You design your product thinking about a particular demographic in mind. So the marketing plan also keeps targeting the same demographic. Everything is fine as long as your ad spends are getting enough leads converted.

But the moment you start realising that your ad budgets are not giving you enough sales. It is when marketing and product development guys need to think with the Jobs to be done(JBTD) framework.

So what is a job to be done framework?

Well, the JBTD theory was born out of the disruption theory by Clayton Christenson (we are not getting into it here). JBTD theory says you need to understand deeply what job the customer is trying to solve when he hires (buys) your product. Blindly trying to copy the competitor is not a good solution. Christenson claims that understanding what job the customer hires your product to do is a more predicitable way to develop innovation.

Here you stop being product-centric (adding more impressive specs) and become customer-centric (solving real customer problems).

Jobs should be stable

Once you have identified what job your product does for the customer you should make sure the demand is stable so you get a good enough chance to attempt to solve the problem with a reasonable market size.

Remember - Jobs + people(you TAM) = market

Relation between JBTD and North Star

JBTD can be social and emotional. FOr eg., Your product meets an emotional or social need of your TAM (Total addressable Market). So all processes need to be aligned to meet this objective. This social and emotional need when translated to a metric becomes the "North star" of your company.

Additional Reading

I made this literature note after reading the following two articles which do a great job of explaining this framework with some real examples.

1. [Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”](https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done)

2. [What is Jobs to be done](https://www.classify.ltd/post/what-is-jobs-to-be-done-theory)