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Jobs To Be Done Research

Turn customer evidence into Jobs To Be Done insights, triggers, desired outcomes, alternatives, and growth opportunities.
Marketing - Customer Research - Jobs To Be Done Research

Who it's for

Product marketers, Founders, Customer researchers, Marketing teams, Growth teams

Get Ready

Prepare the Required Inputs listed in the Workflow Prompt. Use as much detail as necessary.

How to use this prompt

1. Copy the Workflow Prompt.
2. Paste it into your AI tool.
3. Replace the "Required Inputs"
4. Run the prompt.

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Workflow Prompt

				
					You are a Jobs To Be Done research strategist. Analyse customer evidence and identify the jobs, triggers, desired outcomes, struggles, and alternatives that shape buying behaviour.

### Required Input
- Customer Evidence: [Paste interview notes, reviews, surveys, sales notes, support tickets, or research summaries. Example: “Interviews with finance managers who recently bought budgeting software.”]
- Product or Offer: [Describe the solution. Example: “Budget forecasting software for growing SaaS companies.”]
- Target Customer: [Describe the customer group. Example: “Finance leads at 50–300 person companies.”]
- Research Objective: [Explain the decision you want to support. Example: “Improve positioning and onboarding based on why customers switch.”]
- Current Alternatives: [What customers use or consider instead. Example: “Excel models, outsourced consultants, legacy finance tools.”]
- Buying or Switching Context: [When customers start looking. Example: “After missed forecasts, board pressure, or headcount growth.”]

### Input Validation
Review all inputs before generating output. If customer evidence is missing, too generic, or lacks buying or usage context, ask specific clarification questions. Pause until the missing detail is provided.

### Instructions
Analyse the evidence through a practical Jobs To Be Done lens. Focus on progress the customer is trying to make, not only product features or demographic traits. Identify the main job, related jobs, emotional jobs, and social jobs.

Look for trigger events that create demand. These may include frustration with a workaround, internal pressure, business growth, risk exposure, failed attempts, leadership changes, budget cycles, or competitor movement. Explain why the trigger matters and how it changes urgency.

Map the customer’s struggle. Identify what customers are trying, what is not working, what trade-offs they accept, and why they have not already solved the problem. Include competing alternatives, manual workarounds, and doing nothing.

Translate the research into usable marketing strategy. Explain how the job should influence positioning, homepage messaging, landing page structure, sales questions, onboarding, content, and proof. Avoid abstract JTBD theory. Make the insights operational.

### Output
Create a complete Jobs To Be Done research report with these sections:

1. JTBD Summary
- Core job statement
- Main trigger event
- Desired progress
- Primary struggle
- Key alternative

2. Job Map
Include:
- Functional job
- Emotional job
- Social or professional job
- Related secondary jobs
- Jobs to avoid

3. Trigger Events
For each trigger include:
- Trigger
- Why it creates demand
- Customer urgency level
- Messaging implication

4. Desired Outcomes
List outcomes customers want, including:
- Practical outcomes
- Emotional outcomes
- Risk reduction outcomes
- Success indicators

5. Current Alternatives and Workarounds
For each alternative include:
- What customers use now
- Why they use it
- What breaks down
- Opportunity for positioning

6. Messaging and Positioning Implications
Provide:
- Value proposition angle
- Page messaging recommendations
- Content topics
- Sales discovery questions
- Proof points needed

7. Opportunity Prioritisation
Create a table with:
- Opportunity
- Related job
- Customer evidence
- Commercial potential
- Confidence level
- Recommended next action

Ensure the output is detailed enough to guide messaging, product marketing, and campaign planning.
				
			

Optional advanced instructions

				
					Rewrite the core job statement in three styles: plain language, executive-facing, and landing page friendly.
				
			

Example output

1. JTBD Summary

  • Core Job Statement: When a high-growth business hits a scaling milestone or experiences a compliance bottleneck, Risk and Compliance Operations Leads want to safely design, simulate, and deploy advanced transaction routing and risk mitigation rules independently, so they can protect the platform from fraud and satisfy external auditors without exhausting internal engineering sprint hours.
  • Main Trigger Event: A sudden, severe spike in transaction volume or a localized fraud attack that completely breaks the manual review queue, causing customer onboarding backlogs and triggering critical warnings from upstream partner banks or payment processors.
  • Desired Progress: Moving from a state of total structural dependency on developer roadmaps to a state of complete operational autonomy, where compliance teams can adapt logic thresholds in real-time as threats evolve.
  • Primary Struggle: Being fully accountable for fraud KPIs, alert accuracy, and regulatory clean-bills-of-health while commanding zero direct control over the rigid, hard-coded technical logic engines that govern those outcomes.
  • Key Alternative: Building and endlessly patching an in-house transaction monitoring tool using raw SQL scripts, shared spreadsheets, and internal tracking tickets.

2. Job Map

  • Functional Job: Build, test, and run multi-variable conditional transaction tracking rules inside an intuitive visual canvas that feeds directly into core production endpoints via low-latency APIs.
  • Emotional Job: Eradicate the persistent anxiety of alert fatigue, team burnout, and the nagging fear that an unvalidated rule change will accidentally block thousands of legitimate, high-value customer purchases.
  • Social or Professional Job: Establish clear technical credibility and authority during executive board reviews and external regulatory audits by showing complete mastery and instant audit traceability over the platform’s risk infrastructure.
  • Related Secondary Jobs:
    • Automatically log a permanent, unedited history of every rule modification for internal security clear-checks.
    • Onboard junior risk analysts quickly without requiring them to learn complex database querying languages.
  • Jobs to Avoid:
    • Avoid turning compliance operations into an IT consulting project that requires ongoing dedicated development support.
    • Avoid relying on unprovable, “black-box” machine learning algorithms that cannot explain their decision paths to an external compliance inspector.

3. Trigger Events

Trigger 1: The Transaction Scale Inflection

  • Why It Creates Demand: A surge in business scaling metrics or a seasonal volume spike exposes the math limits of manual transaction checking. The team cannot hire analysts fast enough to keep pace with the alert queue backlog.
  • Customer Urgency Level: 🔴 Critical / Immediate
  • Messaging Implication: Focus copy on immediate volume optimization and queue clearing capabilities: “Clear your review backlog. Automate 40% of manual transaction assessments within your first 48 hours.”

Trigger 2: The Upstream Processor Ultimatum

  • Why It Creates Demand: A sudden merchant chargeback spike causes an upstream partner bank or merchant network to issue a formal warning or inflate processing fees, threatening the business’s core financial relationships.
  • Customer Urgency Level: 🔴 Critical / Immediate
  • Messaging Implication: Emphasize deterministic logic precision, risk containment speed, and rapid response safety nets that secure payment pipelines immediately.

Trigger 3: The Dedicated Product Roadmap Lockdown

  • Why It Creates Demand: A major new feature launch or infrastructure overhaul forces engineering leadership to freeze internal tool requests for multiple quarters, leaving the compliance team completely stranded without technical support.
  • Customer Urgency Level: 跨 Medium (Becomes high the moment a new threat pattern slips through)
  • Messaging Implication: Frame the product as the ultimate operational liberation layer: “Build advanced risk routing paths on your own terms—zero developer sprint requests required.”

4. Desired Outcomes

  • Practical Outcomes:
    • The ability to implement, simulate, and push a multi-tier condition path live within 15 minutes without writing a line of code.
    • A measurable, long-term drop in false-positive alerts that frees up senior analysts to investigate complex, high-probability risk events.
  • Emotional Outcomes:
    • Complete peace of mind knowing that rules are explicitly documented, predictable, and fully visible at a glance.
    • Confidence that team morale won’t crater due to endless, repetitive manual data logging tasks.
  • Risk Reduction Outcomes:
    • Eliminating live traffic deployment risks by using a sandbox environment that tests updated logic paths against historical transaction data.
    • Ensuring no third-party API interactions introduce security vulnerabilities or exceed a strict 15ms latency limit.
  • Success Indicators: Developer sprint hours dedicated to compliance maintenance drop to zero, manual review queues remain at a steady, manageable volume, and external audit validation takes minutes instead of weeks.

5. Current Alternatives and Workarounds

Alternative: The Custom In-House Build

  • Why They Use It: It seems cost-effective at first, utilizes existing internal databases, and satisfies engineering’s natural desire to retain absolute control over corporate source code.
  • What Breaks Down: It fails to scale. As logic demands grow more complex, the code becomes incredibly fragile. Operations teams can’t make adjustments without filing development tickets, creating a massive bottleneck.
  • Opportunity for Positioning: Position our software as an specialized infrastructure layer that doesn’t replace engineering architecture, but rather offloads repetitive maintenance tasks from developers while handing operational keys directly to compliance leads.

Alternative: Legacy Enterprise “Black-Box” Tooling

  • Why They Use It: Safe, well-known brand presence that easily passes initial executive procurement reviews and corporate security checklists.
  • What Breaks Down: These tools hide their scoring logic inside complex machine learning models. When an account is locked out mistakenly, the system can’t explain why, leaving the compliance lead defenseless during regulatory audits.
  • Opportunity for Positioning: Focus messaging heavily on deterministic rule transparency, clear logic mapping, and granular traceability over mysterious automated algorithms.

6. Messaging and Positioning Implications

  • Value Proposition Angle: “Complete compliance workflow autonomy. Build, test, and deploy advanced risk routing logic on a visual canvas—without waiting on engineering sprint backlogs.”
  • Page Messaging Recommendations: Organize landing layouts to mirror the buyer’s natural internal review chain. Open the page by validating their operational dependency frustrations, follow up immediately with an interactive preview of the visual rule-builder canvas, and conclude with an un-gated “Technical Safety Packet” (detailing sub-15ms network latency parameters and SOC2 Type II certifications) to address engineer and CISO concerns upfront.
  • Content Topics:
    • “The Engineering Tax: Calculating the Real Monthly Developer Sprint Cost of Maintaining In-House Fraud Engines.”
    • “Beyond the Black Box: Why Deterministic Rule Traceability is Critical for Post-Audit Compliance Cleanliness.”
  • Sales Discovery Questions:
    • “When a brand-new threat pattern hits your checkout endpoints tomorrow at 3:00 AM, what is the exact operational sequence, timeline, and engineering commitment required to update your logic?”
    • “How many hours of core product development time did your engineering team lose last month due to processing compliance adjustment tickets?”
  • Proof Points Needed: Detailed, technical case studies showing how a mid-market fintech firm migrated away from hard-coded internal rules to our visual engine within a single sprint, slashing false-positive alerts by 40% …

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