Users "hire" products for a job. Why this holds up in strategy and roadmap prioritisation.
Category · Project Management
The job, not the feature.
Jobs-to-be-Done flips the perspective: people don't buy a product, they "hire" it for a job — a progress they want to make in a specific situation. The classic image: nobody wants a drill, everybody wants the hole in the wall.
The job is stable, the solution changes. Understand the job and you also see who it really competes against — often not the obvious rival.
Where it earns its keep in practice.
In strategy and roadmap prioritisation, JTBD is a sharp lens: we judge ideas by which job they do better, and for whom — not by which feature sounds good. That prevents feature lists that solve nobody's task.
No panacea.
JTBD is no substitute for quantitative validation or technical skill. Formulating jobs cleanly is handiwork; done badly it just produces nice-sounding sentences. It's a lens for prioritising, not a finished specification.