Book Review: The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid

Basics of The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid

The initial chapter in Section I is a gentle introduction to the framework, describing the categories of jobs and the ways in which you can use JTBD—for example, innovation, sales conversations, and marketing strategy. The author reminds us that JTBD is “a way of seeing, sensing, of knowing.” Customers are human beings who want to make progress. This idea is something with which anyone in the field of user experience can directly connect. The power of this framework is in the precision of the language it uses. The approachability and precision of the framework are why many UX designers and product managers lean in on the framework. Burleson’s refinements to the framework keep both of these things in mind.

In a later chapter of this section, the author sets up his rationale for the JTBD pyramid. He argues that the distinctions between functional jobs and emotional jobs are too simple and cannot fully explain humans’ deeper motivations—especially those that relate to our identity—who we want to be—our self-perception—how we want to perceive ourselves—and our reputation—how we want others to perceive us.

Historically, emotional jobs always became a category for any nonfunctional job and, thus, a miscellaneous bucket, making this category less precise and useful. The author also describes the lack of being able to connect the different motivational layers, which the pyramid solves by demonstrating the connectedness of the different layers. More on this later.

JTBD’s syntax can be a struggle for newcomers. With improved precision from the model’s social jobs, the author rephrases job statements for role identity, image identity, and emotional job levels. Role Identity uses the phrasing “Be someone who… / I am a….” Image Identity is written as “See myself as… / Be perceived as….” Emotional jobs use “Feel… / Avoid feeling….” What’s unique about the description of the role identity is the separation of the action in the verb statement and the identity label. According to the author, this labeling shows what the customer is “trying to preserve, strengthen, or grow into.”

Another syntactical innovation in the JTBD language is the consumption job’s getting a semantic makeover: consumption jobs are now called product jobs. My tongue has always gotten tied up when trying to explain consumption jobs to my colleagues. By renaming these as product jobs, the author does a much better job of describing these kinds of jobs. Product jobs are tied to the product on which the executor of the job is focusing. Sitting at the bottom of the pyramid, these jobs encompass the following categories: preparation, usage, maintenance, and disposal. Without these jobs, the job executor cannot execute and satisfy the core job, which sits directly above the product job at the second level of the pyramid.

The last chapter of this first section is for people who are interested in the origins of the JTBD Pyramid and its relationship to existing motivational models in academia. The author compares the framework to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Self-Determination Theory, and Behaviorist Reinforcement Theory. Using a fictional story about a solo hiker, the author walks the reader step by step through how each of these theories falls short and where the pyramid fills a gap. The author reminds us that, as humans, “our motivations are layered.” By examining these layers and their complex relationships, we can build better products.

The JTBD Pyramid Levels, In-Depth

Section II is where the rubber really meets the road and this book yields the largest return on investment (ROI). The author walks through each level of the pyramid in depth. Starting with the product job, or consumption job, the author gets to the essence of the job—functional jobs that involve interacting with the product itself. As the author puts it, these are operational jobs that are tied specifically to the product.

Another illuminating aspect of this concept is that the jobs at this level of the pyramid mirror the buyer’s journey, which is extremely relatable to anyone who is working in user-experience or product-management roles: acquisition, preparation, usage, maintenance, and disposal. At the end of each description of these product job categories, the author provides a real-life example of the job at work in industry.

One example of this is how Zoom has optimized for the usage job. Joining a meeting is simply a click away rather than the user having to follow multiple steps to repeatedly log in or install software. Zoom also took advantage of a golden opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic: providing features such as virtual and blurred backgrounds for a usage job that could change significantly in context.

Once the author has defined the product job at the first level of the pyramid, he introduces the reader to the main centerpiece of the model: The JTBD Pyramid Navigator. This is a visual metaphor that he incrementally expands at the end of each chapter in this section. The navigator depicts the various component jobs within each level and serves as a reminder of the connections that exist across the whole framework.

Figure 1 shows a diagram of the JTBD Pyramid Navigator, a strategic tool that includes the JTBD Pyramid.

As the author climbs up the pyramid to the core jobs, he reminds us about the four categories of these jobs, then walks us through examples of each job using case studies: process jobs, control jobs, efficiency jobs, and problem-solving jobs. Each of these has distinctive elements and suggests different types of solutions. For example, problem-solving jobs are often complex and require diagnosis. These types of jobs suggest functionality for “clarity, guidance, and support.” An example of this might be to recover from an injury.

I found the interviewing tips at the end of each chapter in this section to be extremely valuable. I often find getting these details a challenge in JTBD literature. At the level of the role-identity jobs, the author reminds us that eliciting the details for a job like this is not as simple as asking a direct question, but requires one to “create space, ask subtly revealing questions, and then listen for signals that a person’s sense of self is at stake.” He then describes things to listen for that hint at where the customer is testing their self-concept—for example, moments of dissonance where the person’s role is blocked. He offers an example of a quotation: “I couldn’t be there—and that bothered me more than I expected.” As a UX researcher who is accustomed to doing user interviews, I find these nuggets of wisdom extremely powerful and hope to apply many of these techniques to my own practice.

While those who are new to JTBD might be turned off by its prescriptive nature, there is a method to the madness. The structure and intentionality behind the language and syntax help shape the solutions that product teams ultimately build using the framework.

Another feature at the end of each chapter in this section: the strategic implications of the jobs. These sections help answer questions the reader might have after reading about the job—for example, “Okay. So what am I supposed to do with this new information?” After walking through image-identity jobs, the author describes these jobs as mainly being centered around “brand loyalty, social sharing, and emotional attachment,” or how a customer wants to be seen by themselves or others. As a result, focusing the product’s messaging around the customer’s self-perception becomes paramount. The product is selling “a version of the self the customer wants to project.” The author goes even further and presents examples of feature-design opportunities that are tied to each image-identity job, making the concepts concrete enough for the reader to understand and put them into action. Those who are tasked with doing something actionable with UX research insights will appreciate the suggestions presented in this section of the chapter. Rather than thinking of these suggestions as hard-and-fast rules, consider them as guidance for a place to start.

Spending time to carefully read the section on role-identity jobs is worthwhile, especially the nine universal motivations that back this job level. These motivations underscore the need for us, as humans, to “become someone through doing.” They describe why people take on the roles they do. The author groups these nine motivations into three core themes: self-preservation, self-expansion, and social connection. Then he tackles each of the higher level jobs, illuminating them in a way that makes them useful and actionable.

Taking things a step further, the author ties these motivations to roles and to products via the power of metaphor: customers as actors in a performance. If these are roles that customers perform, the product team builds the props they need to “help them deliver their role with confidence, clarity, and credibility.” For example, a customer performing the role of creator might need a design tool to help get their ideas out into the world.

Applying The JTBD Pyramid

This final section of the book focuses on putting the JTBD Pyramid into practice. Although readers might feel overwhelmed by all the tools in this chapter, the author introduces The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid Strategic Analysis, which walks through each of the tools, then explores three detailed case studies to help illustrate their use. I reached out to the author while writing this review to get some insights into the tools. According to the author, he is putting together a practitioner toolkit on his Substack.

These tools include the following:

• market lens—To help users set the context
• JTBD Inventory—To map out the competitive landscape in the language of JTBD across the five levels of the pyramid
• summary tools—A series of tools that helps guide the user toward solutions

To make these tools feel relevant to the reader, the author describes when to use them and which teams can benefit from their use. A great example of when to use these tools is during feature prioritization. Rather than focusing on the features, prioritize the jobs. Another highly relevant use of these tools within the field of User Experience is in trying to understand the customer journey via journey mapping. The author suggests that doing this through the lens of product jobs, core jobs, identity jobs, and emotional jobs paints a complete picture for teams to ultimately empathize with their customers and build confidence in what to design and build next.

One thing to keep in mind while going through this section is that there is no need to address every job you discover. Plus, doing so could easily become a pitfall. The author reminds the reader that these tools establish a focus. The author describes the market lens “as a camera. The lens you choose determines what comes into focus—and what gets left out of the frame.” It is about quality over quantity. Precision matters.

A centerpiece of these tools is the Innovation Profile. Consistent with JTBD theory, in which you calculate the most underserved jobs that present the greatest opportunity, the Innovation Profile represents the pyramid level at which teams can focus their efforts on improving a product. There are five innovation profiles, one for each level of the pyramid.

For example, the Innovation Profile for the emotional job level at the top of the pyramid is called Emotional Resonance. As shown in Figure 2, the jobs at this level focus on aspects such as confidence and trust, which are in-the-moment feelings.

Innovation Profile for Emotional Resonance

The author describes the implications of the Innovation Profile from a user-experience perspective and what the designer needs to consider when focusing on this profile. The author reminds the reader that, for emotional jobs, the focus is less on solving for the technical aspects of an experience and more on “reshaping the emotional texture of an existing one.” An example the author gives is of a wellness app that provides gentle interruptions with breathing animations that make the user “feel centered and in control when overwhelmed.”

The author also mentions the concept of high-leverage jobs. Jobs just don’t happen in isolation from one another. Some jobs are truly worth solving for because doing so can help solve for other jobs as well. As the author suggests, “You don’t need to address every job to make meaningful progress. You just need to find the pressure points.” The concept of high-leverage jobs is not explicitly present in other JTBD literature. You can use this powerful concept in your JTBD analysis to unlock systems-level thinking about the jobs. The author uses this concept to develop a network-style diagram called the Causal Amplifier Map and also cross-level job connections.

At the end of this section, the author finally puts all of these tools together into a cohesive whole, which he calls the Strategic Innovation Pathway. This pathway is your means for solving all the jobs worth solving and determining how you are going to get there. According to the author, this pathway includes the area of focus, or Innovation Profile, the starting point, the keystone high-leverage job, and the set of experience changes to solve for the profile job and the high-leverage job, then finally the cross-level job connections.

Concluding Thoughts

It is hard not to be inspired after reading this book. The author is filling in a very large understanding gap relating to the JTBD framework—specifically around emotional jobs and social jobs. Plus, he’s taken the opportunity to refine the framework’s terminology—for example, by renaming consumption jobs to product jobs.

However, a number of questions arose after I finished reading this book. One of them was about the lack of discussion in the book around outcomes. If you have read other JTBD books, they all discuss desired outcomes, need statements, or success criteria. Other questions arose around real-life case studies proving out the framework. Since this is a fairly novel framework, I was curious to see how successful practitioners are in putting the framework into practice.

I reached out to Burleson with some of my inquiries, and he was gracious enough to answer my questions. When I asked about outcomes, he said: “Desired outcomes are metrics by which we evaluate job statements, so when we create outcomes for each job, we are going deeper; it’s about depth. But when studying markets, the cost of depth is breadth.” Burleson went on to explain that using the JTBD Pyramid at the job statement-level versus the outcome-level is the right level of breadth to fill in the framework.

While the author’s book succeeds in making this framework more approachable for people who are new to JTBD, I would have liked to see a little more runway for newbies. The author does not cover desired outcomes in his primer. As someone who has read many JTBD books, I would have expected some acknowledgment of outcomes, even if they are not as explicit in his framework—just to complete the picture of the original framework.

If you are a product manager or UX professional who has frequently used or even just dabbled with the JTBD framework, this book is definitely for you. As a UX researcher and leader, I will definitely be studying this framework further and sharing with it my teams. This tome now sits next to my other JTBD literature on my bookshelf.

The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid: An Innovation Architecture for Humans - Linking Function, Emotion, and Identity” is available for purchase on Amazon, in paperback or for Kindle.