential of the JTBD framework to build a stronger, more effective GTM strategy.
In the next section of this article, I want to look at how you use research to flesh out the JTBD process before closing on how it helps align internal and external teams.
Qualitative research is a crucial component of the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, providing deep insights into customer needs, motivations, and behaviours. By employing various qualitative methods, businesses can effectively map out the jobs that customers are trying to accomplish. Here’s how qualitative research can be used to map out JTBD:
Objective: Gain a deep understanding of the core functional job the customer is trying to get done.
Steps:
Objective: Break down the customer’s core functional job into discrete steps.
Steps:
Outcome: A job map provides a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of the job, revealing gaps and opportunities for innovation.
Objective: Capture the metrics customers use to measure success in getting the job done.
Steps:
Outcome: A comprehensive set of desired outcome statements provides actionable product development and marketing insights.
Objective: Observe customers in their natural environment to gain contextual insights.
Steps:
Outcome: Ethnographic research provides rich, contextual insights that complement interview data, helping to paint a complete picture of the customer’s job to be done.
Objective: Identify patterns and themes in the qualitative data to map out the jobs to be done.
Steps:
Outcome: A well-organised and synthesised set of qualitative data provides a robust foundation for understanding the jobs to be done and informs strategic decisions.
Qualitative research is essential for mapping out jobs to be done as it provides deep, nuanced insights into customer needs and behaviours. By conducting in-depth interviews, creating job maps, capturing desired outcomes, performing ethnographic research, and analysing data, businesses can comprehensively understand the jobs their customers are trying to accomplish. This understanding is crucial for driving customer-centric innovation and developing effective go-to-market strategies.
Finally, we will examine how you use the framework internally to align teams and design a truly customer-centric business approach.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework is not just a tool for understanding customer needs but also a powerful mechanism for aligning various departments within a company. The JTBD framework can help ensure that all teams work towards a common objective by focusing on the core jobs customers are trying to accomplish. Here’s how it can foster alignment across different departments:
The JTBD framework provides a unified language and perspective for understanding customer needs. By defining the jobs customers hire products or services to do, all departments—from product development to marketing to sales—can align their efforts around these core jobs. This shared understanding helps to break down silos and ensures that every team is working towards the same customer-centric goals.
Implementing the JTBD framework requires input from various departments, fostering cross-functional collaboration. For example:
By involving cross-functional teams in the JTBD process, companies can leverage diverse perspectives and expertise, leading to more comprehensive and effective solutions.
The JTBD framework helps teams prioritise their efforts based on the most critical customer jobs. This prioritisation ensures that resources are allocated efficiently and that the most important needs are addressed first. For instance, if a particular job is identified as highly important but underserved, product development can focus on enhancing features that address this job. At the same time, marketing can emphasise these improvements in their campaigns.
Companies can develop desired outcome statements that guide innovation efforts by understanding the specific jobs customers are trying to accomplish. These statements are stable over time and provide a clear direction for product development, reducing the guesswork and making innovation more predictable. This predictability helps align R&D, product management, and marketing teams around a common innovation strategy.
The JTBD framework introduces metrics customers use to measure success in completing their jobs. These metrics, known as desired outcomes, are used to evaluate the effectiveness of products and services. By focusing on these customer-centric metrics, all departments can align their performance indicators with what truly matters to customers, ensuring that every team contributes to delivering value.
The JTBD framework encourages a holistic view of the customer journey, considering all the steps customers take to complete their jobs. This comprehensive understanding helps different departments see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how they can collaborate to improve the overall customer experience. For example, customer support teams can provide insights into common pain points, which can then be addressed by product development and communicated by marketing.
The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework is a powerful tool for aligning different departments within a company around a common goal: helping customers get their jobs done.
The JTBD framework ensures that all teams work in harmony to deliver maximum value to customers by fostering a shared understanding of customer needs, encouraging cross-functional collaboration, prioritising efforts based on critical jobs, making innovation predictable, focusing on customer-centric metrics, and providing a holistic view of the customer journey.
This alignment enhances the effectiveness of individual departments and drives overall business success.
This article is part of our ARISE® methodology series, discussing the steps taken at each stage to build a comprehensive approach to go-to-market strategy. As a proprietary framework to Digital BIAS, it's an effective route to driving new customer acquisition and market positioning. For more information, contact our team using the form in the footer.