Joshua Franklin Wiedeman

Jobs-to-Be-Done Map

The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework focuses on what customers are trying to accomplish, not who they are demographically. A JTBD map links customer goals (functional, emotional, and social) to your product’s capabilities. It shows gaps, opportunities, and the words customers use when they look for a solution. Use it for positioning, messaging, and feature priorities.

How it works

Customers do not buy products. They “hire” them to make progress in a specific situation. A JTBD map breaks a job into steps, from first thought to finishing and reviewing the result. For each step it lists the outcomes the customer uses to judge success, then rates how important and how well served each outcome is. Outcomes that are important but poorly served are where your product and your messaging should focus.

How to do it

  1. Run 10 to 15 switch interviews with recent customers. Walk through the timeline that led them to look for, compare, and adopt your product. Record four forces: push (frustration with the old way), pull (appeal of the new way), anxiety (fear of switching), and habit (comfort with the status quo).
  2. Write a core job statement: “When I [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [desired outcome].” Group similar jobs and pick one primary job and two or three related ones.
  3. Break the primary job into 8 to 12 steps (for example: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, conclude). List three to five outcomes per step, phrased as “Minimize the time it takes to…” or “Minimize the likelihood that…”.
  4. Survey at least 100 target customers on the importance and satisfaction of each outcome (1 to 10). Calculate opportunity score = importance + max(importance - satisfaction, 0).
  5. Map your features to the highest-scoring outcomes. Mark which jobs you serve well, which partly, and which not at all. Use the gaps for roadmap and messaging decisions.

What to measure

  • Opportunity score per outcome: importance + max(importance - satisfaction, 0) from the survey. Higher scores mean more underserved; as a rule of thumb, treat scores above 10 as worth a closer look.
  • Job coverage rate: high-importance outcomes your product addresses, divided by all high-importance outcomes. Compare against competitors.
  • Switching forces frequency: count how often each push and pull force appears across interviews. Use the most common ones in ads and landing pages.

Best practices

  • Use customers’ exact words from interviews in your copy. They describe frustrations and goals better than marketers do.
  • Map competitors against the same outcomes. Competitors often cluster on the same outcomes and leave whole steps untouched. That gap is a positioning opportunity.
  • Keep functional, emotional, and social jobs separate. B2B buyers care about social jobs like “look competent to my boss,” even if they rarely say so.

Common pitfalls

  • Confusing a solution with a job. “I want project management software” is a solution. The job might be “Minimize the time it takes to know which tasks are blocking the team.”
  • Interviewing only happy customers. Talk to people who recently switched, including those who evaluated you and chose a competitor. Lost deals often teach more than wins.
  • Building the map once. Jobs and expectations change. Re-run the outcome survey every year and after major launches.