What do you think about the Jobs to be Done framework for enterprise B2B?

I find the jobs to be done framework very useful in order to keep a customer-first mindset. Truly understanding your target audience's needs serves a product marketer targeting any segment or industry. Ultimately all buyers are people whether they're purchasing as a consumer or as a representative of their employer. 

I think it's very helpful. For those reading this that haven't read Clayton Christensen's work, here's a good summary of the concept of "jobs to be done".

When we create messaging, we need to be focused on what problem we're solving. I'll give you an example of when I worked on GoToMeeting. This was early days and not many people used online meetings, way before Zoom. If you think about what job GoToMeeting was solving, many thought the problem was better collaboration. You get screen sharing and video conferencing, that's better collaboration/communication right? Yes....and no. That's not the job people were hiring GoToMeeting to solve. People were hiring GoToMeeting to help them not travel as much. That's a much more specific job. Based on that, we created the marketing campaign with this line - "Do More. Travel Less." This was a highly successful campaign because it spoke to the job folks where trying to solve with GoToMeeting.

The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) concept is excellent for an enterprise B2B sales motion, and it is beneficial to think about why someone would buy your product. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Speaking just about the job works well when your audience is responsible for actually getting the job done. For example, developers might need a CI/CD pipeline tool to deploy code, or marketers might need an email marketing tool to send email to customers. With these audiences, you can speak about how your product directly accomplishes what needs to be done.

As you move up the leadership stack, people will need to know that your product can get the job done PLUS why they should pick you. Senior architects, VPs, and C-level executives will want to know how your product impacts their lives as they won’t do the job themselves. In these cases, just telling them how your product accomplishes the job won’t be enough.

For example, do you increase their revenue? Do you reduce their risk? Do you reduce their costs? These are questions they will want answered.

JTBD is great, but please keep your target audience in mind while creating your messaging.

P.S. Make sure you’ve read at least one article on the Jobs To Be Done idea. Pop quiz: who was the original well-known author of the Jobs To Be Done idea, and where was it published?

JTBD is a great framework for products with many use cases which can appear across multiple B2B ICPs. For example, when I was leading SDK product marketing, we used job stories to explain typical use cases for SDK. Our enterprise users "hired" SDK to solve their own integration needs and build various types of extensions which went into typical job stories.