A JTBD canvas reframes the question from "what features should we build?" to "what progress is the customer trying to make?"
Layout
Customer Jobs-To-Be-Done Canvas
12 blocks · 4-row grid
"People don't buy quarter-inch drills. They buy quarter-inch holes."
What it is
A job framed in the customer's words. The job statement reads as: "When [context], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]." Around it sit motivation, barriers, alternative solutions, and the digitisation opportunities your product can plausibly own.
Origin
Jobs-To-Be-Done emerged from a body of research that questioned the demographic targeting most marketing teams relied on. Instead of asking what kind of person buys a product, it asks what job they hired the product to do. This canvas packages the lens into a workshop-friendly grid with explicit columns for motivation, barriers, and the digital touchpoints where the job actually gets done today.
When to reach for it
Your roadmap is feature-driven and you suspect you're solving for the wrong job.
You're entering a category and want to see who you're actually competing with (often: spreadsheets, status quo, doing nothing).
You're writing positioning copy and need a job statement the entire team can rally around.
The blocks
Worked example uses An Airbnb guest planning a city trip.
What good looks like
The deeper "why" — career stakes, social signal, sense of progress. Functional and emotional motivations both belong here.
Example — An Airbnb guest planning a city trip
Identity (be the kind of traveller who stays "with locals"), value (often cheaper per night than a comparable boutique hotel), authenticity, and the practical perks — a kitchen, a washing machine, more space than a hotel room.
What good looks like
Habit, switching costs, anxiety, learning curve. Anything that explains why people don't already use your solution.
Example — An Airbnb guest planning a city trip
Worry that the photos will not match reality, fear of bad hosts or outright scams, uncertainty about the check-in process in a foreign city, and hidden fees at checkout that change the headline price.
How to use it
Capture the job in the customer's exact language. Stay literal — the precise verb often reveals the underlying motivation.
Map the four forces — push of the situation, pull of the new solution, anxiety about switching, habit of the old way. The biggest force is the strongest leverage.
Inventory the alternatives the customer uses today. Don't flatter yourself with peer products — most jobs are done with email, calendars, and willpower.
List the digitisation opportunities — where the job is still done manually and where a product could compress the work.
Common mistakes
Writing the job statement in your product's language instead of the customer's.
Ignoring "do nothing" as an alternative — for most jobs, it's the dominant one.
Confusing motivation (the why) with outcome (the what). Both belong in the canvas, in different cells.
Spin up the canvas in one click. Copilot will score every cell against the same rubric this guide describes.
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