The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)

1. Understand Four Forces of Progress

Analyze customer behavior by understanding the four forces: Push (F1), Pull (F2), Anxiety (F3), and Habit of the Present (F4). People will only change behavior if the Push and Pull are greater than the Anxiety and Habit.

2. Design Sales for Customer Buying

Structure your sales process around how customers want to buy, not how you want to sell. Recognize the six phases of buying (First Thought, Passive Looking, Active Looking, Deciding, First Use, Ongoing Use) to meet them where they are and increase conversion.

3. Conduct Hypothesis-Building Interviews

Frame customer interviews around “what caused people to say today’s the day” they made a change. Extract their full story, including pushes, pulls, anxieties, habits, and trade-offs, without using a rigid discussion guide to uncover true motivations.

4. Focus on Struggling Moments

Shift your product roadmap and development focus from features to the underlying struggling moments customers face. These moments are the true seeds for innovation and where new products emerge.

5. Reduce Customer Friction Points

Identify and remove non-product-related frictional points in the customer journey, such as the effort of moving or setup. Addressing these can significantly increase sales, even if it means adjusting product pricing.

6. Cluster Customer Stories, Don’t Segment

When analyzing interview data, cluster customer stories by pathways of reasons (sets of pushes and pulls) rather than just segmenting. This helps understand the different jobs a product is hired for and resolve potential conflicts.

7. Interview Those Who Already Tried

To gain accurate insights into causation, only interview people who have recently purchased your product or a competitor’s, or who have churned. They can articulate the specific context and trade-offs that led to their actions.

8. Don’t Trust Stated Intent

Never trust what people say they will do or their initial, superficial responses. Instead, investigate what actually happened and unpack deeper layers of language to uncover the true motivations and causal mechanisms.

9. Choose What to “Suck At”

Make deliberate trade-offs in your product’s design and features that align with what customers are willing to sacrifice. This prevents overshooting customer needs, adding unnecessary complexity, and ensures your product’s compromises match theirs.

10. Leaders Must Do Customer Interviews

Ensure product leaders and founders personally conduct customer interviews. This direct engagement provides a deep, firsthand understanding of struggling moments and prevents the team from merely hypothesizing jobs in a vacuum.

11. Value is Context + Outcome

Recognize that customer value is derived from both their starting context and the desired outcome, not just the outcome itself. Understanding this helps avoid over-delivering features or mispricing your product.

12. JTBD for Choice and Change

Apply the Jobs to be Done framework primarily when customers have real choices and are actively changing their behavior. It is less effective for deeply ingrained habits or situations where customers have no viable alternatives.

13. Context Makes Irrational Rational

When customer stories seem irrational, seek out the full context. Understanding the complete situation will reveal why seemingly illogical behaviors or decisions are, in fact, rational within their specific circumstances.

14. Focus on Customer Progress

Shift your mindset from simply selling products to helping customers make progress in their lives. People ‘hire’ products to achieve specific outcomes within their unique contexts.

15. Identify What Not to Build

Use the Jobs to be Done framework to identify features or functionalities that are not essential to the customer’s core job. This helps prevent feature bloat and keeps the product focused on what truly matters.

16. Study Change, Not Momentum

Instead of merely observing the current direction of customer behavior, focus on understanding what causes people to change their direction. Innovation happens at these points of behavioral shift.

17. Accept Customer Perception

Be open to how customers actually perceive your product and its value, rather than trying to force your desired perception. This alignment is crucial for effective positioning and adoption.

18. Small Interview Sample Size

For causal mechanism research, aim for 10-12 customer interviews, as the patterns of pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits tend to repeat and reveal themselves around 7-8 interviews.