Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
The level of classification of customer feedback at which the customer describes what they are trying to accomplish in their work, expressed as a business action: qualifying an incident, tracking a job, comparing several entities, recovering context before acting, coordinating several people.
Full definition
The job to be done is, in its tradition, a theory of demand: a customer "hires" a product to make progress in a situation, and the job is that sought progress, independent of any solution. The "use case", which comes from software engineering, designates rather a typed interaction between an actor and a system.
In the classification of customer feedback worked on here, the two words are held together to name a single tier: that of the intended act of work. It doesn't matter whether you write it in the language of jobs or the language of use cases; what defines the tier is that it names a business gesture without naming the product's answer.
It is the tier that best resists time: screens change, features get replaced, the action remains.
Usage in the field
This level feeds discovery: it serves to group heterogeneous requests around one poorly equipped action, and to run interviews that bear on real work rather than on opinions about the product.
Synonyms and variants
Job to be done, JTBD, job, use case, business action, business task.
Not to be confused with
- Business stake — a business objective, organizational constraint or risk: what matters to the activity, one notch above the action that carries it.
- Product capability — what the tool should make possible. The capability answers the job; it coincides with it only if you write the job in solution vocabulary.
- User story — a format for writing a need destined for a backlog, which already includes a scope of implementation.
- Local friction point — an irritant located on a precise screen or behaviour.
Examples
"Qualify an incident" — the action is named, how the product serves it stays open.
"Recover context before acting" — an act of work that several very different product designs could serve.
Ambiguities / debates
The two terms brought together here are not equivalent in their traditions: the JTBD claims independence from any product, the use case presupposes a system. Their union is a local choice, justified by the fact that they designate the same tier in a feedback framework; a reader coming from strict JTBD will consider that union a shortcut.