A Template for JTBD Interviews

If you are familiar with Jobs to be Done interviewing, you know that good notes are essential to help you understand your customer’s story. Together with your recordings, they help you to shed light on the energy that influenced your customer’s transaction.

Today I would like to share a little template I was using during my interviews with you. It essentially sums up the Timeline and the Forces Diagram on a single page that you can print and take with you when you jump into an interview to get that story out of your customer.

You can quickly structure your thoughts while listening. Try to fill up the timeline first, you can sort the forces later. Your first priority is listening to your customer.

Download the template

What’s the idea?

Jobs to be Done interviews help you to understand the journey your customer had to undertake in order to make the commitment to your product. The Timeline tool helps you to capture the discrete moments in time when you customer got a nudge to move forward with the purchase. Your friend’s sudden buy of a huge TV can make you consider a similar purchase, or you at least start noticing TVs more.

The interviews also help you to get a better picture of the various emotional and social aspects influencing the decision-making process. Was fear an important driving force? Who else was directly or indirectly involved?

In the template above, I provided room for both. You can note events along the timeline. Print several sheets to have a page for each event if you would like to have more space. Once you have gathered enough experience and develop a feel for the different forces, you can quickly note forward-driving forces on the right and backward-pulling forces on the left.

Note about the forces

You don’t need to be anywhere precise. Concentrate on getting the Timeline right. You will uncover a lot of the forces when analysing your notes and recordings. Sometimes, however, a force is so striking that it can help to sort it out directly in order to dig deeper.

Getting in touch

If you have any questions or comments about interviewing, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, I will be happy to help.

Learn more

Check out this great page from Alan Klement about what is Jobs to be Done.

Read this great article from Rene Bastijans on how to recruit for JTBD interviews.

Check out our services at Revealed if you need help exploring and creating new markets with JTBD.

Thanks for reading.