Lack of demand is why startups fail — how to win with JTBD

In this article, I’ll walk you through the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory from the perspective of the demand for your product. Because lack of demand is why startups fail. The read will take about 12 minutes.

Why should every product owner care about JBTD?

Hey, indiehackers. If you're reading this, chances are you're developing a new product or growing an existing one. You might also be operating an established business and looking for opportunities to reach out to new audiences or otherwise grow your market share. Let's take a closer look at it from the JTBD perspective and see how to employ the theory to discover and leverage demand and product-market fit.

Product-market fit is a degree to which a product satisfies established market demand.

Let’s begin with the two core ideas:

• Demand is important because its lack is the number one reason startups fail according to CB Insights and other research.
• ‘Jobs’ are stable in time: they outlive products; it makes discovering and leveraging job-based demand more reliable than looking at the landscape of your ‘direct competition.’

The JTBD theory helps you categorize, define, capture, and organize your customer’s needs: employ a wider demand landscape and answer the demand with your product’s functionality and related narratives.

For example, even a shift to conveying your product values through different Jobs-to-be-Done on your marketing site can significantly improve your conversion rates; distributing jobs across your entire funnel will have a higher impact.

Now, let’s have a closer look at the JTBD theory and practice, so you could get the ball rolling.

So, what is JTBD exactly?

The core concept of the JTBD framework is that people buy products and services to get a job done. It’s more about hiring products than buying them.

Like, you hire a drill to make a hole or an audio streaming service to listen to music. In the examples, ‘drill’ and ‘streaming service’ are products, ‘make a hole’ and ‘listen to music’ — their respective jobs.

Then, when I’m selling drills, I compete with other things that can make holes in things, and with streaming services — other ways of listening to music.

The framework has two main interpretations:

• Jobs-As-Progress by Clayton Christensen: a job is the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance;
• Jobs-As-Activities by Anthony Ulwick: jobs are the tasks and activities consumers are trying to carry out.

The examples above refer to Jobs-As-Activities. The As-Progress interpretation can be explained through ‘positive images you see in your head related to the post-purchase period.’ It means that when going after a drill, you might ‘see’ how happy your loved ones become after you employed a hole in a wall to hang a beautiful family photo.

At first, there existed a classification of jobs segmenting them into emotional, social, and functional. This proved to be impractical and is currently laid out as: ‘jobs are functional, with emotional and social components’ by Anthony Ulwick in his core JTBD tenets. So, it makes more sense to define jobs as both what consumers are trying to get done AND the progress they try to make in a particular circumstance.

That said, to fall under the definition, a functional job should be formulated in a way to have social and emotional components. That helps increase the chances of successfully conveying a functional job by helping consumers draw that positive ‘image in their heads.’ Now, let’s navigate to the corresponding job formula.

Zen Note: segmenting jobs into emotional, social, and functional adheres to motivational hierarchy: be-goals, do-goals, and others. However, when it comes to conveying product values to a target audience through content, we’ll use other hierarchical models like text funnels, micro funnels, awareness ladders, meaning we’d still want to convey emotional context when talking about making holes here and there.

How to lay down jobs in JTBD

The minimal job formula would include a verb and an object it relates to (or acts upon), like ‘listen to music’, ‘make a hole’, or ‘water a plant.’

Now, let’s cycle back to our core points:

• Jobs help discover demand. Say, you market watering systems. While there are many of them on the market, you can also attract audiences interested in purchasing watering pots. Because both get the same job done. You can easily discover a wider range of similar products by Googling ‘ways to water a plant.’
• Jobs are persistent: irrigation is ancient, and plants have been watered for thousands of years with a variety of products. From buckets, through dams and dikes to watering pots and watering systems. It’s thus more practical to market a product in the niche as a ‘better water-a-plant product’ rather than ‘a better watering pot.’

When marketing products, it’s more practical to think of the aggregate formula that would include social and emotional context. I prefer the one I first encountered at a CX Buro webinar by Mike Rudenko. It goes as verb + object + context + result and easily melts functional, social, and emotional components together. Let’s take a look at the two jobs in the picture.

As a marketer, you would benefit from brainstorming such jobs: they help form different narratives to generate and test marketing hypotheses while staying in the product context. ‘Jobs are the building blocks for predictable growth,’ says Ulwick.

Zen Note: it’s interesting to see how it unfolds. ‘Verb + object’ works great for market and competitor intelligence. Once we add ‘context,’ the job becomes more useful from the product development perspective. The ‘result’ addition leaves wide room for marketing activities. Hence, a Job-to-be-Done aggregates market, product, and audience context.

Hierarchies: why it’s Jobs-to-be-Done, not Job

First, there usually are many jobs associated with a single product. Let’s think functional. With digital products, it’s common to develop new product functionality. Each piece of product functionality widens the range of jobs it gets done.

Second, jobs form hierarchies that are similar in their structure to goal and motivational ones. It means that you can take a cloud of jobs your product gets done and distribute them vertically along the functional-emotional dimension.

Let’s unfold the ‘make a hole’ job:

• {emotional} Engage in personal growth to get to the new height: for a greater good.
• {emotional} Achieve self-realization to obtain motivation and grow personally.
• {social} Make your family happy to achieve self-realization in your social role.
• {functional} Hang the family photo in the living room to make your family happy.
• {functional} Make a hole in the wall to install a family photo.

Zen Note: emotional jobs define how customers want to feel or avoid feeling as a result of executing the core functional job. Social jobs define how the customer wants to be perceived by others. The functional job defines what a customer needs to accomplish. It well serves as a starting point for your research. When it’s defined first, emotional and social jobs get easier to design and test.

In product marketing, job hierarchies are especially useful when distributing narratives across your funnel. In SaaS, the narrative of your product dashboard and documentation will then be shifted towards the functional level, while your marketing site would be appealing to the social and emotional context of your target audiences.

What is important from the perspective of this article’s core points:

• Jobs help discover demand: the more you know about the jobs your product gets done and the top jobs employed by its users, the closer you are to understanding the magnitude of demand in the market. Strategyzer puts their Value Proposition Canvas (or VPC) with ‘Customer Jobs’ being its important element as an instrument to achieve product-market fit.
• Jobs are persistent: it’s useful to reflect on the life span of each job your product gets done and its respective demand’s trend; sticking with ‘long-lasting’ jobs and perfecting your value proposition would then become a reliable way to achieving or enhancing your product-market fit. According to Ulwick: ‘the strategy should always be to help customers get the entire job done better and more cheaply on a single product platform.’

The higher is the level of a job in a hierarchy, the more competitive it becomes: there are fewer ways to make a hole in a wall than to make your family happy or obtain motivation.

Zen Note: while the VPC framework is positioned as an instrument to achieve product-market fit, filling out the canvas is the first step on this journey. Think of it as ‘product karma.’ Letting your product fully unleash its potential or realization requires action: the cyclic flow of generating and testing product and marketing hypotheses aimed at getting a job done better 🧘

Jobs are persistent

‘A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time’ is one of the core tenets of the JTBD theory. Since jobs are closely tied with goals pursued by individuals, they evolve in parallel with the psyche and society. And, the pace of this progress is slower than the pace of technological development. It’s interesting that the JTBD theory has its roots in the strategy named Outcome-Driven Innovation (or ODI). When you design for better outcomes, the innovation is about getting a job done in a ‘better way.’ For instance, in a specific context.

Let’s take a look at the job ‘study new research and technology.’ Universities were famous for centuries for getting this job done. Later on, a significant market share of this job was taken by the eLearning industry. The year 2020 brought an unexpected and high-contrast change of the global context with the COVID-19 crisis. The discussed job then largely shifted towards its ‘study … in a lockdown’ or ‘study … at a distance’ version: the eLearning Industry growth rate is now forecasted as 8.00% CAGR by Global Market Insights in 2020, while the rate assessed by Docebo in 2016 was at –6.40% CAGR. A whopping 180 turn in the growth rate of the same ‘job’ provided with a different ‘context.’ This, of course, well correlates with demand.

Рroducts compete at the quality and cost of getting a job done. Hence, the teams aware of the jobs done by their product have a competitive advantage and spend less resources adapting to a changing context.

Zen Note: when we reflect on the quality of getting a job done, we immediately find ourselves in the field of customer experience. Improving the customer experience is the top-rated driver for commercial success addressed by 85% of 1,350 business decision-makers in a recent Frost & Sullivan study.

Jobs help discover demand

Jobs-to-be-Done are stable over time and substitute an important part of your value proposition design. Hence, it’s practical to look at your competition and demand from the job perspective:

• Your product competes with other methods to get a customer job done, not other products.
• Segmenting audiences by what they are trying to get done (or applying job-based segmentation) provides you with larger market opportunities and a more predictable path towards them.

Including Jobs-to-be-Done in your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) allows you to properly describe your product for each customer segment and form laser-focused value propositions.

You can then use the value propositions as marketing hypotheses for your brand’s narrative, advertising, visuals, UX copy, content marketing, etc. It allows setting up marketing experiments to understand which job-based narrative better resonates with a target audience. When you find the best narrative-audience matches, you leverage your product-market fit and are able to measure demand as a compound volume of those audiences.

Summary and … Introduction

Looking at your product and its audiences from the perspective of Jobs-to-be-Done makes your strategy more predictable and stable in time, and structures your choice of product and marketing hypotheses around the ‘true customer needs.’ As a bonus, the JTBD theory aligns your product vision with motivational aspects of human behavior, a wide field of sociological science.

The Indiehackers community guidelines advise every author to introduce themself in the first post. I decided to combine the intro with value and the outline of what I will be writing about. I’m both a researcher and practitioner in the fields of data analysis, applied linguistics, sociology, marketing, and will be writing about the theory and appliances of product frameworks, experiments, and marketing strategy. I hope this will help complement your work with structure and help guide your marketing with evidence, not just data. Name’s Ilya, and I’m glad to be a part of the Indiehackers community 🧘

I’m a founder of Scalekarma where Pythia is a Market Intelligence technology that supports your ideas with evidence. We take your value propositions and score them against a web search context flooded with Jobs-to-be-Done that people have been persistently telling search engines about in the form of search queries, for decades. Simply put, you name a job, and we say how the market for it looks like and help design and execute the marketing strategy.

Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in how exactly we do that, and I’ll shoot you a note with the whitepaper. I’m also curious whether you have experienced difficulties explaining what a certain product does for your customers or experimented with job-based audience segmentation. If you’re a Product or UX person too, let’s connect via LinkedIn.