How to Build a Job Map: Practical Steps from the JTBD Playbook

Journey maps describe how customers use your product. Job maps describe what customers are trying to accomplish at all. That difference is why job maps, a centerpiece of Jim Kalbach’s JTBD Playbook, routinely reveal opportunities that journey maps cannot.

What is a job map?

A job map breaks a job into its universal stages, commonly eight: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, conclude. The key discipline is that the map contains no product. It does not matter whether the customer uses your app, a spreadsheet, or a nephew who is good with technology. You are mapping the job itself, which makes the map stable across time and competitors.

How do you build one?

1. Choose a job with stakes. Pick something customers actively struggle to get done, ideally tied to a purchase decision.

2. Interview customers about behavior, not opinions. Ask them to walk through the last time they did the job. What did they do first? What was annoying? What did they cobble together?

3. Plot the stages. Organize what you hear into the eight stages. Most jobs will not use all of them, and that is fine.

4. Mark the struggle points. Where do people improvise, double-check, give up, or pay someone else? Struggle is opportunity.

5. Attach outcomes. For each stage, write what success looks like in the customer’s words: minimize the time to, reduce the chance of.

What does a job map give a design team?

It separates two questions teams constantly blur: are we doing the job well, and are we doing the right job? A polished flow for a stage customers do not care about is wasted craft. A job map shows you where care pays.

Why does Tremoloo share this book?

Job maps feature heavily in our discovery research because they de-politicize prioritization. When the map shows customers struggling at a stage your roadmap ignores, the debate ends itself.

Want a job map built from real customer interviews? Our research team runs them.