jtbd-analysis

What this skill does

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 way
```

### Push (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

1. Interview recent switchers — people who adopted your product (or a competitor) in the last 90 days. Their memory is fresh.
2. Map the timeline: First thought → Passive looking → Active looking → Decision → Purchase → First use → Ongoing use.
3. Identify the trigger event: What specific moment made them start looking? This is your marketing gold.
4. Map all four forces for each switcher.
5. 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.

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*Built on Jobs-to-be-Done (Clayton Christensen) and the Forces of Progress (Bob Moesta). Skills from [productskills](https://github.com/assimovt/productskills).*