A Customer-Driven Path to Transformation:
Introducing Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) as a Foundation for Intelligent Experience Transformation
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a user-centered framework, first conceptualized by Tony Ulwick and later adapted by Jim Kalbach, that helps organizations understand what their customers actually need before building a solution. A “job” is a goal or outcome that a customer, employee, or partner wants to achieve. The core premise is straightforward: organizations succeed by understanding customer needs and motivations, or their customers’ “jobs to be done.” The framework identifies and defines outcomes in a human-centered, solution-agnostic way, creating a stable behavioral foundation for strategic decisions regardless of how fast the technology landscape shifts.
In our expanded application of JTBD, we identify jobs to be done inside the organization and the internal “job performers” who support customer needs and outcomes across the lifecycle of a service or product experience. These job performers include frontline employees, specialists, operational staff, and the emergence of AI agents responsible for completing specific jobs. Figure A illustrates this in practice: the sample JTBD maps customer jobs to be done and the corresponding organizational jobs across the customer experience lifecycle. The result is a job map that gives the organization an internal view on what it needs to deliver great customer outcomes. When we created a job map for an enterprise client, we identified approximately 300 internal jobs to be done across the customer and organizational lifecycle, most with digital technology implications, including AI and agentic opportunities.
Figure A
This example JTBD ecosystem is for the legal industry. The JTBD map includes client and correlating legal firm 'Jobs To Be Done' across the matter lifecycle.
