Breaking the Jobs-to-be-Done Code: The 5 Questions That Expose What Your Customers Actually Want

Let's be honest—most of us spend ungodly amounts of time building products nobody actually wants. (I've done it. You've probably done it. We nod knowingly at each other across the startup graveyard). We convince ourselves we're "disrupting" when we're really just creating shiny solutions to problems that don't exist. The problem? We're asking customers what they want, which is about as useful as asking a toddler what they want for dinner. They'll say "ice cream" when what they really need is vegetables and a nap.

This is where Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory swoops in like the superhero we didn't know we needed. It's not about what customers say they want—it's about the deeper job they're "hiring" your product to do. And the only way to uncover these jobs? Mastering the art of the JTBD interview.

Why Standard Customer Interviews Are Fantastically Useless

If you've ever conducted a traditional customer interview, you know the drill. "Would you use this feature?" (Yes!) "How much would you pay for it?" (£5 a month sounds reasonable!) "Would this solve your problem?" (Absolutely!)

Then you build it, and... silence. Tumbleweeds. The occasional pity signup from your mum.

The problem is that humans are spectacularly bad at predicting their own behaviour. We're unreliable narrators of our own stories. We say we want to eat healthily, then demolish a packet of biscuits at 11 pm. We claim we'd pay for quality journalism, then spend three hours finding a way around the paywall.

After burning through my savings developing luxury candles that people said they'd "definitely buy" (narrator: they did not, in fact, buy them), I learned that what people say and what people do are entirely different planets. This is precisely why one Product Hunt founder discovered that a single unstructured 2-hour customer conversation provided more valuable insights than months of typical 15-minute structured interviews.

The JTBD framework sidesteps this problem by focusing not on hypotheticals but on actual purchasing behaviour that's already happened. It's archaeology, not fortune-telling.

The 5 Questions That Crack Open Customer Motivation

The beauty of a good JTBD interview is that it feels more like a therapy session than market research. You're not asking "Would you buy this?" You're saying, "Tell me about the last time you actually spent money to solve this problem."

Here are the five questions that will help you excavate the real motivations behind customer decisions:

1. "Take me back to the moment you realised you needed to make a change."

This question is about the trigger—that specific moment when your customer moved from passive discontent to active solution-seeking. The more specific, the better.

Rubbish version: "Why did you buy our accounting software?"

Brilliant version: "What was happening the day you decided your old accounting system wasn't working anymore? Where were you? What were you trying to do?"

The difference is crucial. The first gets you a post-rationalised, sanitised answer. The second unlocks the emotional memory of the actual moment—perhaps they were frantically searching for a receipt at 11 pm before a tax deadline, swearing profusely and questioning their life choices. That's the good stuff. Research shows that customers remember the most emotionally intense moments and the end of an experience, not the average—making these emotional triggers absolutely critical to understand.

2. "What solutions did you try before this one?"

This question reveals your true competition—and it's rarely who you think it is.

When I was building my doomed candle business, I thought I was competing with other luxury candle brands. Turns out, I was competing with "nothing at all" (people simply leaving rooms smelling however they smelled) and, bizarrely, houseplants (apparently a more sustainable way to make your flat look and smell nice).

Understanding alternative solutions helps you see what job the customer is actually trying to accomplish. Are they buying your meal kit because they want to cook (in which case, you're competing with grocery shopping) or because they don't want to cook (in which case, you're competing with takeaway)? Often, the biggest competition isn't another company but the status quo—customers may not even be aware the problem exists.

3. "What were you hoping would be different about your life after purchasing?"

This question gets at the progress your customer is trying to make in their life. The answer is almost never about your product features.

Nobody buys a drill because they want a drill. They don't even buy it because they want a hole. They buy it because they want to put up shelves to display their book collection to make guests think they're intellectual. Or something like that.

The functional job ("I need accounting software that can reconcile transactions") is just the surface. The emotional and social jobs ("I need to feel like a competent business owner" or "I need my accountant to stop sighing dramatically every time we meet") are where the real insights live. Understanding these deeper motivations is crucial—pain points are the foundation of a successful marketing strategy because they allow a business to position its product as a solution rather than just a commodity.

4. "Walk me through the exact purchase decision. What almost stopped you from buying?"

This question illuminates the anxieties and obstacles that nearly derailed the purchase—crucial information for improving your conversion funnel.

You'll hear about the moment of hesitation when they saw your pricing page. Or the review they read that almost scared them off. Or the competitor they were seriously considering until the last minute.

These friction points are gold dust. They're where customers leak out of your funnel, and identifying them lets you patch the holes. Research reveals that high cart abandonment rates and elevated return rates are direct consequences of unaddressed customer pain points, making this question essential for optimizing your sales process.

5. "Since using this solution, what's the main benefit you've experienced?"

This final question reveals the actual value as experienced by the customer—which, again, is often wildly different from what you think you're selling.

You might think you're selling "enterprise-grade security features," but your customer might value "the peace of mind that lets me sleep at night instead of worrying about data breaches." You're not just selling software; you're selling a good night's sleep.

This question also cleverly sidesteps the "what features do you want?" trap, which invariably leads to bloated products that solve no problem particularly well.

How to Conduct a JTBD Interview Without Making It Weird

Knowing the right questions is only half the battle. The real art lies in creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their actual thought processes rather than their polished, post-rationalised versions of events.

• Start with recent purchases (within the last 60 days). Memory fades quickly, and you want the details fresh. For ongoing behaviours, consider diary studies that capture real-time, contextual insights over days or weeks to complement your JTBD interviews.
• Make it conversational, not interrogational. You're having coffee with a friend, not conducting a police investigation.
• Embrace the silence. When you ask a probing question, resist the urge to fill awkward pauses. The gold often comes after that uncomfortable 5-second gap.
• Listen for emotional language. Words like "frustrated," "worried," or "relieved" signal the underlying motivations.
• Dig deeper with "why" and "how did that make you feel" follow-ups, but avoid asking "why" more than twice in a row unless you want your interviewee to feel like a toddler being interrogated about a broken vase.

From Insights to Action: What to Do With All This Juicy Data

After conducting 5-10 JTBD interviews, patterns will emerge. You'll start to see the same triggers, anxieties, and desired outcomes repeated across different conversations.

The magic happens when you translate these insights into your:

Messaging: Address the actual job, not just your features. "Stop losing sleep over potential data breaches" speaks directly to the emotional job, while "256-bit encryption" addresses the functional job.

Product development: Prioritise features that solve the most important jobs, not just the ones that are easiest to build or that your loudest customers are screaming for.

Onboarding: Design your user journey to deliver the "first win" that addresses their primary job as quickly as possible.

Customer success: Measure success not by feature adoption but by whether customers are making the progress they hired your product to help them make.

After my candle business went up in flames (metaphorically, thank goodness), I realised that proper JTBD research would have saved me from creating products that solved problems nobody actually had—or at least problems nobody was willing to pay to solve.

The Unvarnished Truth About JTBD Interviews

Let's not sugar-coat it: conducting good JTBD interviews is hard. It requires checking your ego at the door and being willing to discover that your brilliant product idea solves absolutely nothing of value. It demands empathy, patience, and the ability to read between the lines of what people say.

But here's the truth: understanding the real job your customers are hiring your product to do is the difference between building something people use once and building something people can't imagine living without. It's the difference between creating another forgettable app and creating a product people evangelise to their friends.

So before you write another line of code or design another feature, ask yourself: do I actually know what job my customers are hiring my product to do? And if the answer isn't an immediate, evidence-based "yes," then it's time to close your laptop, pick up the phone, and start asking better questions.