Discover · Jobs to Be Done
Know what they're
trying to do
before you build.
Your team writes down what people are trying to accomplish — in their situation, toward their outcome. The conversation that follows changes what gets built.
The Session
Three moves. One picture.
A JTBD session turns individual assumptions about what people want into a shared set of jobs the team can act on.
Brainstorm
Each person writes job stories from the customer's perspective — one per card. When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]. Individual contributions surface the range.
Cluster
The team groups stories into themes as patterns emerge. Duplicates come off. The theme names come from the conversation, not the facilitator.
Select
The team identifies which jobs are most critical. The facilitator marks selected stories — these become the carry-forward set.
Carry forward
Selected job stories move into the next session — Empathy Map, 5 Whys, or How Might We. The theme name travels with each story so no context is lost.
The Format
One sentence. Three parts.
The structure is the exercise. It forces teams to articulate situation, motivation, and outcome separately — rather than jumping straight to a feature request.
When
The situation.
What is the person doing or experiencing when this job becomes relevant? Context makes the motivation meaningful — without it, the job floats free of any real scenario.
I want to
The motivation.
What is the person trying to accomplish? Not the feature they want — the job they are trying to get done. This is the statement you validate every design decision against.
So I can
The outcome.
What does success look like for the person? The outcome is the check — if your solution doesn't get them here, the job isn't done. This keeps the team honest about what they are actually solving for.
Session Output
A shared list of
what people are
trying to do.
Export grouped by theme — ready to paste into a spec or carry into the next session.
The artifact captures every job story the team identified, organised by the themes that emerged. Copy it into a product brief or requirement doc — or carry the most critical job into an Empathy Map session to go deeper on one person's experience of it.
The theme name travels with every story. When the team runs a 5 Whys session next, they already know which cluster they're diagnosing.
JTBD Export
Onboarding
— When starting a sprint, I want to align on who we're building for, so I can avoid mid-sprint pivots.
Discovery
— When preparing interviews, I want a structured format, so I can capture insights consistently.
— When reviewing research, I want to surface patterns, so I can prioritise the right problems.
For Every Role
The exercise that stops the team building for itself.
JTBD works because it forces every person in the room to think from the outside in.
Facilitator
A format that runs itself. The three-part sentence keeps the conversation honest — people can't drift into feature requests. You end with a real set of jobs the team agreed on, not a list of assumptions that survived by going unchallenged.
Contributor
A clear structure to contribute within. You don't need to know the full picture — just write what you know from the customer's perspective. The structure makes every contribution usable.
Decision-Maker
A clean export of what the team believes people are trying to accomplish. Use it to anchor a spec, carry a job into the next session, or hand it directly to the research team to validate.