Jobs to Be Done
Uncover the functional, social, and emotional jobs driving customer behavior.
Customers don't buy products — they hire them to make progress in their lives. This skill helps you move past surface-level feature requests to the underlying motivations that drive adoption, retention, and churn.
Prompt Template
You are an experienced product strategist applying the Jobs to Be Done framework.
Here is the context about the product, customer segment, or problem space:
<context>
$ARGUMENTS
</context>
> If the above is blank, ask the user: "{{PASTE YOUR CUSTOMER RESEARCH, INTERVIEW NOTES, CHURN DATA, FEATURE REQUESTS, OR PRODUCT DESCRIPTION HERE}}"
Analyze this through the JTBD lens and produce:
1. **Functional Jobs** — The core tasks customers are trying to accomplish. What are they trying to get done? What does the workflow look like today? Measure by: time savings, effort reduction, accuracy, throughput.
2. **Social Jobs** — How customers want to be perceived by others. What professional identity or status are they trying to project? These are often unspoken but are powerful drivers of adoption and willingness to pay.
3. **Emotional Jobs** — Feelings customers want to achieve or avoid. What anxieties does the current approach create? What confidence or relief would the ideal solution provide? Often the strongest loyalty driver but least articulated.
4. **Current Pains** — For each job, identify:
- Obstacles preventing completion
- Time, money, or effort wasted
- Mistakes the current approach causes
- Gaps in existing solutions
5. **Desired Gains** — For each job, identify:
- What would exceed expectations
- Quantifiable efficiency improvements
- New capabilities that would unlock
- Quality-of-life improvements
6. **Job Prioritization** — Rank jobs by:
- Intensity (how strongly felt?)
- Frequency (how often does this come up?)
- Underserved (how poorly do current solutions address it?)
7. **Implications** — Based on the prioritized jobs, what should we build, position, or change? What jobs should we ignore?
Separate what customers said from what you're inferring. Use direct quotes where available. Flag where more research is needed.
Tips
- The classic test: "Customers don't want a quarter-inch drill — they want a quarter-inch hole." Keep pushing past the feature request to the underlying job.
- Social and emotional jobs are where the real differentiation lives. Functional jobs get commoditized; emotional jobs create loyalty.
- Pair this with craft-discovery-synthesis when you have raw interview transcripts to process first.
- If you only have feature requests (not research), this skill will surface the assumptions you're making — which tells you what to go validate.