Meta Description:
Build effective JTBD templates that align teams and drive growth. Learn how to create, customize, and apply templates that deliver real customer insights.
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is more than a theory—it's a methodology that helps our clients understand the true motivations behind their customers’ behavior. It clarifies the difference between what their product does and what their customers are trying to achieve. While many organizations claim to be customer-centric, few have a structured, reliable way to uncover and act on real customer needs. JTBD templates solve this gap. This is what we do at thrv.
A JTBD template isn't just a research format or workshop tool. It's a repeatable system for capturing customer goals, breaking them into manageable parts, and aligning teams around objective, measurable outcomes. The best JTBD templates clarify strategy, prioritize roadmap decisions, guide marketing messages, and create consensus across product, engineering, design, and go-to-market teams.
This guide, written by thrv experts, is designed to help product managers, innovation leads, and business leaders build, customize, and apply JTBD templates that become the foundation for smarter, faster, customer-led growth. We'll cover:
Let's turn theory into action—and insights into revenue.
A JTBD template provides the structure for understanding and prioritizing your customer's job. Here are the must-have elements that make a template effective:
The job statement defines the core functional goal your customer is trying to achieve—not with your product, but in their life or work. It should be written in a simple "verb + object" format, like "Get to a destination on time," or "Ensure aircraft airworthiness."
This phrasing strips away solutions and zeroes in on the goal. A good job statement is:
Avoid vague aspirations or emotional desires ("feel secure," "be happy"). These may matter, but they're not functional enough to drive product decisions.
Each job is made up of smaller, sequential steps. Think of these as the customer's process for getting the job done. Job steps help your team:
For example, in the job "Get to a destination on time," steps may include:
Mapping steps gives you a job blueprint. It's essential for uncovering unmet needs.
Each job step contains several customer needs. These are not features or wants—they're metrics customers use to judge success. A well-formed need looks like: "Minimize the time it takes to determine the optimal route."
Every need should be:
Needs are where JTBD gets powerful. They quantify value from the customer's point of view.
Not all needs are equal. Some are already well-satisfied by the market; others are underserved. Unmet needs represent your best opportunities.
We find them using:
We prioritize needs with high importance and low satisfaction: innovation sweet spots.
Rather than traditional persona-based segments ("marketing manager, age 35"), we use struggle-based segmentation. Group customers by shared unmet needs. This lets you:
This segmentation is dynamic and rooted in real behavior, not assumptions.
We bring it together with a strategic summary:
This becomes your north star for product, marketing, and positioning.
We then analyze how current solutions (including yours) perform against each need. We look for areas where competitors are slow, inaccurate, or hard to use. These are your wedge opportunities.
This ensures you're not just different—you're better at helping the customer succeed.
Our templates end with a space for brainstorming ideas that:
This structure turns research into execution. Your team can go from insight to solution with clarity and focus.
JTBD is flexible by design—but templates must reflect the specifics of your market, product category, and customer environment. Here's how we adapt your template for maximum relevance.
We identify the job beneficiary—the person who benefits from the job being done, regardless of who executes it. In consumer markets, these are usually the end users. In B2B or healthcare, the job beneficiary may be a stakeholder whose outcomes matter most.
For example:
We focus your template on the beneficiary's goal—not the executor's workflow.
The complexity of your job map depends on the stakes and frequency of the job. For low-stakes, high-frequency tasks (e.g. "Find a recipe"), you might only need 5–8 steps. For high-stakes, regulated jobs (e.g. "Ensure aircraft airworthiness"), you may need 20+ steps.
We capture enough detail to:
In addition to functional jobs, we include related consumption jobs such as:
These influence adoption and long-term satisfaction. They're often where churn happens—so your template should capture and prioritize them too.
We use terminology your customers use. This improves research accuracy and internal alignment. If you're mapping the job of a pilot, "perform preflight inspection" is clearer than "check before flying."
We customize your job steps and needs to fit how customers think and talk.
You don't have to abandon OKRs, agile epics, or design sprints. Instead, we align them to JTBD language:
JTBD becomes your strategy layer—your existing tools become more focused and effective.
Even with good intentions, teams often undermine their JTBD work through preventable missteps. Here are the top traps to avoid:
Bad example: "Customer wants in-app chat support" Better: "Minimize the time it takes to resolve an issue."
Fix: Always phrase needs in terms of outcomes. Stay solution-agnostic.
Guessing at job steps or needs leads to bias. You may solve problems your customers don't actually have.
Fix: We start with qualitative interviews. Then use quantitative surveys to validate unmet needs.
Personas can distract from the real driver of behavior: the job. Two users with different demographics may have identical needs.
Fix: We segment based on shared struggles. Group by unmet needs, not traits.
A product may excel at the core job but fail at onboarding, installation, or billing—leading to churn.
Fix: We include consumption job steps and needs in your template.
Customer needs change. So should your template.
Fix: We revisit and update templates every 6–12 months with new data.
Avoiding these mistakes keeps your JTBD practice credible and useful across functions.
Let's look at three real-world examples from thrv's work.
Biscom, a 30-year-old fax services company, used JTBD to transform its business model. By shifting focus from "fax services" to the broader job of secure information handling, they identified 17 critical steps and over 100 customer needs. This comprehensive template guided their pivot toward solving more significant problems for healthcare clients, particularly around regulatory compliance.
AutoQuotes used thrv’s templates to identify growth opportunities in a mature market where they already had deep penetration. Their template helped align the operating team, board, and employees around the customer's complete job, not just the quoting process. This alignment led to product innovations that addressed previously unseen market opportunities.
Target's Registry team transformed their approach by using JTBD templates to move beyond feature parity with Amazon. Instead of reactively matching competitive features, they focused on the deeper job customers were trying to accomplish. Their template helped identify unmet needs in the registry creation and management process, leading to innovative features that Amazon eventually copied, demonstrating Target's shift from follower to market leader.
These examples demonstrate how thoroughly developed JTBD templates create alignment, uncover opportunities, and drive measurable business growth across different industries and contexts.
A powerful JTBD template is more than a document—it's a shared framework that connects strategy to execution. It aligns product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams around what truly matters: helping your customer succeed.
With thrv’s well-structured templates, your team can:
When implemented effectively, thrv’s JTBD templates become the foundation for a customer-centered organization. They transform how teams think about product development, moving from feature-driven roadmaps to outcome-focused innovations. Marketing messages shift from highlighting capabilities to addressing real customer struggles. Sales conversations focus on customer progress rather than product specifications.
Most importantly, thrv’s JTBD templates create a common language across the organization. Everyone from executives to developers understands what customers are trying to achieve and how the company uniquely helps them accomplish their goals.
At thrv, we help companies build JTBD templates that turn insight into growth. Whether you're in SaaS, healthcare, or retail, our approach adapts to your context and scales with your team.
Schedule a thrv demo and start building what your customers really want—faster and with less risk.