User Research with Jobs To Be Done Interviews

Alex Baldwin

Alex Baldwin

@alexbaldwin

Doing a bit of research before starting a project can save you from years of building the wrong product. In product design, typical research efforts center around understanding user demographics or personas. At their best, personas are incomplete, missing crucial information about the surrounding context. Jobs to be done (JTBD) interviews are a powerful user research technique for mapping out the context around a user’s purchasing decisions. They allow you to map out what events and forces influence user behavior. By selecting the right interview candidates and going through the following process, you can do in 10 interviews what would normally take over 1,000 surveys.

  1. The “Job” of a McDonald’s Milkshake

    Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor, developed the concept of JTBD while researching what products customers want to buy. Watching him tell the “milkshake story” is by far the most compact and accessible introduction to the topic. Think about how easily a researcher could be misled by only looking at demographic purchasing data.

  2. What is Jobs to be Done?

    Now that you have the basic concept of JTBD, let’s round out your understanding and put it into the context of product design. After reading, you should be able to tell the difference between an activity and a customer job, know what it means to “upgrade a user” through your product, and have an idea what concepts preceded JTBD.

  3. Watch the live interview from Uncovering the Jobs to Be Done

    Skip ahead to 18:40 and watch a JTBD interview by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, two veteran JTBD researchers. Carefully listen to how they put together a timeline of the participant’s car purchase journey. Take notes on the specific language the interviewers use to clarify points and stoke the participants memory.

  4. Develop your own JTBD interview framework

    The goal of your JTBD interviews is to put together a map of casual steps that customers go through to accomplish a job. Using example questions from this article, you’ll easily be able to construct an interview template.

  5. When Coffee & Kale Compete

    I love this book, it’s absolutely the most comprehensive resource on JTBD. At minimum, be sure to read through the three case studies (chapters 9, 10, 11). No excuses since it’s free to read online or download as a PDF.