Jobs to Be Done

Jobs to Be Done is a framework that describes a purchase as a customer hiring a product to make progress in a specific situation. The job is the outcome they want and the circumstance that triggered the search. Two shoppers with nothing demographic in common can be buying the same product for the same job.

It is not a Customer Persona, which describes age, income, location and habits. A persona says who the buyer is; a job says what happened to them last Tuesday that made them start looking. It is also not a Pain Point, which is one obstacle inside a job rather than the whole progress the customer wants.

There is no formula. You gather jobs from open-text post-purchase survey answers, support tickets and interviews, then code each response into a job and count how often each appears. The honest denominator is everyone you asked. The flattering one is everyone who replied, which inflates every job because people with a strong reason to buy are the ones who bother answering. Report both, and watch whether a job's share moves as you change traffic sources.

Customer Persona describes the buyer; Jobs to Be Done describes the buyer's situation. Pain Point is one friction inside a job. Message Angle is the sentence you write once a job is identified, and Search Intent is the same idea expressed inside a search query rather than a survey answer.