While organizations today have a new imperative to be customer-centric, the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework shifts the focus from product and brand to the outcomes that people are trying to achieve. It’s about discerning the motivations of customers within business contexts to offer a valuable perspective for understanding how value is generated.

Its essence is quite simple: individuals employ products to satisfy specific needs. For instance, you might “enlist” new clothes for your first day of work, might “hire” LinkedIn to grow your professional network, or even “employ” running shoes to run a marathon. Viewing customers from this vantage point, as purposeful actors within a particular context, flips the emphasis from psycho-demographic characteristics to their needs and motivations. It's not solely about the user, but also about the usage.

Over the last few years, I've implemented and expanded the practice of JTBD at SAP SuccessFactors. This has allowed for seamless integration into our product design strategy and enabled us to identify and prioritize the core needs of our users, effectively driving product desirability. Furthermore, I’ve improved the integration of JTBD by incorporating storytelling and user story mapping capabilities, resulting in a cohesive and compelling narrative for solutions like SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace and assets such as the growth portfolio, the whole self model, and time management.

For designers, grasping the JTBD framework presents new opportunities. It allows us not only to create superior solutions but also to contribute to more extensive strategic discussions in a bottom-up approach to innovation.

In this abridged interview conducted during SAP's UX Immersive event, I talk with Jim Kalbach, author of "The Jobs to Be Done Playbook" and Chief Evangelist at Mural. Together, we delve into the essence of the JTBD framework and explore how it enables innovation to happen at more granular levels of product development, and to what extent AI can help.

Jim Kalbach (left) and Itamar Lima Medeiros (right)

Itamar Lima Medeiros: Jim, thanks for being here. Why don't we get started with the question, what is Jobs to Be Done?

Jim Kalbach: Theodor Levitt, a famous Harvard Business professor in the 60s and 70s used to tell his students: “People don't want a drill. They want a hole in the wall.” So it’s about shifting your focus from your own product and your brand to the outcomes that people are trying to achieve. In essence, it's a human-centered way to approach your business. It’s not specifically about design or marketing, but about how we as an industry, as a business, can look at our customers in a different way. Instead of seeing people as consumers of a product – say, the drill – JTBD asks that you see them as goal-seeking individuals acting in the world. It's about shifting your focus away from your own products to the outcomes that people want.

Itamar: In a way, JTBD acts as a kind of thermometer for how much you know your customers. Everybody wants to claim they are customer centric. But most cannot really answer the question, “What are the customers actually trying to do?".

Jim: Correct. A lot of times teams don't bother digging in, claiming to already know everything. But making assumptions means missing the opportunities for innovation. With JTBD, you’re the apprentice and the customers are the teachers. What you're saying is the lens that I'm going to understand the market through is centered around this specific job. I'm not going to understand their psychological profile or their demographics. What I want to understand is their job, which is essentially a goal or a problem to be solved. And there's a hierarchy that comes with it. So one of the first things you have to do is get the right level of granularity for the target job because this frames everything else that you're doing. At which level in the hierarchy do you want to innovate? And when I say innovation, I mean any change, any improvement to your product.

Get the right level of abstraction for the main job

Hierarchy of Jobs (Kalbach, J. Jobs to Be Done Playbook, 2020).

Itamar: Different teams operate at different levels and the higher levels of this pyramid tend to be very good for the storytelling piece of innovation - what we typically see happen in strategy. But what do I want as a designer? What do I advocate for?

Jim: And JTBD, I believe, can be the starting point for more granular innovation. It can and should be at a lower level. What is the individual's problem they're trying to solve? You can get very specific on that, but it doesn't tell you what solution to build. It just tells you where to focus your solutioning efforts. With the job as the focus, you're a little more centered and have something more tangible to work with.

Itamar: Speaking of teams operating at different levels, I believe that JTBD is not just a tool for product managers, designers, and strategists to process the findings of product discovery. As we discussed earlier, jobs stories are becoming increasingly popular in SAP SuccessFactors, and we are seeing the benefits of using them as a better way to describe, capture, and align on user needs. We are even calling them a "common currency" between product managers, designers, and developers to discuss outcomes from the user's perspective. What do you think about it?

Jim: In “The Jobs to be Done Playbook” I say that, while psychology and other fields have precise definitions of human needs, business does not. As a result, risk-averse organizations struggle to grasp the customer perspective and align to it. JTBD helps shift a collective mindset from focusing on the organization and its solution to focusing on customers and their needs which helps create a shared understanding of our customers' perceptions of value. From that perspective - since you mentioned you are using it as a common currency - the process of creating a mutual understanding becomes a negotiation. Consequently, it is even more crucial to carry out activities that involve discovering jobs together.

Itamar: That's right! At SAP SuccessFactors, we use a combination of user story mapping and JTBD to ensure that our projects are aligned with our strategy and executed efficiently. We keep the user's journey at the center of the narrative by using storytelling and represent the project's release plans and roadmaps through user story mapping and job boards. This ensures that we focus on the customer's underlying needs rather than just developing features. Our job boards have JTBD at the top, which helps our teams maintain confidence in the project's vision since jobs are stable over time. This ensures that the project always moves in the right direction. I know we've discussed job stories and the importance of jobs being based on user research. But this wouldn't be a tech talk if we didn't talk about the hottest topic of the moment. Does it mean that I shouldn't use ChatGPT to write job stories?

Jim: I'm actually an advocate for using AI to help with JTBD. You don't necessarily have to start from a blank page. Using AI just to get started and to make you a more informed researcher, it might get 60-80% of what you would find if you went out and talked to people. But guess where the innovation is going come from?

Itamar: Talking to people.

Jim: That's right. JTBD begins with qualitative research. You just go out and you listen, and when you're done listening, you listen some more. Because, by default, ChatGPT only knows what's already been published. What you're trying to find is what are those things that nobody else has asked yet. That's where your innovation opportunity comes from. I see them as very complementary, and if I have a problem, particularly if I'm unfamiliar with the domain, I'll use AI to be more informed or even create a job map before I do the first interview. But I want to do the interviews to do two things. One is to validate that so you can spend more time validating. And the second is to fill in the gaps that ChatGPT didn't get at. You can't get away from talking to human beings. Conducting user research, talking to people, scoping, investigating, mapping, prioritizing, and synthesizing. That's the only way to get to the problem behind the problem and get really specific. Jobs to Be Done brings focus. It brings rigor, but then it also brings the ability to pinpoint the exact problem that maybe your ears haven't heard yet. And maybe the market can't even articulate.