It’s not as simple as just planning the job, doing the job, reviewing the job. To achieve the job, your customer will likely process through many or all of these stages. By calculating Importance + (Importance – Satisfaction) to create an Opportunity score, we see where customers report their unmet needs, which could be opportunities for you to focus on. This works by surveying customers on the importance of each step, and how satisfied they are with their current ability to achieve it. This map example also goes further to identify product opportunities. These steps are sometimes actions, but can also be decisions and considerations to be evaluated. For example, within the ‘Finding content’ stage the customer undertakes multiple steps. Underneath, you’ll also see the steps that the customer takes within each stage. The three blocks at the top detail the macro stages – I’ll come onto those in a second. It’s logical that a culture that focuses on customer-first empathy will deliver maximum customer value. I believe that everyone in a business, from backoffice teams to sales and marketing, should have knowledge of what your customers are trying to achieve. But I like to use them for two reasons: they’re really simple to communicate, and they base your product in the customers world, not yours.

Traditionally they have a lot of value in product management and can provide a foundation for the product discovery process. Rather than user story maps, job maps don’t look at the individual actions that somebody takes in this journey, like clicks or searches, but instead look at the macro stages and micro-tasks that someone will do in their search to be successful.

Jobs to be done examples