Fast forward 12–13 years, I’m still working with product teams, and this problem still existed. And these are smart people, both young and old. Furthermore, I’ve found that, when trying to grasp the idea of consumption versus core jobs, they often mistakenly conclude that innovation for consumption jobs is somehow inferior to innovation for core jobs.
Finally, enough was enough. There were more problems with classical jobs-to-be-done that I would ultimately try to solve, including the following:
- confusion between consumption jobs and core jobs
- the verbal aspect of JTBD being difficult for visual learners
- fuzziness of emotional jobs
- lack of job categories
But this confusion of consumption versus core jobs was the real catalyst to create a new model. Consumption jobs would anchor the core of the JTBD Pyramid, renamed as Level 1 Product Jobs and given the categories of Acquisition, Preparation, Usage, Maintenance, and Disposal. Core Jobs—the solution-independent jobs-to-be-done in the Clayton Christensen sense—would find their place in Level 2 Core Jobs, with the categories of Process, Control, Efficiency, and Problem-Solving.
Michael: Thanks for sharing a bit of the history of how this pyramid evolved. As someone who has taught and explained JTBD language to UX professionals, I always found myself stumbling around when it came to explaining consumption jobs. So I can relate to the dilemma and appreciate the need for trying to clarify it through the pyramid. Within the JTBD community at large, how has your framework been received by JTBD pioneers and practitioners? What additional refinements, if any, do you envision after this first iteration of the pyramid?
Scott: For the most part, JTBD pioneers are fully committed to their methods as written. There’s a practical reason for this, in that they have published and reinforced their methods so often that it would be bad business—not to mention time-consuming—to update their models in any way. If they’ve been at their craft for any amount of time, they will have published lots of information about their methods. It would be a lot of work for them to change either their approach or methods—and essentially, it’s just not going to happen. Consulting is a really difficult business as is, and you need to keep your methods stable. A pioneer, or even a committed consultant, has little to gain by embracing a significant change to their methods.
Actually, practitioners within corporations are also committed to their approaches, but for a different reason. They have many other responsibilities besides research or even product strategy and, for them, if their current JTBD method is good enough, they are content.
The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid was created for a different audience entirely: my consulting clients and students of our training programs. These are the ones who struggle with the concept of consumption jobs. They also struggle with a language-based JTBD method that doesn’t have a visual component. To pick a tangible example, imagine a product manager within a company who is tasked with understanding customer needs and building product strategies, then communicating them throughout their company. To tell them something from classic JTBD—such as “a customer doesn’t buy your product, they buy what it can do for them—sounds smart and interesting, but isn’t all that helpful for structuring their next customer interview or for building a persona based on true empathy or for building that slide deck for the sales team.
Or imagine startup executives. They know they need to understand the customer, but are unsure where to begin. They have data from the call center and from customer interviews, as well as random feedback from the sales team or distributors. It’s just a mangled mess of customer information, desired features, jobs from different levels, even complaints about availability or delivery times. None of this information can be understood well if left in this pile. The JTBD Pyramid provides a structure to sort through it all, from product interactions to aspirations and desired emotions.
In short, the JTBD Pyramid was built out of necessity: to help my customers, clients, and students—not for current practitioners or JTBD gurus. I do find it interesting to read LinkedIn debates by JTBD experts, and it’s true that many JTBD experts write for an audience of other experts. While in person with other experts, I do enjoy pushing the limits of these methods and challenging my own perspectives. However, when writing, I’m writing to a broader audience of those who are struggling with the more basic tasks of understanding customers, building product strategies, and communicating insights throughout their company.
As for refinements, I have always been open to them but find this to be a bit of a burden! The reason that it took me ten years to write “The Statue in the Stone” was that my JTBD experiences kept opening up nuances that I wanted to incorporate into the book—so I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. Quite honestly, one of the reasons that I didn’t have this problem with the JTBD Pyramid is that, in many ways, it’s not as new as it might appear. Consumption jobs were just renamed to Product Jobs. Core Jobs are the same, but now with categories within them. Identity Jobs are admittedly the newest element. With their inclusion, Emotional Jobs can now be narrowly defined to “emotions we desire or wish to avoid.” While the pyramid provides a new visual home for JTBD, it doesn’t conflict with the stable, classical JTBD model. As such, I’m not expecting any changes.
Michael: Can you tell us a bit about how you’ve used AI along with the JTBD Pyramid.
Scott: AI has been helpful in a few ways. Much of the JTBD Pyramid was essentially renaming and reorganizing proven elements of classical jobs-to-be-done—such as the renaming of Consumption Jobs to Product Jobs. However, with the introduction of a new job domain, Identity Jobs, it took a lot of work to fully explore this to get it as right as possible. AI helped me understand the best psychological models out there and how there might be an opportunity to use them to build a better JTBD model. I found this exploration so important that I included a chapter in the book titled “The JTBD Pyramid vs. Other Motivational Models,” in which I compare it with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Self-Determination Theory, and Behaviorist Reinforcement Theory. This resulted in the inclusion of the nine motivations of identity performance within the three themes of self-preservation, self-expansion, and social connection.
Beyond that, AI has been a great help in building out market simulations with the JTBD Pyramid. To do so, this first requires a phase of training your large language model (LLM) in the JTBD Pyramid. This actually takes quite a bit of time to make sure that the AI model gets it right. Once complete, you can provide the LLM with a Market Lens and ask for it to create a JTBD Navigator, which includes, among other things, an inventory of jobs at each level, a list of which jobs to address, the recommended level to target with a strategy, specific recommendations for marketing and sales, and so on. However, even after training the LLM, this may take a few cycles because it will sometimes forget one of the rules. In fact, you have to review the output quite carefully. In other words, a JTBD Pyramid Analysis works pretty well, but also suffers from all the issues involved with synthetic users. In the near future, I can imagine training the LLM on the JTBD Pyramid, with an AI improvement that it better remembers the model, and then supplementing the data with interviews from real customers.
In other words, I see the JTBD Pyramid model as an excellent structure to combine with AI for an improved analysis that provides specific outputs for the purposes of innovation, marketing, and even sales.
Michael: It sounds like AI was almost like an editorial thought partner in your book-authoring journey. Very interesting. Your new book makes no mention of desired outcomes—aka (Also Known As) need statements. Can you tell readers more about that? Someone who has read up on JTBD might be looking for these somewhere in your pyramid.
Scott: As an evolution of JTBD, the main additions that we didn’t really have before throughout Levels 1 and 2 are the additions of categories for subtypes of Product Jobs and Core Jobs. But yes, with Levels 3 and 4, we were pushing the current theory by embracing the concept of Identity Jobs. I used AI like a junior research partner. As a starting point, I listed all the elements of identity that I could think of and then I asked my AI research partner to search the fields of psychology and sociology to help me to see what was missing. There’s one more contribution from my AI junior research partner that I should mention: a poem for the introduction of Level 5 that’s written by AI. Having trained ChatGPT on the JTBD Pyramid, I asked for a poem introducing it and summarizing the progress up to that point. The result was amazing, and I simply had to include it.
In writing the book, I spent more time on Level 3 than any other. Anyone with a critical eye will notice that there is a fuzziness between Levels 3 and 4. These are less distinct from each other than Levels 1 and 2, for example. But I couldn’t bring myself to combine Levels 3 and 4 because there is something profound about who we want to be when by ourselves with our aspirations and the moment that we step on stage into the world and the image we want to project to others and even to ourselves.
In my presentations on the JTBD Pyramid, I tell the story of myself, at nine years old, when I was on the last day of a fishing trip with my dad. We were in Orange Lake, Florida, where we vacationed every June. At this time in the 1970s, it was a real sign of becoming a grown up when you caught a largemouth bass worthy of being mounted. And, that morning, I hooked a huge fish. I fought it for a bit, but to my horror, I lost it. But I lost more than a fish. I lost an opportunity to demonstrate my competence to myself and to the world. I begged my dad to take me back to that same place in the late afternoon. He told me that the likelihood of that same fish biting again was essentially zero, but he humored me nonetheless, and we went. Well, I did hook that fish again. To this day, it’s the only fish that I’ve ever had mounted. I was so proud that evening.
Classical JTBD would struggle to fully capture the depth of my frustration and satisfaction, because my victory was in reinforcing my identity as a fisherman, an outdoorsman, a rugged person who perseveres and succeeds. Sure, you could use classical JTBD emotional jobs such as Feel Proud, but there’s no emotion behind that. It falls short. That fish was proof of something. It made the statement, “I am a fisherman!” “I am an achiever!” “I am competent!” The astute JTBD student will note that I’ve deviated from JTBD language to begin a statement with I, but doing so unleashes the true emotion and hits closer to a person’s actual motivation. I feel nothing when saying the words “feel proud,” but I feel a lot when I say, “I am an outdoorsman.” JTBD is a field of language that converts the messiness of the world into words, and I believe that the JTBD Pyramid brings to life much of the chaos and color that was missing.
As for the desired outcomes, yes, I probably should have addressed this for JTBD practitioners in the know. The simple reason that it’s not there is that Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) so perfectly frames up the relationship between jobs and outcomes that I didn’t have much to offer.
Believe me, I’ve tried to break ODI in an attempt to improve it! However, in the end, I find myself just sitting back and admiring Tony’s work. I actually spoke with Tony just prior to the book’s release and told him as much, and that I was staying at the job level where I felt I had something to offer.
Even in the ODI realm, there’s something that’s not well known by those outside of the Strategyn universe: the concept of a jobs study. This is where you gather and prioritize job statements, staying at a higher level. For example, when I was at John Deere, Strategyn did an excellent jobs study for our compact-tractor group since tractors perform many jobs. The JTBD Pyramid is a reframing of how a jobs study can—and I believe should—be done going forward.
However, to your point, I should have explicitly mentioned in the book that its scope didn’t cover outcomes, and I could have still showed how they fit into the big picture. It could have been handled quickly and easily. Maybe in the next version!
Michael: Interesting! I would love to know of other things beyond jobs studies. (Perhaps another edition of your book can cover those things?) Sounds like your work really complements the work that has been done by others in the field. It is very exciting to see how all the pieces fit together. For those new to JTBD who are picking up your book and are seeing all of these really interesting tools you’ve created from the pyramid—for example, market lens, innovation profiles—where would you recommend someone new to JTBD begin? What recipes would you offer to the newbies?
Scott: Where to get started? That’s a great question. Let’s chart out a path! The initial start should be that a person recognizes they have a challenge that JTBD can help to address. In practice, I’ve noticed that this tends to be folks responsible for new product development, User Experience, and those in market research. However, that group should also extend to Marketing. At John Deere, for example, I know that JTBD improved the way we thought about marketing, from strategy to Web-site copy.
From there, when getting started, I always recommend the same thing: Go on YouTube and watch the good Dr. Christensen tell the milkshake story. It’s a powerful tale in JTBD lore for a reason. After that, my first read would be the 2008 HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” which not only details the job-map concept but also provides a healthy background on JTBD. Afterwards, they will understand the broad concepts well-enough to converse with others about JTBD, and they will be well-prepared to go deeper.
At this point, the most direct path will be JTBD training. And please forgive me, but I will have to recommend my own system! We have training programs that are entertaining, hands-on, and provide a structured learning path to competence. These can be found at www.thejtbdpyramid.com. You will learn how to execute a JTBD project in your field, and honestly, this is where the real learning happens.
However, if someone wants to pursue a self-learning path, let me provide that option as well. I would read the following books, in the order given—and again, forgive me for recommending my own works!
- Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want
- Clayton Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution
- Scott Burleson, The Statue in the Stone
- Jim Kalbach, The Jobs to be Done Playbook
- Scott Burleson, The Jobs-to-be-Done Pyramid
From there, subscribe to my Substack at www.jtbdcamp.com, where you can find modern illustrations and examples. Or, for the deeper library, I maintain a reading list at www.JTBDreadlinglist.com. As a general rule, read everything that Anthony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt have ever written. They are my mentors and are just good people. JTBD is a funny field in that the immediate wisdom is immediately obvious to most, but for true mastery, this is a longer path. And, along the path, a person needs to read the masters and use JTBD in their professional work.
Michael: If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of the book, buy it on Amazon. 
