Turn raw customer interviews into strategic gold your cross-departmental teams can apply—without burying insights in slides or Google Docs/Notion black holes.
You’ve just wrapped up a round of Jobs-to-Be-Done customer interviews. You asked the right questions. The responses were raw, revealing, and deeply human. You heard about struggling moments that sparked real searches. About emotional triggers, anxieties, and competing options.
You uncovered the kind of gold most teams never get close to.
But now what?
The insights are sitting in digital folders as video recordings, transcripts, and notes.
The reality? Like with Buyer Personas, many teams never take action with the insights they have worked so hard to collect. They’re too long. Too abstract. Too removed from the real decisions happening in product, marketing, sales, or support.
Let me show you a better way: a simple, practical, repeatable system to document and share your JTBD insights—and the Four Forces of Progress—in a way that gets seen, used, and drives action. And, I’ve included a free (ungated) JTBD Card Template at the end of this post.
Why Jobs-to-Be-Done Documentation Often Fails
The default outputs of most customer research projects are:
- 47-slide presentation decks with too much detail and not enough focus.
- Longform Google Doc write-ups that feel more like dissertations.
- A few cherry-picked quotes pasted into marketing copy decks with no apparent logic behind them.
This isn’t a problem of intelligence or good intent. It’s a format problem. Insights die quickly if they aren’t easy to scan, reference, and reuse.
When teams can’t easily understand and apply the learnings from customers, the research ends up locked in a drawer—and your competitive advantage goes with it.
How to and What To Capture in the JTBD Insight Stack
To make JTBD insights useful, you need a better structure than merely more detail.
Here’s a clear, repeatable format I recommend capturing for every Job you uncover:
1. Job Statement (Simple, Clear, Human)
This is your anchor. Capture the job in the customer’s own terms:
“When I’m presenting to the board of directors, I want marketing reports that clearly show ROI, so I can defend our spend and keep our budget.”
Use this format: When [situation], I want to [action], so I can [desired outcome].
Keep it clear and jargon-free. Use real language only.
2. The Four Forces of Progress (Condensed)
Lay out each job’s internal dynamics:
| Force | Insight |
|---|---|
| Push | “At every board meeting, I feel like I’m on trial.” |
| Pull | “This narrative-driven dashboard finally tells a story I can stand behind.” |
| Anxiety | “Will our CFO and investors trust this platform’s data storytelling?” |
| Habit | “I already built a scrappy system in Excel. It’s painful but familiar.” |
This model shows exactly what’s moving them toward change and what’s keeping them stuck.
3. Struggling Moments (Emotionally Charged Quotes)
These are the turning points that triggered action:
“After the last board meeting where I got grilled on ROI, I knew I couldn’t walk in blind again.”
These are storytelling gold. They belong in your campaigns, sales emails, product copy, and onboarding flows.
How to Store The Insights So They Get Used
You don’t need any fancy tooling. But you do need visibility and ease of access.
Here’s what’s worked across teams:
- Living Document: One shared Jobs-to-Be-Done insights document per product/service line. Store it in Notion, Coda, or Google Docs.
- Loom Walkthroughs: Record a quick 2–3 minute explainer video summarising each job. Embed the Four Forces. Share it in Slack or MS Teams.
- Slack Series: Post one JTBD job card each week in #marketing, #product, or #growth.
- Tagging Framework: When launching campaigns, tag the JTBD Job. e.g., “This blog post speaks to Job #3: Prove ROI to stakeholders.”
Make it part of your daily workflows.
Getting Every Team to Apply The Insights
Once documented, the goal is adoption. That only happens when people see precisely how it helps them do their jobs better.
- Marketing pulls actual struggling moment quotes for ad hooks, landing pages, and nurture emails.
- Sales uses the Push and Anxiety forces to refine objection handling.
- Product prioritises features that eliminate specific barriers to progress.
- Customer Success ensures they’re helping users accomplish the job they hired you for.
Make It a Card, Not a Chapter
Instead of a 10-page insight report, try a JTBD card—one per job. Include:
- A clear job title
- The full job statement
- Summary of each of the Four Forces
- Top 2–3 struggle quotes
- Do’s and Don’ts for messaging
This format is fast to scan, easy to reuse, and perfect for planning meetings, sprints, campaign briefs, or sales enablement.
Jobs-to-Be-Done Is Your Strategic Superpower
Your customers are already making progress, with or without you. Your goal shouldn’t be to build customer personas. You should be learning about the progress your users are trying to make, and become the product or service they hire to help them achieve it.
When you document and implement your JTBD insights effectively, you not only improve your messaging but also align your entire business around what truly matters.
That’s what growth looks like.
Want help with unearthing insights and turning them into action? I help teams move from raw interviews to structured, shareable, strategically applied insights. Let’s chat.
Grab my Jobs-to-Be-Done Card Template for free and start mapping your customer insights today. It’s a Google Document. So open it and then File > Make a copy.