Where Can I Learn More About Jobs-To-Be-Done?
You’ve heard about the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) theory, and you recently saw how it provides a solid foundation for understanding how purchase decisions are made. It gave you ideas about how to improve your product, a way to understand the motivation of your buyers better, and gave you a new lens to spot areas for innovation where you didn’t see them before.
Now you’d like to learn more.
Have You Read This Book?
I’d start with the book Competing Against Luck by the late Clayton Christensen. I’ve read the audiobook version, and it was super.
Its core premise: relying on aggregate data, trends and demographics won’t give you the causality behind a purchase behavior. Doing so is akin to relying on luck to find what products to be working on, which features to be developping. Instead, Christensen introduces the idea of Jobs-to-be-done, the lens of how to get to what caused a person to hire a product, and for which job.
A Course on Mastering JTBD Interviews
In order to understand the buyer’s behavior, it pays to understand their purchase story. This course on Mastering JTBD Interviews teaches you how to ask the right questions to map out the Forces of Progress, the two key events and the different parts in every purchase story, and to get to the core Job-To-Be-Done for having purchased that product.
It’s a video-based course, and it’s solid.
Two Podcast Episodes to Start
If you’re looking for something free to start learning, here are two podcasts I suggest starting with.
First, this podcast episode of The Disruptive Voice covers one of the main ideas behind JTBD. In it, of the hosts tells the story of how he built a product that everybody thought would work, but couldn’t sell to anyone. Nobody pulled the product into their lives because nobody felt the struggle hard enough. There’s no real need to hire a product, unless there’s a hard struggle.
For an example of a JTBD Interview, try this podcast episode. You’ll hear the interview and an explanation of the reasons behind each question.
And there’s a podcast series called Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio that launched it all a few years back.
People to Follow on Twitter
Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek and Ryan Singer are the people I find get to the bottom of the theory. There are more folks to follow, for sure, but I’d start with them.
Some Articles From This Site
And, lastly, these articles cover the basics of Jobs-To-Be-Done:
What Have You Found?
There’s a ton of stuff I haven’t covered. If I’m missing something you’d like to recommend for those that want to go deeper, please reach out in this twitter thread.
Stay Sharp!
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Pascal Laliberté
@pascallaliberte