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. The list goes on…

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. Regardless of…

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…

In his 2009 article “Technology First, Needs Last,” Don Norman provoked the design community with a polemic assertion: I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs… New conceptual breakthroughs are…

Since Clayton Christensen popularized jobs to be done (JTBD) several decades ago, different interpretations of the field have emerged. As a result, newcomers may find an array of approaches and opinions on the topic. One school of thought focuses on the functional objectives people have. The other interprets the job…