Evan Shore is Senior Director of Product Management for Walmart Health & Wellness. His team’s objective is not only to provide easy access to the products and services that customers want but also to help them make progress in their health-related Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). For example, with an…

Want to find new opportunities for growth? Well, stop obsessing over your own solution and start focusing on the people you serve instead. While that might sound good in theory, it takes a little practice to shift your perspective. And it takes a structured approach to bring focus and clarity…

Ruth Hartt is a leading JTBD practitioner and founder of Culture for Hire, a consultancy focused on strategically advising arts organizations. With this, she’s seeking to reverse the downward trajectory of dwindling arts audiences around the world. It’s no wonder Ruth uses JTBD thinking in her work: she is also…

I’ve never worked for or with a company that didn’t have enough ideas. In fact, most are swimming in them — what the next feature or product offering should be, how to improve marketing and sales, and what company to buy or partner with should be. …

JTBD is very powerful at pinpointing opportunities for innovation. But it doesn’t have to entail a big, heavy upfront process. Applying “jobs thinking” — an explicit shift away from your own solution — can lead to incremental improvements that have a big impact. That’s why I like the work of…

How can I determine product-market fit without a product on the market? I don’t even have any customers yet — how can I conduct research? These are common questions we get from entrepreneurs and founders. The truth is, JTBD is a perfect framework for start-ups to orient their efforts to. …

In the broadest sense of the term, JTBD is a theory that predicts human behavior. The approach holds that individuals are motivated to make progress toward an objective. If an organization knows in advance what underlying needs drive behavior, it has a better chance of creating successful solutions. …

There are many misconceptions about the field of JTBD. Part of the problem was in-fighting amongst leading JTBD professionals and thought-leaders. Newcomers to JTBD may find an array of approaches and opinions on the topic, leading to confusion and discouragement. Contentious debates exacerbate the divide. JTBD falls broadly into two…

Creating a job map is an important step in understanding a target job. I think of a job map as the scaffolding that frames your innovation effort into smaller chunks. Below is an example of a map for a job I was investigating a few years ago. It’s important to…