Welcome the Practical Jobs-to-be-Done Book

Many teams struggle incorporating Jobs-to-be-Done into their product and market research efforts. This books goal is to highlight practical ways to get more out of the theory, the potential unlocks of knowing how to use it properly, and the many pitfalls and things to look out for.

This book exists for one reason: to give you a complete, step-by-step playbook for running real JTBD research using the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) process pioneered by Tony Ulwick, Strategyn, and knowing the limitations of the approach.

You'll learn how to:

• Uncover the exact functional, emotional, and consumption-related outcomes customers use to measure success
• Understand the JTBD and ODI quantification process
• The critiques with the methodology and alternatives teams may consider.

No methodology is perfect, and I'll openly discuss the real drawbacks of the ODI approach. I will highlight where it shines, where it can be rigid or overly quantitative, common pitfalls teams run into, and situations where other JTBD flavours (Switch interviewing, Forces of Progress, Jobs-as-Progress, etc.) or even completely different frameworks might serve you better.

Whether you're a product manager, designer, researcher, founder, marketer, or executive, this is the practical field guide I wish had existed when I started doing this work.

Acknowledgements

Jobs-to-be-Done is a community effort. Huge thanks to every contributor, reviewer, and practitioner who shared examples, feedback, and late-night debates that made this resource what it is.

Forever free & open source (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) • Contributions welcome on GitHub