Stop Using JTBD for Product. Use It for Positioning.

I've watched dozens of marketing teams spend months on JTBD research only to file it away in a "Customer Insights" folder that product occasionally references. They'll interview 50 customers, map out elaborate job stories, then go straight back to positioning themselves around features and capabilities. The research was solid. The execution was backwards.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Jobs to Be Done isn't a product development methodology. It's a positioning strategy in disguise. When you understand the job your customer is trying to accomplish, you automatically answer positioning's three critical questions: Who is it for? What does it do? Why is it better than alternatives?

Most companies treat JTBD as input for the product roadmap. The best companies use it to reframe their entire market position.

The Status Quo: JTBD as Product Research

Walk into any SaaS company doing JTBD work and you'll see the same pattern. Product teams interview customers about their workflows. Designers map out job stories. Engineers prioritise features based on unmet needs. Marketing gets a summary deck and maybe attends a few readouts.

The research stays in product. Positioning stays in marketing. And the two never properly connect.

This fragmentation creates a predictable failure mode: products that solve real jobs marketed like they solve imaginary ones. The product team knows customers hire them to "reduce anxiety about campaign performance tracking" but marketing positions it as "comprehensive analytics dashboard". The job-to-be-done insight never makes it to the messaging.

According to Strategyn's research, 30,000 new consumer products launch each year and most fail—not because they're bad products, but because positioning fails to connect the solution to the job.

Why Traditional Positioning Frameworks Fall Short

Most positioning frameworks start with competitive analysis. You map competitors on a 2x2 matrix, identify white space, and stake a claim. It's rational, strategic, and completely divorced from how customers actually make decisions.

Customers don't wake up thinking "I need to evaluate vendors in the upper-right quadrant of the ease-of-use versus functionality matrix". They wake up with a problem that's making their job harder, costing them money, or making them look bad to their boss.

Oren Greenberg articulates this perfectly: positioning is intrinsically connected to the problems you solve. Not the problems you think exist in the market. Not the problems your competitors are solving. The actual problems your specific customers are trying to solve.

Traditional positioning frameworks optimise for differentiation against competitors. JTBD-based positioning optimises for relevance to customers. The former helps you stand out. The latter helps you get hired.

The Recruitment Software Nobody Bought

Let me share a positioning failure I witnessed firsthand. A recruitment software company had built an impressive ATS (Applicant Tracking System) with AI-powered candidate matching. Their positioning hit all the traditional marks: "AI-powered recruitment platform" with messaging focused on "advanced algorithms", "intelligent screening", and "automated workflows".

For 18 months, they ran ads targeting HR directors at tech companies. Conversion rates hovered around 0.8%. They assumed they needed better ads, more features, or a pricing change.

Then someone asked: what job are customers actually hiring a recruitment tool to do?

They interviewed recent customers and discovered something unexpected. The job wasn't "screen candidates faster"—it was "stop losing great candidates to competitors because our process takes too long". HR directors were getting pressure from hiring managers who'd watched strong candidates accept other offers whilst they were stuck in 3-week interview cycles.

The repositioning was radical. New headline: "Hire before your competitors do". The messaging shifted from AI capabilities to speed outcomes: "Make offers 5 days faster" and "Stop watching LinkedIn turn green whilst you're scheduling round 3".

Same product. Same features. Same target audience. Conversion rates jumped to 3.2%—a 4x improvement. The emotional job (stop the embarrassment of losing candidates) drove decisions far more than the functional job (screen efficiently).

The Milkshake That Proved the Point

Clayton Christensen's famous milkshake marketing study remains the clearest example of JTBD as positioning strategy. A fast-food chain had positioned milkshakes as a dessert for families with children. Demographics, product category, occasion-based segmentation—all the traditional positioning inputs were there.

Sales were flat.

Christensen's team asked a different question: what job were customers hiring the milkshake to do? They discovered 40% of purchases happened in the morning by solo commuters. These customers weren't hiring a dessert. They were hiring a breakfast solution for boring commutes—something thick enough to last the drive, interesting enough to stay engaged with, and tidy enough to consume one-handed whilst driving.

The repositioning was radical: morning milkshakes got thicker and chunkier (to last longer and provide more interest). The competitive set shifted from other milkshakes to bagels, bananas, and breakfast sandwiches. The positioning message changed from "delicious treat" to "makes your commute better".

Same product. Completely different position in the market. All driven by understanding the job.

JTBD as Positioning: The Three Questions

Positioning, stripped to its essentials, answers three questions:

1. Who is it for? The target customer

2. What does it do? The value delivered

3. How is it different? The unique approach

JTBD research naturally surfaces all three—if you ask the right questions.

Who Is It For?

Traditional segmentation uses demographics, firmographics, or technographics. JTBD segmentation uses circumstances: who experiences this job most acutely, most frequently, or with highest stakes?

A marketing automation platform I worked with had positioned themselves broadly as "for B2B marketers". Generic. Forgettable. Conversion rates reflected it.

Their JTBD research revealed three distinct jobs:

• Generate pipeline to prove marketing's worth (CMOs at venture-backed companies under board pressure)

• Scale personalisation without scaling headcount (marketing ops at growth-stage companies)

• Coordinate campaigns across regions (enterprise marketing teams with distributed offices)

Three completely different jobs. Three different emotional drivers. Three different positioning opportunities.

They chose the first—CMOs who needed to justify marketing spend to sceptical boards. Positioning shifted from "marketing automation platform" to "turn marketing spend into pipeline you can show investors". According to their case study, qualified lead volume increased 67% after the repositioning.

The key insight: as Greenberg explains, unless you're large and established, you can't effectively target multiple personas. Pick one job, nail the positioning for that job, then expand sequentially.

What Does It Do?

This is where emotional jobs separate good positioning from great positioning. Every product has a functional job (what it literally does) and an emotional job (how it makes customers feel). Positioning based on emotional jobs converts better because that's what drives purchase decisions.

HubSpot's 2024 State of Marketing report found that messaging focused on emotional outcomes produced 2.3x higher engagement rates than feature-focused messaging. The emotional job is the positioning anchor.

A productivity tool's functional job might be "organise marketing tasks". But the emotional jobs underneath could be:

• Feel in control instead of overwhelmed

• Look competent in front of leadership

• Reduce anxiety about missing deadlines

• Feel accomplished at day's end

As Greenberg illustrates, you want to position around symptoms prospects recognise, not root causes they may not be aware of. They're not searching for "disconnected communication channels"—they're searching for "why aren't my campaigns converting".

How Is It Different?

JTBD research reveals differentiation by showing you how customers currently solve the job—and where current solutions fall short. This gives you three positioning options:

| Positioning Approach | When to Use | Example |
|---------------------|-------------|---------|-----|
| Position against the status quo | Current solution is manual/painful | "Stop managing campaigns in spreadsheets" |
| Position against the incumbent | Dominant player exists but has weaknesses | "Fathom Analytics: Privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics" |
| Position the category | Job isn't well-served yet | "Drift: Conversational marketing for sales teams" |

Superhuman email provides a masterclass in this. The job isn't "manage email" (that's what Gmail does). The job is "get through inbox quickly so you can focus on actual work". Their positioning centres on speed—"blazingly fast email"—which differentiates against every other email client that positions on features, storage, or collaboration.

The JTBD Interview Questions That Unlock Positioning

Most teams ask the wrong questions in JTBD interviews. They ask about workflows, pain points, and feature requests—all useful for product development, none of it actionable for positioning.

As Greenberg points out, you can't just rely on your sales team's interpretation. You need direct customer interviews, but with questions designed to extract positioning ingredients.

Here's our interview framework for 30-45 minute customer conversations:

Positioning Ingredient Discovery Questions:

1. The Stakes: "What has changed in your industry recently that makes this important?"

2. The Enemy: "What were you struggling with before you found us?"

3. The Consequences: "What happened when you couldn't solve this problem?"

4. The Status Quo: "How did you try to solve it before?"

5. The Trigger: "Do you remember the moment you decided you needed a solution?"

6. The Superpower: "What's the ONE thing you no longer have to do that was painful before?"

7. The Promised Land: "How would you describe your work now versus before?"

8. The Proof: "What concrete results could you show a colleague to prove this works?"

These questions surface everything you need for positioning: who experiences the job most acutely (the stakes), what they're trying to accomplish (the promised land), how you're different (the superpower versus status quo), and why they should believe you (the proof).

We record every interview and mine them for actual customer language. When a customer says "I can finally go into board meetings confident" rather than "I have better reporting", that's positioning gold. Use their words, not yours.

The Evolution Problem: When JTBD Changes Over Time

Here's where most positioning strategies fail: they assume the job stays constant. It doesn't.

Intercom's Geoffrey Keating wrote about this pattern in their customer research. They found new customers hired Intercom to "respond to support tickets faster" but customers who'd been using it for 6+ months had shifted to a completely different job: "proactively prevent support tickets through better onboarding". Same product, completely different job.

Their solution: segmented positioning. New customer messaging focused on support efficiency. Existing customer messaging focused on proactive engagement and onboarding improvements. This repositioning contributed to their expansion revenue growing faster than new customer revenue—a critical milestone for SaaS retention.

The positioning implication: segment your messaging by customer tenure, not just by persona. Month 1 customers see different positioning than month 12 customers, even though they're using the same product.

Slack's famous growth through retention demonstrates this perfectly. Their initial positioning targeted technical teams: "Email killer for developers". As customers evolved, Slack repositioned for broader use cases: "Where work happens" encompassed far more jobs than replacing email.

The Positioning-Product Alignment Gap

The most common JTBD implementation failure: product understands the job but marketing positions around features. This creates cognitive dissonance that kills conversion.

I audited a marketing analytics company's positioning after disappointing adoption of their new dashboard feature. Product had interviewed customers extensively—validated demand, understood workflows, built exactly what customers asked for.

But uptake was 11% after three months.

The problem wasn't the product. It was positioning the job wrong. Customers told product they wanted "better visibility into campaign performance". Marketing positioned it as "comprehensive analytics dashboard with 47 metrics". But the real job wasn't "see more data"—it was "confidently report to executives without spending hours in spreadsheets".

As Greenberg explains in his framework on understanding customer needs, customers often articulate jobs from their "ideal self" rather than their actual circumstances. They'll say yes to features that sound useful but don't actually use them because there's no space in their day-to-day for that job.

The repositioning: "Turn campaign data into executive-ready reports in under 5 minutes". Feature adoption jumped to 38% in two months. Same product, positioning that matched the actual job rather than the stated job.

Your JTBD Positioning Playbook

Stop treating JTBD as product research. Start treating it as positioning strategy. Here's your implementation framework:

The 5-Step JTBD Positioning Framework:

1. Interview 10-15 recent customers using the positioning ingredient questions above

2. Map jobs to personas and identify who experiences each job most acutely

3. Choose your positioning target: highest pain + highest willingness to pay + largest addressable market

4. Extract positioning ingredients from interviews: enemy, stakes, superpower, promised land

5. Craft positioning statements that speak to emotional outcomes, not functional features

6. Test positioning variants on landing pages before company-wide rollout

7. Monitor positioning evolution quarterly as customer jobs evolve

The critical decision point: which persona to position for first. Consider:

• Who has the greatest pain?

• Who's most inclined to pay to solve it?

• Which persona are your happiest customers?

• Which market has the greatest immediate revenue potential?

Pick one. Nail the positioning. Then expand sequentially to adjacent personas with different job-to-be-done contexts.

The Positioning Mistake Matrix

After working with dozens of B2B SaaS teams on JTBD-based positioning, I've catalogued the failure modes:

The most expensive mistake: positioning for multiple jobs simultaneously because you want to appeal to a broad market. This is the "enterprise healthcare platform for everyone" problem. You end up with positioning so generic it speaks to no one.

"The jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?" — Clayton Christensen

What This Means for Your Next Quarter

If you've done JTBD research and filed it in a product folder, pull it back out. You've already done the hard work—now use it for what it's actually for: positioning strategy.

If you haven't done JTBD research, start with 10 customer interviews using the positioning ingredient framework above. You'll get more actionable positioning insights from 10 deep conversations than from 100 feature requests.

And if your positioning isn't working—low conversion, high CAC, messaging that sounds like everyone else—the problem probably isn't your product. It's that your positioning describes what you are instead of what customers are trying to accomplish.

The best positioning doesn't describe features. It doesn't list benefits. It doesn't explain capabilities. It articulates the job customers are trying to do and positions you as the obvious solution.

Theodore Levitt said people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. But even that doesn't go far enough. They don't want the hole—they want to hang a picture. They want to feel proud showing their home to guests. They want to turn a house into a home.

Your positioning should answer: what are they really trying to accomplish? Everything else is just features.