You’re staring at your product roadmap. Or your next campaign brief. Or a blank Google Doc. And the question looms:
“What does my customer really want right now?”
Sometimes, even with customer interviews and surveys, the real customer needs (the Jobs-to-Be-Done) remain hidden beneath the surface. But once you know how to spot them, you start to see them everywhere.
Let me break down five deceptively simple ways to uncover JTBD insights in everyday life, paired with real-world examples to show how top businesses have used them to build category-leading solutions.
1. Seeing Jobs in Your Own Life
If you’ve ever thought, “There’s got to be a better way,” congratulations! You’ve just spotted a job.
Many successful products started as a founder solving their own annoyance:
- Slack: A video game team frustrated by scattered communication built their own internal tool to streamline messaging. Job: “Let me collaborate without digging through endless threads.”
- Dropbox: Drew Houston forgot his USB stick one too many times. Job: “Keep my files accessible everywhere without emailing them to myself.”
- Calendly: Founder Tope Awotona was tired of back-and-forth emails. Job: “Help me schedule meetings without the logistical hassle.”
👉 What tools do you cobble together? What do you find yourself avoiding, dreading, or ranting about to a friend?
2. Finding Opportunity in Non-Consumption
Where people aren’t using anything, because what exists is too expensive, too complex, or too misaligned—that’s fertile ground.
- Square opened up card payments for micro-merchants who had never taken cards before. Job: “Let me accept payments without installing a full POS.”
- Canva gave non-designers an easy way to make polished graphics. Job: “Let me create professional visuals without hiring or learning design.”
- Coursera / Udemy empowered those locked out of traditional education to upskill. Job: “Let me learn valuable skills without quitting my job or taking on debt.”
👉 Look for segments that currently say no to the market. What’s stopping them? What’s too much friction?
3. Identifying Workarounds
Customers hacking together duct-tape solutions are waving a giant flag: “My job isn’t well served.”
- Zapier emerged from people manually copying data between platforms. Job: “Connect the tools I already use without code.”
- Notion unified dozens of scattered tools (docs, kanban boards, wikis) into one flexible workspace. Job: “Help me stay organised my way.”
- YouTube tutorials became the go-to support system for thousands of products, from IKEA builds to Excel macros. Job: “Show me how to use this, fast.”
👉 Find the spreadsheet that runs everything. The email hacks. The DIY solutions. That’s where unmet jobs live.
4. Zoning in on What We Don’t Want to Do
People often pay not for the task, but to avoid the pain of doing it themselves.
- HelloFresh: Job: “Plan and prep healthy meals without decision fatigue.”
- TaxScouts: Job: “Handle my taxes without the confusion or dread.”
- My own, Unlock Growth: Job: “Unlock growth for my business so I don’t have to scrutinise agencies/freelancers, interpret vague reports, or waste budget again.”
👉 What tasks do your customers avoid, delay, or complain about? Those are unmet emotional jobs—often more powerful than the functional ones.
5. Spotting Unusual Uses of Products
When customers start bending your product to fit a new context, they reveal jobs you didn’t even know you were hired for.
- TikTok: From dance videos to product reviews and how-to content. Job: “Help me discover things quickly through entertaining video.”
- Google Sheets being used as a CRM, content calendar, applicant tracking system, etc. Job: “Give me a customisable system I already understand.”
- ChatGPT used for drafting strategy, marketing copy, and business plans by non-marketers. Job: “Give me expert-level outputs without hiring anyone.”
👉 Watch how users misuse your product. What job are they hiring it for instead? Should you lean into it or create a spin-off?
Want to go deeper? Suppose you’re trying to uncover customer jobs for your product or next campaign. I run strategic discovery sessions and workshops that combine Jobs-to-Be-Done with Four Forces of Progress mapping and strategic Positioning. Let’s talk.
Turn Hidden Jobs into Strategic Advantage
The best marketing, product, and growth strategies start by truly understanding what your customer is hiring your solution to do.
These five lenses, drawn from your everyday observations, are the starting points:
- Your own frustrations.
- Gaps where no solution exists.
- Workarounds and hacks.
- Tasks people avoid like the plague.
- Unusual, unintended product uses.
Use these to guide interviews, customer observation, or just your own sense-making. And once you uncover the real job? That’s when the growth begins.