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Product Management vocabulary · Discovery & User Research

Jobs to be done

Meaning in product management, with examples

nounCommon term

In product management, jobs to be done means: A way of understanding customers by focusing on the progress they are trying to make in a given situation, their “job”, rather than on their profile or the features they ask for.

In Turkish: yapılacak işler yaklaşımı, müşterinin halletmek istediği iş

How it is used

Shortened to JTBD. The core idea is that people “hire” a product to get a job done and “fire” it when something else does the job better. Jobs are often written as: When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].

Example sentences

  1. From a jobs to be done view, people don't want a budgeting app; they want to stop worrying at the end of the month.

  2. Our interviews followed the jobs to be done approach: we asked about the moment they decided to switch.

Common collocations

  • jobs to be done framework
  • job story
  • JTBD interview
  • jobs to be done approach
  • personaA realistic but invented profile of a typical user, based on research, that describes their goals, habits and problems so the team can design for them.
  • customer interviewA one-to-one conversation with a current or potential customer to understand their needs, habits and problems, usually as part of product discovery.
  • pain pointA specific problem, frustration or difficulty that users experience, which a product can solve or reduce.
  • use caseA specific situation in which someone uses a product to reach a goal, described step by step or as a short scenario.
  • product discoveryThe work of finding out which problems are worth solving and which solutions will actually work, before the team commits to building them.

More terms: Discovery & User Research

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