Personas describe people. Jobs explain decisions.
JTBD is a lens, not an identity. Used well it explains why someone switched; used badly it becomes another artefact nobody opens.
11 March 2026 · 6 min read
A persona tells you that Marketing Mary is 34, uses two analytics tools and values efficiency. It does not tell you what happened on the Tuesday she decided the current arrangement was no longer tolerable. Only the second thing predicts anything.
The forces are the content
The useful part of Jobs To Be Done is not the job statement. It is the account of what pushed someone away from the old situation, what pulled them toward a new one, what anxiety nearly stopped them, and what habit almost kept them. That is a causal story, and causal stories can be designed against.
Where teams get it wrong
Two failure modes recur. The first is treating JTBD as a workshop: a good afternoon, a wall of sticky notes, no change in what gets built. The second is treating it as a totalising philosophy that must replace every other input, which makes it easy to reject.
I have had far more success embedding the questions into a workflow someone already completes — a buying process, a brief, an onboarding form — than presenting the method as a better worldview.
What it does not do
JTBD will not tell you how large the market is, what competitors are winning, or whether demand is growing. It sits alongside market research and quantitative signal. Anyone selling it as the whole practice is selling one instrument as an orchestra.
Where this shows up in the work
Keep reading
- Search is becoming an answer, and that is a product problemWhen an assistant answers instead of listing results, the question stops being 'how do we rank' and becomes 'what are we reliably known for'. That is decided upstream of marketing.
- Most growth problems are positioning problems wearing a costumeTraffic briefs, conversion briefs and churn briefs often describe the same underlying failure: the company has not established what it is for, and for whom.
- Positioning is not copywritingIf the words outrun the product, you have bought yourself an expensive disappointment. Positioning should be the shortest accurate description of real value.