Jobs-to-be-done interviews: how to run them and analyse what you find

Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) research focuses on why customers choose, use, or abandon a product — specifically, what progress they are trying to make in their lives and what gets in the way. Clayton Christensen, who popularised the theory, estimated that between 75 and 85% of new products fail because they don't target a job customers are genuinely trying to get done. JTBD interviews are a structured way to surface these jobs before committing to a product bet.

The core insight is deceptively simple: customers don't buy products for their features. They "hire" products to do a job. A construction worker doesn't buy a drill — they hire it to make a hole. When you understand the job, you understand why customers switched to you, why they switch away, and what competing solutions they compare you against. That knowledge shapes better product decisions and more effective positioning than persona documents or demographic segmentation.

This guide covers the two main JTBD research traditions, how to design and run a Switch interview, how to analyse JTBD data across a corpus of transcripts, and where Skimle fits.

What are the 2 main JTBD research traditions?

The JTBD field has two distinct traditions that share a common theory but differ significantly in method and output.

Both traditions are valuable, and many researchers draw on both. For early-stage product decisions and founder research, the Switch interview approach is the more practical starting point. For established teams with existing customers and a desire to prioritise features systematically, ODI's quantitative layer adds precision.

What is a job-to-be-done exactly?

A job is the progress a customer is trying to make in a particular circumstance. Three dimensions define every job:

Functional jobs — the core task or outcome the customer wants to achieve. "Keep my team aligned on project status." "Understand why customers are churning." These are what most product teams focus on.

Emotional jobs — how the customer wants to feel (or avoid feeling) as they do the task. "Feel confident I haven't missed anything important." "Avoid looking incompetent in front of my manager." Emotional jobs are often more powerful drivers of choice than functional ones.

Social jobs — how the customer wants to be perceived by others. "Be seen as the person who brings data-driven insights to the team." "Look professional to clients."

A complete job map includes all three layers. Products that address only the functional job are vulnerable to competitors that also solve the emotional and social dimensions.

How to design a JTBD Switch interview

The Switch interview, developed by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, focuses on a specific event: a recent purchase, switch, or cancellation. By tracing the full arc of a specific decision — from first awareness of a problem through to selecting a solution — you build a picture of the forces that drove the switch.

Who to recruit

The most valuable participants are recent purchasers or recent churners, specifically people who switched from something else to your product (or switched away). Recent matters: the specific memories and emotions are accessible. People who have been customers for 5 years cannot reliably reconstruct the decision that led them to you.

Aim for 8-15 participants for initial JTBD research. With 5-6 good interviews you will typically start to see patterns; 10-15 gives you confidence in those patterns.

The interview structure

Opening (5 minutes): Establish the timeline. "Can you tell me about the day you decided to [sign up / cancel / switch]? What was going on that day?" Get a specific event, not a general account. If the participant gives you "I'd been thinking about it for a while," probe: "What was happening in the days just before you made the decision?"

The four moments (15-20 minutes): JTBD research identifies four key moments in the decision process:

1. First thought — when did the customer first start thinking about this problem?
2. Passive looking — early, low-effort awareness gathering ("I noticed a few other tools mentioned...")
3. Active looking — serious evaluation ("I did a proper comparison of three options")
4. Decision — the final push that resolved the choice

Work through each moment with specifics: what were they doing, who were they with, what specifically prompted the move to the next stage?

The four forces (throughout): The four forces of switching explain every decision:

• Push — dissatisfaction with the current situation ("My old approach was taking too long")
• Pull — attraction to the new solution ("I heard it could handle this in minutes")
• Anxiety — fears about the switch ("What if it doesn't work with our existing workflow?")
• Habit — the gravitational pull of the current way ("We've always done it this way")

Listen for all four throughout the interview. The ratio of push+pull to anxiety+habit explains whether and when switching happens.

Close (5 minutes): "Looking back, what made you confident you were making the right decision? What would have made you hesitate more?" These questions surface the criteria the customer used to evaluate the decision — which becomes the basis for positioning and competitive analysis.

Sample interview questions

• "Walk me through the day you decided to [sign up]. What was going on?"
• "Before you started looking, what were you using to handle this?"
• "What finally made you start looking for something different?"
• "What were you worried about when you were deciding?"
• "Tell me about the moment you said 'yes, this is the one.'"
• "What almost stopped you?"
• "Who else was involved in the decision?"
• "If you hadn't found this, what would you have done instead?"

Notice that none of these questions ask about features, satisfaction ratings, or comparisons. They ask about events, feelings, and context. The feature preferences emerge from the story; they are not the subject of the story.

How to analyse JTBD data

After 10-15 Switch interviews, you have a rich corpus of decision stories. The analysis task is to find the patterns across individual accounts.

Code for the four forces. For each participant, identify the specific push statements (what was broken about the old way), pull statements (what attracted them to the new solution), anxiety statements (what almost stopped them), and habit statements (what kept them in the old way). This produces a clear picture of the forces at work across your customer base.

Map the job landscape. What functional, emotional, and social jobs are customers hiring your product to do? List them and note how often each appears across participants. The most frequently cited functional job is your core value proposition; the most frequently cited emotional job is your messaging opportunity.

Identify the switching trigger. What specific event pushed customers from passive consideration to active evaluation? Common triggers: a failure in the old way ("the spreadsheet broke"), a new context ("we hired someone and the old workflow stopped working"), a new relationship ("my colleague told me about it"). The trigger tells you where to place your marketing message.

Segment by job. Are different customer segments hiring your product for meaningfully different jobs? A startup founder and an enterprise HR manager may both use the same product but for jobs that are similar in function but very different in emotional and social dimension. Skimle's metadata analysis lets you code transcripts by participant type and compare patterns across segments.

For the mechanics of coding interview data, see our guide on how to code qualitative data and inductive, deductive, and abductive coding.

How to use JTBD findings

JTBD research produces insight at three levels:

Product: Which jobs are underserved? Which features are customers hiring the product for that it was not designed to serve? Where are the anxieties that slow adoption?

Positioning: What language do customers use to describe the job and the switch? This language belongs in your website copy and sales conversations. It is more persuasive than features-and-benefits copy because it sounds like the customer's own thinking.

Competitive strategy: Who else is a candidate for the job? The real competitors for a JTBD are not always what a market map suggests. If someone hires a consultant to run their qualitative research, their alternative to Skimle is not just NVivo — it might be a research agency or doing the analysis in ChatGPT.

For synthesising interview findings into a format product teams will act on, see how to synthesise user research.

Frequently asked questions

Is JTBD the same as user research?

JTBD and user research overlap but are not the same. User research (UX research) typically focuses on how people interact with a product — usability, task completion, interface friction. JTBD focuses on why people chose the product and what they are trying to accomplish at a strategic level. Both are valuable; neither substitutes for the other. Many product teams use JTBD for product strategy and UX research for execution.

How many JTBD interviews do you need?

For initial JTBD research, 8-15 interviews with recent purchasers will surface the main job patterns. With 5-6 good interviews you typically see the core jobs emerging. Beyond 15, new jobs rarely appear — but if you are doing segment-specific JTBD research (e.g. enterprise vs SMB), you want 8-15 per segment.

Can I use JTBD for B2B research?

Yes, though B2B JTBD research requires attention to the full buying group, not just one decision-maker. A purchase that involves 3 people will have 3 sets of push/pull/anxiety/habit forces — often in tension. Mapping the buying group and interviewing different roles (economic buyer, champion, user) gives a more complete picture of the job landscape.

What is the difference between JTBD and customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map traces the steps a customer takes through a process. JTBD explains why they take those steps — what they are trying to accomplish and what forces act on their decisions. Journey mapping describes behaviour; JTBD explains motivation. In practice, JTBD research provides the "why" layer that makes journey maps actionable.

Can Skimle Ask run JTBD-style interviews?

Yes. Skimle Ask can run structured AI-led conversations that follow a Switch interview logic — tracing the customer's decision arc from first awareness through selection. This works well for post-sign-up or post-churn research where you want qualitative switching data at scale without scheduling 30-minute calls for every cohort. See Skimle Ask for how to set up these conversations.

Ready to analyse JTBD interview transcripts and find the job patterns across your customer base? Try Skimle for free — load your Switch interview transcripts, code for forces and jobs, and use metadata to compare findings across customer segments.

Related reading:

• Voice of customer research: how to build a VoC programme
• How to conduct effective business interviews
• How to synthesise user research

About the authors

Henri Schildt is a Professor of Strategy at Aalto University School of Business and co-founder of Skimle. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles using qualitative methods, including work in Academy of Management Journal, Organisation Science, and Strategic Management Journal. His research focuses on organisational strategy, innovation, and qualitative methodology. Google Scholar profile

Olli Salo is a former Partner at McKinsey & Company where he spent 18 years helping clients understand the markets and themselves, develop winning strategies and improve their operating models. He has done over 1000 client interviews and published over 10 articles on McKinsey.com and beyond. LinkedIn profile

Sources

• Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done" — Christensen et al. (2016), Harvard Business Review
• Jobs to Be Done: Theory and Frameworks — GoPractice
• The History of Jobs to Be Done and ODI — Tony Ulwick, Strategyn
• Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail — CB Insights