Best Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) Templates and Examples

A jobs-to-be-done template is the essential tool for transforming your user interviews into actionable insights and developing an engaging product with a high chance of success.

But how do you organize those user insights to map the framework effectively?

We’ve curated eight jobs-to-be-done templates that can perfectly lay out your customer’s JTBDs in an actionable way.

What is the jobs-to-be-done framework?

The JTBD framework is a product development method based on the premise that customers purchase products and services to get a specific “job” done.

Tony Ulwic, the originator of the term, describes the JBTD framework as a perspective. According to him:

It is the lens through which you can observe markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments differently, and by doing so, make innovation far more predictable and profitable.

In essence, the JBTD framework captures, defines, and categorizes customer needs based on their desired outcomes rather than their demographics. This allows you to understand why a customer “hires” a product, and then build the perfect solution for that job.

Your JBTD framework should include:

• The job.
• Outcome.
• Context.
• Pain points.
• Key insights.

Intercom’s JBTD stories simplify it into “When _____ I want to _____ so I can _____”

E.g., When I launch a new feature, I want to track user behavior, so I can understand adoption and improve performance.

From a product management perspective, applying this “lens” requires a structured organization. You need to document these needs clearly to determine the right solution, which is exactly where a JTBD template becomes essential.

Note: This guide focuses on the tools to map these jobs. For a deep dive on the theory and core principles, read our complete guide to the JTBD framework in product management.

Job-to-be-done example

JTBD frameworks vary based on the type of job, whether it is functional, social, or emotional. Here’s a quick guide to see the difference:

• Functional job: Recruit qualified users efficiently for usability testing (e.g., finding 20 active users who recently used a new feature).
• Social job: Show stakeholders that your research is credible (e.g., presenting insights backed by the right user segments).
• Emotional job: Feel confident your decisions are based on real user needs (e.g., knowing you’re not relying on the wrong audience).

That said, we’ll focus on just the functional aspect for this example.

Job: Recruit the right users for usability testing.

Outcome: Recruit a reliable group of users who match your target segment and are willing to participate.

Context: You need participants for usability testing. However, you’re only targeting users with specific roles or product experience. You also need enough qualified users to reach a meaningful sample size.

Pain points

• Low response rates from broad outreach.
• Difficulty reaching the right users.
• Time wasted screening unqualified participants.

Key insights

• Use segmentation to target users by role, behavior, or usage.
• Trigger in-app invites while users are active.
• Use microsurveys to qualify participants instantly.
• Apply throttling to control visibility and avoid fatigue.

With this framework, you’ll reach the right users, on time, and with minimal friction.

Why should you use a jobs-to-be-done template?

With a jobs-to-be-done template, you can:

• Put JTBD theory into practice with a predetermined process.
• Get a birds-eye view of why and how customers decide to adopt new products.
• Avoid the risk of developing products or features that no one would use.
• Create marketing material that speaks to your audience’s needs and attracts good-fit customers.
• Have all your customer information and insights in one single document.

So if you’ve decided that the JTBD framework is for you, we highly recommend checking the templates we’re going to cover next.

8 Real-world examples of the JTBD framework template

Now, which of the following workable templates should you use?

Let’s take a look:

1. Tony Ulwick’s job-to-be-done template for market definition

Tony Ulwick’s JTBD template helps you define your market based on what users are trying to get done. It’s built on Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), which focuses on identifying unmet needs.

ODI has six phases, spread across 84 processes, but this canvas summarizes them into eight key steps:

How to use the template:

Start with a product idea, then move through these 8 steps:

1. Traditional market definition: Define the product, service, or idea you want to innovate. E.g., a product analytics tool for SaaS teams.
2. Job executor determination: Identify who uses (or would use) the product to get a job done. E.g., product managers, growth marketers, and data analysts.
3. Abstracted job executor: Put the users from step two into a broader category. E.g., use “product teams” instead of product managers.
4. Job executor (final): Choose the best label that represents this group. E.g., product teams in SaaS companies.
5. Function of the product: Define what the product helps users do using “verb + object + context.” E.g., analyze user behavior to improve feature adoption.
6. Other products and their functions: List other tools users rely on and what each helps them accomplish. E.g., use spreadsheets to track metrics, session replay tools to watch user behavior, and survey tools to collect feedback.
7. Abstracted job statement: Define the core job users are trying to get done across all tools. E.g., understand how users interact with the product to improve activation and retention.
8. Customer’s job-to-be-done: Finalize the job statement that defines your market using “market = group of people + job-to-be-done.” E.g., product teams that understand and improve user behavior across the product lifecycle.

Here’s a link to the blank Canva for your use. It’s totally free.

When to pick this template:

Use it when you want to define your market around customer needs and uncover high-impact opportunities using ODI.

2. JTBD Hypothesis Canvas for guided discovery

The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas typically has three phases: Frame, Discover, and Spin. It helps you nail down what to research before you start researching. It aligns your team on who you’re targeting and how to investigate the crucial jobs.

How to use the template:

Start by defining your scope, then build a hypothesis to validate:

• Playing field: Define your domain in plain language. E.g., “helping SaaS teams improve product adoption.”
• Job performer: Identify who you’re creating value for, e.g., product managers.
• Aspirations: Capture who the user wants to become or what they want to achieve at a higher level. E.g., become a data-driven product team, deliver seamless user experiences.
• Related jobs: List adjacent goals at the same level as the focus job, e.g., reduce churn, increase feature adoption.
• Focus job: Define the core job using an action-based format, e.g., “improve user onboarding experience.”
• Job steps: Outline how the job gets done, from planning through execution to conclusion. E.g., first, analyze drop-offs, then test improvements, and finally monitor results.
• Success criteria: Define what success looks like, e.g., reduce time-to-value, increase activation rate.
• Emotions: Capture how users feel during the job, e.g., feel confident and avoid frustration.
• Circumstances: Note factors that affect how the job is done, e.g., whether the team is early-stage or enterprise.

This JBTD framework is also free, but you have to create an account with the JBTD Toolkit to access it. Download it here.

When to pick this template:

Use it when you need alignment before research, especially for new features, markets, or strategic bets.

3. Miro’s JTBD template to understand customer goals

Miro’s template, although far from simple, is very well-organized and straightforward. Allowing you to get a complete picture of your target audience.

How to use the template:

Start conducting interviews with newer users. Pay special attention to those who have been using your existing solution for 2 or 3 months or were behind the purchase decision, and then fill in the following sections:

• Demand creation: List the business objectives that your users want to achieve and their corresponding obstacles. Then, try to articulate the customer motivations and emotions that are involved when they decide to find a solution to their problems.
• Desired progress: Create multiple job stories about how your ideal customer decided to make a change. Compare the details. Then write the jobs-to-be-done statements (“help me to…” and “so I can…”) that are involved in the story. And finally, determine the signals that make your customers feel like they’re making progress.
• Hiring: List all the possible solutions they hired, fired, and considered for their JTBD. Discuss each aspect of the hiring process. Then use the stickers to determine what parts of these solutions increased or decreased customer trust, their usability, their value for money, and their novelty/familiarity.

You can get access to this template here, but note that you need to sign up for Miro to use it.

When to pick this template:

Use this JTBD template to gather insights from interviews to understand why users choose your product and how to improve positioning and grow.

4. Conceptboard’s JTBD template to evaluate from a customer’s perspective

This template by Conceptboard is simple, yet it helps you organize the fundamental parts of a proper JTBD framework.

How to use the template:

To make the most out of it, take all your customer research data and organize it into these different groups:

• Jobs to be done statements: These statements are framed as an action the customer is trying to perform, along with the obstacles they’re facing right now. E.g., “I need to vet job candidates without going over each application manually.”
• Tools hired: List the tools that your market would hire to get the job done. E.g., “Google Docs for documentation.”
• Reasons for hire: Write a list of reasons your customers would hire those tools. E.g., “Integrates with our current tech stack.”
• Barriers to hiring: Brainstorm the reasons why your customers would NOT hire those tools. E.g., “It can’t organize our documents as we’d like.”

The good news is this template doesn’t require you to sign up, and you can access it right here.

When to pick this template:

Use this when you want a quick, structured way to synthesize customer research into clear JTBD insights. It is especially useful to understand why users choose (or reject) certain tools and where your product can win.

5. Figma’s JTBD template to identify customer needs

Figma has a fairly simple template that can work pretty well if you don’t have too much data and you need a quick way to upgrade your messaging as part of your marketing strategies.

How to use the template:

• Identify a JTBD statement from VoC data using the three-sentence template.
• Determine your customer’s goals and their internal motivations to reach those goals.
• Write the challenges preventing customers from achieving those goals.
• List JTBDs based on the previous data.

You can see the template without signing up on this page, but you’d need to create a Figma account if you want to download or edit it.

When to pick this template:

Use Figma’s JTBD when you need a fast, lightweight way to turn customer insights into clear JTBD messaging. It works best for refining positioning or marketing campaigns.

6. Creately’s JTBD template to capture and organize customer needs

If you’re looking for a straightforward and simple JTBD template, this one from Creately is one to use.

How to use the template:

• Jobs-to-be-done statement: Describe the core task or goal that the customer is trying to achieve, regardless of the solution used.
• Tools hired: Lists the current products or solutions that the customer uses to get the job done.
• Reasons for hire: Explain the specific user motivations or pain points driving the customer to hire (use) these tools.
• Barriers for hire: Highlight the challenges or objections preventing the customer from fully utilizing or adopting the tools.

You can play with this template right away, but to export it, you would need to sign up. Get this template here.

When to pick this template:

Use this to create a simple way to organize customer insights into clear JTBD components. It reveals the what, why, and where of your product.

7. Mural’s JTBD template for brainstorming with your team

Mural’s template is great for collaborating and brainstorming with your team. It includes external customer information and context around the user’s position and priorities.

How to use the template:

To use it, collect all the customer data you have and host a meeting with your team to brainstorm on the following sections:

• Core functional job: Brainstorm possible tasks with your team and vote on what JTBDs are more accurate. Make sure the JTBDs are solution-agnostic and stable over time.
• Job executor: Map stakeholders involved in the job and create a proto-persona of the person performing the tasks.
• Job map: Define the steps and stages of each JTBD based on research.
• Prioritization: Determine what the customer’s priorities are for each JTBD.

You need to sign up for Mural to get access to this template. You can only use a work email for this.

When to pick this template:

Use it when you need to align your team around JTBD insights. It helps to collectively review scattered research and turn it into a shared understanding and prioritized actions.

8. Genially’s JTBD template to align your products and services

Genially has an interactive template that goes deeper into the customer’s internal triggers and motivators to understand what makes them act and achieve customer satisfaction.

How to use the template:

• The job: The context that triggers the JTBD, the role that performs the task, and the stage of the journey the task is part of.
• Related: State all the customer’s jobs that come before and after it, the bigger job of which the JTBD is part, and the smaller tasks that integrate it.
• Intrinsic, extrinsic, and alternatives: List the activities that the customer is already doing, the outcome they want to achieve, and the current solutions they’re adopting to achieve it.
• Motivation, opposition, and impression: List the needs and desires that push the customer forward, the friction and fears they’re facing, and the “Aha!” moments they could experience.

You can see and interact with the template here, but you’d need to sign up to fill in the blanks.

When to pick this template:

This framework template helps you identify friction points and triggers that shape customer decisions and satisfaction.

How to collect jobs-to-be-done data?

A template is only as good as the data you feed it. If you fill these canvases with guesses, you will build the wrong features.

To get accurate ‘Job’ statements, you need to ask users what they are trying to achieve while they are using your product.

Instead of guessing, you can ask a user: ‘What specific task are you trying to accomplish right now?’ This gives you the raw, validated data you need to populate your JTBD template effectively.

Here are four ways to collect customer data that you can use to follow the JTBD framework:

Use onboarding microsurveys to discover customer needs

With welcome surveys, you can ask new users about their current jobs and what they plan to do with your particular product.

This will help you easily outline the relevant features to their needs, as well as design an onboarding process that leads users to success. But most importantly, you’ll get direct JTDB statements you can add to the templates from earlier.

Conduct user interviews to capture customer expectations

The most essential method you can’t skip is doing a JTBD interview. As here’s where most of the gold is usually found.

Here’s how you can make sure you’ll get useful insights from customer interviews:

1. Identify and interview target customers who need to perform the job.
2. Write your questions so they can tell you valuable details about the job. E.G. “What are you trying to find when watching analytics?”
3. Ask about every step they need to take to get the job done. You can use the Universal Job Map below (made by Digital Leadership) as a reference.
4. Collect valuable quotes that you can use to guide your product development and prioritize features.

Collect user feedback to improve your product

Before adopting the JTBD framework to improve your product, it’s important to know what is already working well and what isn’t.

With product feedback surveys, you can see if users are successfully using your product to satisfy their needs. And then, you can decide what features you need to keep, improve, or sunset.

You can trigger these surveys in-app and collect feedback passively. To gain meaningful insights, trigger surveys in context. Focus on experienced users with sufficient product exposure to provide informed feedback. You can also fine-tune this with event-based triggering and throttling so surveys appear at the right moment.

Measure product satisfaction to enhance customer experience

Besides understanding how your product fits a specific job, you also need to understand the emotional aspect behind its usage.

Do your users feel like they’re making progress? Do they feel less friction during work?

If you trigger a CSAT survey inside your app, you can collect this information. This way, you can tell what features or what customer journey stages are providing the most positive or negative feelings in your users (and build a complete JTBD profile). To make the information useful over time, run these surveys regularly. Doing so helps you create internal benchmarks and track changes.

Use a jobs-to-be-done template to improve product design

As said before, using a job-to-be-done template can help you put the theory into practice.

Once you’ve collected enough customer data, you can pick one or two templates and start following the JTBD framework to improve product growth.