The Jobs To Be Done Playbook. Jim Kalbach

to drive roadmaps for years. It feeds innovation with raw materials and insights from customer discovery.

      This chapter presents techniques for discovering and making sense of jobs. First, you’ll have to engage people in research, primarily in the form of interview. Then you can analyze the forces of demand generation and map out the job process to make sense of your insights. Use these opportunities to get people from your organization to engage and interact with customers. The alignment of perspectives you can gain from fundamental discovery activities is invaluable later during solution-finding phases.

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Conduct Jobs Interviews

      Jobs don’t come in neat, little packages. You have to hunt for them. You won’t find jobs from analytics or marketing surveys, and you can’t just “brainstorm” jobs and needs. You have to get out and talk to job performers in formal interviews.

      Start by getting the right people—job performers. Then lead an open interview that lets them speak in their own words about their objectives. Don’t read from a questionnaire, but instead probe on the job process and needs. Afterward, you’ll need to translate what you heard into the JTBD language.

      Note that jobs interviews are not intended for gaining empathy for participants per se, although that is often inevitable. Critics point out that jobs interviews miss a lot of the details about the person’s overall experience. Jobs interviews also don’t get at psychological states, even if there are questions about emotions and social aspects. Instead, the JTBD approach assumes that people are first and foremost motivated to get the job done so they can make progress. The interviews favor a more surgical approach to reach their goals and needs.