Jobs To Be Done
Date: 2026-08-17
People don’t buy products, they hire them to make progress in a situation. The reframing is genuinely useful because it redefines your competitive set — and it’s frequently applied as a template with the thinking left out.
Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a framing that treats a purchase as hiring a product to accomplish something, in a specific circumstance, with functional, emotional and social dimensions.
The job is the progress someone is trying to make, not the product category.
The reframe
PRODUCT FRAMING JOB FRAMING
"people who buy "people whose skin
moisturiser" reacts to everything
and who are tired of
wasting money on
products that don't
work"
competitors: competitors:
other moisturisers a dermatologist
giving up entirely
a friend's recommendation
doing nothing
The competitive set is the payoff. Your real competition is every other way someone could make that progress, including doing nothing — which is usually the market leader.
The three dimensions
FUNCTIONAL the practical task
"stop my skin reacting"
EMOTIONAL how they want to feel
"stop feeling anxious about
trying something new"
SOCIAL how they want to be seen
"look like someone who has
their skin sorted"
Most product copy addresses only the functional dimension, which is why it reads as interchangeable with every competitor’s. The emotional and social dimensions are where differentiation usually lives — Value Propositions.
Push, pull, and the two anxieties
The forces model, and the useful part of it:
PUSH the problem with today
"my skin flared up again"
PULL the appeal of the new
"this one is formulated for
sensitive skin"
──────────────── vs ────────────────
HABIT inertia of current behaviour
"I've used the same thing
for years"
ANXIETY fear of the new
"what if this reacts too?"
Push and pull get all the attention; habit and anxiety are where conversions are actually lost. A product page that only amplifies pull is fighting on one front out of four.
Practically: returns policy, samples, ingredient transparency and reviews are all anxiety-reducers, and they’re often the highest-leverage thing on a page — Trust Signals.
Interviewing for it
The distinctive technique: interview people about a recent purchase, working backwards to the trigger.
1 when did you first realise you
needed something?
2 what happened that day?
3 what did you try first?
4 what made you start looking again?
5 what nearly stopped you buying?
6 who else was involved?
Step 5 is the one that pays. The hesitation people report is the objection your page needs to answer, in their words — User Interviews, Microcopy.
Interview recent switchers specifically. Someone who bought last week remembers the sequence; someone who bought a year ago reconstructs it.
Where it’s overapplied
Being honest about the limits:
- The template without the research. “When I [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]” filled in from a workshop is a guess in a format. The format adds nothing the guess didn’t have
- One job per product. Real products get hired for several jobs by different people, and forcing a single one loses the segment you didn’t pick
- It doesn’t size anything. JTBD tells you a job exists, not how many people have it or what they’d pay — Qualitative vs Quantitative Research
- It’s weak on incremental optimisation. Useful for positioning, range and messaging; not the tool for deciding a button’s placement
- The evidence base is contested. It’s a useful lens with a large consulting industry attached, not a validated theory
Where it earns its place
Deciding what to build, what to stock, and what to say. For a retailer specifically: which products to range together, how to group a category, and what a landing page needs to address before it can sell anything — Category Page Design, Landing Page Strategy.
It pairs well with Personas and replaces them badly. A job describes a situation; a persona describes a person. The situation is more stable and more actionable, which is the honest argument for preferring it.