Jobs to be done interview
Definition
A jobs to be done (JTBD) interview is a structured retrospective conversation with a recent customer designed to surface the underlying job — the progress they were trying to make in their life or work — that caused them to seek out and buy the product.
The jobs to be done framework was developed by Clayton Christensen and later extended by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek into a practical interview methodology. The core insight: people don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Understanding the job determines what the product is really competing against.
The switch interview is the primary technique. You interview someone shortly after they made a purchase decision — ideally within 90 days. The interview traces the full purchase timeline: the first thought ("when did you first realize you needed something like this?"), the passive looking, the active looking, the decision, and the first use. The goal is to identify the push (what dissatisfied them with the old solution), the pull (what attracted them to the new one), habits (what they're reluctant to give up), and anxiety (what nearly stopped the switch).
JTBD interviews surface language and context that user interviews often miss. Where a user interview might reveal that someone wants "faster meeting notes," a JTBD interview might reveal that they bought the product after a specific incident — a Monday morning where they couldn't find the notes from Friday's whiteboard session, lost a key decision, and had to reconvene the team.
That incident — the specific triggering event — is the product's real competition context. The product is competing not just against other apps, but against the old behavior (a photo in the camera roll, a Slack thread, nothing at all).
JTBD synthesis sessions often cover whiteboards with timelines, push/pull diagrams, and customer quote clusters. BoardSnap captures those sessions as structured summaries.
Examples
- A switch interview tracing a PM's decision to start using BoardSnap after losing whiteboard notes before a sprint review
- Discovering that the product's real competition is "we just take a photo and share it in Slack"
- A push/pull diagram on a whiteboard mapping reasons customers switched from the old behavior
- Identifying the triggering event that caused purchase — the first time the old solution visibly failed
Snap a jobs to be done interview. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.