[This document is still a WIP]
The following video summarizes the JTBD framework
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGtw2C95Ms
Jobs to be Done interviews help you to understand the journey your customer had to undertake in order to make the commitment to your product. This framework helps you to capture the discrete moments in time when your customer got a nudge to move forward with the purchase.
The interviews also help you to get a better picture of the various emotional and social aspects influencing the decision-making process. Was fear an important driving force? Who else was directly or indirectly involved?
After decades of watching great companies fail, its understood that the focus on correlation— most of the masses of customer data companies create is structured to show correlations and on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to horn in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done.
We all have many jobs to be done in our lives. Some are little (pass the time while waiting in line); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again. And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. (The word “product” is used here as shorthand for any solution that companies can sell; of course, the full set of “candidates” we consider hiring can often go well beyond just offerings from companies.)
The following questions are designed to help guide you during the interview. Remember, the key here is to eventually uncover the anxieties, motivations, and situations that led your customer to your product.