Imagine this situation: a customer contacts a company, receives a consultation, compares offers and postpones the purchase. The sales manager records “Too expensive” in the system. At the next meeting, the team discusses discounts, new ads and a special offer.
But what exactly stopped the customer? A lack of money? Doubt about the outcome? An inconvenient delivery date? Concern that after paying they would still need to solve additional problems on their own?
The business decision depends on the answer. In one case, the offer package should change. In another, the delivery process. In another, the company needs to explain how the work will happen and who will be accountable for the result.
Jobs to Be Done, or JTBD, helps research the circumstances of choice: what a person wants to achieve, what prompts action and what holds them back. It provides a basis for work on product, service, positioning and sales.
What Jobs to be Done means
Jobs to be Done, or JTBD, is an approach to researching customer motivation. It helps reveal the “job” a person is trying to complete with a product or service. This is not simply the product’s formal function, but the result the customer wants to achieve in their situation.
Customers evaluate more than product features. Previous experience, circumstances, risks, familiar alternatives, other people’s expectations and their own criteria for a successful outcome all shape the choice.
Which decisions JTBD research can support
For product teams, JTBD helps identify the outcomes that matter to customers and where current solutions fall short. For marketing, it reveals customer language, the context of choice and the barriers communication must address. For sales, it highlights comparison criteria and the reasons people delay a decision or choose a competitor.
The approach is also useful when demand exists but conversion remains low, when customers use the product differently from what the team expected, or when a business is planning a new service and wants to test whether it fits a real customer situation.
How customer motives are researched
The primary material comes from in-depth interviews with people who recently made a choice, changed solutions, abandoned a purchase or moved to an alternative. The conversation should focus on a real recent experience rather than asking respondents to predict future behaviour.
The researcher reconstructs the sequence of events: when dissatisfaction first appeared, what prompted the search, which options were considered, what created doubt, who influenced the decision and why the final choice became acceptable.
- Define the business decision first
Start with the concrete question the company needs to answer and the result the research must produce.
- Recruit people with the right experience
Select recent buyers, switchers, repeat customers or people who rejected the offer, depending on the decision in scope.
- Reconstruct a specific choice story
Explore what happened before the search, the alternatives considered, doubts, compromises and the moment of the final decision.
- Compare stories and form findings
Record circumstances, desired outcomes, choice criteria, barriers and alternatives, then compare patterns and important differences.
Turning interviews into hypotheses
After the interviews, the team compares stories and looks for recurring situations, motives, expected outcomes and barriers. These patterns can inform hypotheses about the product, price, service, communication or sales process.
A hypothesis must be testable. Instead of the broad conclusion “customers value speed,” describe a concrete change: which promise, process or condition should be tested and which behaviour it is expected to change.
How to test hypotheses
For every hypothesis, define an owner, a testing period and the metric that will determine whether the change should be implemented further.
For example, when testing a promise to deliver by an agreed date, monitor sales, logistics costs and actual on-time delivery at the same time. This shows both whether the offer is attractive and whether the company can fulfil it.
Which conclusions require further validation
In-depth interviews provide material for understanding motives and forming hypotheses. Quantitative research with an appropriate sample design is used to estimate how widespread a need is, how important it is and how satisfied the market currently is. Qualitative and quantitative stages are combined, for example, in Outcome-Driven Innovation, an approach built on JTBD.
A recurring motive in interviews should therefore be treated as an important signal within the researched group. Any conclusion about the share of the wider market requires separate evidence.
Pricing decisions also require validation of willingness to pay, offer economics and customer response. New communication should be tested for clarity and its effect on choice. Service changes should be piloted and their expected and actual results compared.
The value of research is reflected in the decisions a team makes from it and in how the team validates their effectiveness.
How to start using JTBD in your company
Choose one situation that raises the most questions for your team. For example: prospects receive proposals and disappear; repeat customers move to competitors; a new service draws interest but few orders.
Define the decision that needs to be made. Identify people whose recent experience can explain the situation. Collect and compare their stories, then prepare concrete changes to test.
At ZMK, we research customer behaviour, choice criteria and reasons for loyalty so companies can rely on evidence when making product, marketing and sales decisions. We select the research format around the business decision that needs support.