Understand why customers "hire" and "fire" products. JTBD (Christensen/Moesta) reframes competition: you're not competing against similar products, you're competing against whatever the customer currently uses to get the job done — including doing nothing.
Job Statement Format
Structure every job as: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]."
- "When I finish a customer call, I want to capture key insights quickly, so I can share them with my team before I forget the context."
- NOT: "Users want better note-taking." (Too vague, no situation, no outcome.)
The situation is critical — the same person has different jobs in different contexts.
Forces of Progress
Four forces determine whether someone switches to your product. Map all four:
DRIVING ADOPTION RESISTING ADOPTION
================ ==================
Push: Pain with current solution Anxiety: Fear of the new solution
Pull: Attraction of new solution Habit: Comfort with current wayPush (away from current solution)
What's broken or frustrating about how they do it today? Stronger push = more urgency.
- "I spend 3 hours every week manually copying data between tools."
Pull (toward your solution)
What's attractive about the new way? This is your value proposition.
- "Automatic sync means I never copy data again."
Anxiety (about the new solution)
What are they afraid of? Switching costs, learning curves, data migration, reliability.
- "What if the sync breaks and I lose data?"
Habit (of the current solution)
What keeps them doing it the old way? Muscle memory, sunk costs, "good enough."
- "I've built all my templates in the current tool over 2 years."
To win: Push + Pull must be stronger than Anxiety + Habit.
If anxiety is high, reduce it (free trials, migration tools, guarantees). If habit is strong, find the trigger moment when the current solution fails hard enough to break inertia.
Conducting JTBD Analysis
- Interview recent switchers — people who adopted your product (or a competitor) in the last 90 days. Their memory is fresh.
- Map the timeline: First thought → Passive looking → Active looking → Decision → Purchase → First use → Ongoing use.
- Identify the trigger event: What specific moment made them start looking? This is your marketing gold.
- Map all four forces for each switcher.
- Find patterns across 5+ interviews.
Guidelines
- CRITICAL: NEVER define jobs as features. "I want to export to PDF" is a feature request. The job is "I want to share a polished document with my investors."
- ALWAYS include the situation/context in job statements. The same person has different jobs at different times.
- ALWAYS map all four forces — teams tend to focus on Push and Pull while ignoring Anxiety and Habit (the reasons people DON'T switch).
- NEVER interview only happy customers. Interview people who evaluated you and chose a competitor — they reveal your weaknesses.
- ALWAYS identify the trigger event. Without a trigger, there's no urgency to switch.
*Built on Jobs-to-be-Done (Clayton Christensen) and the Forces of Progress (Bob Moesta). Skills from productskills.*