Most SaaS founders and growth teams know they should be talking to their customers. The problem isn’t knowing — it’s the doing.
“We don’t have time.”
“We can’t afford to pause the roadmap.”
“We did customer interviews last year.”
Here’s the honest truth: every week you spend building without understanding why customers actually bought your product is a week you’re guessing. And guessing, when it comes to your product strategy, positioning, and go-to-market, is expensive.
The good news? A well-executed JTBD research project doesn’t have to take 6 months, require a dedicated research team, or grind everything else to a halt.
Done right, you can go from zero to a full set of actionable insights in under 3 months, and what you learn will inform your roadmap, your messaging, your pricing, and your retention strategy all at once.
Here’s exactly how we do it.
What is JTBD research, and which type do you actually need?
“Jobs to be done” (JTBD) is a framework rooted in the idea that customers don’t buy products; they hire them to make progress in their lives. The theory was pioneered by Tony Ulwick and popularized by the late Clayton Christensen, then co-developed further by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek at The Re-Wired Group.¹
There are two main flavors of JTBD research, and which one you use depends on what you’re trying to figure out:
Switch interviews (demand-side) are what most SaaS founders need first. This approach (developed by Moesta) traces the timeline of events that led someone to seek out, evaluate, and ultimately “hire” your product. The focus is on the context of the purchase decision: what was happening in their life or work that created the need, what they tried before, what pushed them to finally act, and what almost made them walk away. This style is best for positioning, messaging, GTM strategy, and troubleshooting growth plateaus.
Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is Ulwick’s framework, and it goes deeper into the functional job steps customers are trying to complete and the metrics they use to measure success at each step.² ODI is more suited to customer discovery: understanding whether there are unmet needs in the market, and where the product can create new value. If you’re trying to figure out what to build, ODI-style research is your friend.
For most early and mid-stage SaaS companies, switch interviews are the right starting point. They’re faster to run, easier to synthesize, and immediately applicable to real business decisions. If you’re troubleshooting stalled growth, trying to nail your ICP, or reorienting your positioning: this is where you start.
What are the objectives of JTBD research?
Before a single interview gets scheduled, it’s important to align on what you’re actually trying to learn. JTBD research without clear objectives tends to produce interesting conversations but no clear direction.
Here’s what well-scoped JTBD research typically helps you understand:
The “hiring” moment. What was happening in the customer’s life or business that triggered the search for a solution? What was the struggling moment that made the status quo no longer acceptable?
The decision criteria. What did customers evaluate? What almost made them choose something else? What pushed them over the finish line?
The job your product is actually hired for. Not what you think you built, but what customers are actually using your product to accomplish. These are often meaningfully different, and the gap between them is where positioning problems are born.
The emotional and social context. Progress isn’t just functional. Customers also have social jobs (how they want to be perceived by others) and emotional jobs (how they want to feel). Switch interviews surface all of these.
What would make them “fire” you. The signals and circumstances that would lead a customer to switch away, which is enormously valuable for retention strategy.
The process: under 3 months, start to finish
Here’s what the timeline looks like for a typical JTBD research project:
Weeks 1–2: Scoping, recruitment, and preparation
Start with a clear brief: who are you interviewing, and why? For most SaaS companies, this means your best existing customers: the ones with the highest LTV, longest tenure, or strongest usage patterns. You’re looking for the people who clearly “hired” your product for a specific job and kept it hired.
For recruitment, we use platforms like userinterviews.com and respondent.io to source participants efficiently. These platforms handle screening, scheduling, and incentive disbursement, which removes a significant operational headache.
Speaking of incentives: offer $100 per completed interview. This is the sweet spot for most audiences; it’s high enough to get participation rates up and low enough to fit a reasonable research budget. For highly specialized or executive-level audiences (think C-suite or highly compensated technical roles), the incentive may need to scale up or be structured differently: a gift card, a donation to a cause, access to exclusive content. For most SaaS customers, though, $100 gets the job done.
In parallel, prepare your interview guide. More on what that looks like below.
Weeks 3–4: Conducting interviews
The target is 10–15 interviews, with 12 being the sweet spot in our experience. Twelve interviews is enough to start hearing clear patterns emerge (the same struggling moments, the same decision criteria, the same emotional context) without the diminishing returns of running 25+ conversations.
Each interview runs 45–60 minutes and is recorded and transcribed (tools like Otter.ai or Grain make this easy). The most important rule: both the interviewer and at least one member of the client team should be present for every interview. Not to take over, but to listen. There’s no substitute for hearing your customers say, in their own words, why they hired your product.
Weeks 5–6: Analysis and synthesis
This is where the insights get made. The raw transcripts get organized, coded, and analyzed; we’re looking for patterns in the timeline of events, the jobs being articulated, and the emotional context behind decisions. We document discovered jobs, create artifacts that capture the patterns across interviews, and begin connecting the insights to the business decisions on the table.
The synthesis phase typically produces a clear picture of: who your best customers actually are, what job they hired your product for, what messaging resonates, what the real competing alternatives are (which is almost always surprising), and what retention risks look like.
Weeks 7–10 (optional): Connecting insights to strategy
Not every project extends into this phase, but if there are strategic decisions on the table (a pricing change, a repositioning, a go-to-market pivot), the synthesis often feeds directly into a prioritized set of recommendations and next steps.
The JTBD interview guide: a talking map, not a script
A common mistake in JTBD research is treating the interview guide like a survey: a fixed list of questions to work through in order. That’s not how switch interviews work.
The interview guide is a set of talking points and a rough arc, not a script. The actual questions vary significantly from interview to interview, because good JTBD interviewing means actively listening and following threads. If a customer mentions they almost quit the evaluation process because of a security concern, you don’t skip past that to get to your next bullet; you stay there and understand what that concern was, where it came from, and what resolved it.
That said, the arc of a switch interview follows a consistent timeline of events:³
The first thought. When did the customer first realize they had a problem worth solving? What was happening at that moment? This is often months before they started looking at solutions.
The passive looking phase. Before actively searching, most customers go through a period of casually noticing relevant information: a mention in a newsletter, a conversation with a peer, a passing ad. What were they noticing, and what triggered the shift to active searching?
The active looking phase. When did they start seriously evaluating options? What criteria did they use? What did they try? What fell short?
The deciding moment. What made them ultimately choose your product? Was there a specific conversation, a feature they discovered, a moment of clarity? What almost made them not choose you?
Early experience and onboarding. What happened in the first days and weeks? Was there a moment where the product “clicked”? What created anxiety or doubt?
The ongoing job. What are they using the product for now? What’s still unresolved?
Across 12 interviews, the patterns in this arc become unmistakably clear, and that clarity is the foundation of everything from your homepage copy to your onboarding sequence to your pricing tiers.
A quick note on who should be in the room
One of the non-negotiables in our projects: the client team participates in the interviews, live. Not just in the debrief. Not just reviewing transcripts afterward.
There’s a real difference between reading a summary of what a customer said and hearing them say it. The tone, the hesitation, the moment they light up talking about a specific outcome: these things don’t survive the translation to a synthesis doc. Teams that sit in on their own JTBD interviews come out of the process with a shared understanding and a shared language that’s almost impossible to manufacture any other way.
After each interview, we run a 20–30 minute debrief with the client team. What stood out? What was surprising? What does this change about what we thought we knew? These immediate reactions are some of the most valuable inputs into the eventual synthesis.
Don’t want to run it yourself? Top JTBD research consultants for SaaS
JTBD research done well requires a specific skill set: comfort with ambiguity, active listening, the ability to follow a thread without leading the witness, and enough pattern recognition to know when a signal is meaningful. It’s learnable, but it takes practice; and if you’re trying to get high-quality insights fast, there’s a real argument for bringing in someone who has done it hundreds of times.
There are a few good reasons to go the done-for-you (or done-with-you) route: you don’t have the bandwidth to run it yourself, you want to be more hands-on and build internal research capability at the same time, it’s important for the team to absorb the insights directly rather than through a summary, or you’re not yet confident in your ability to conduct non-leading interviews. Any of these is a perfectly valid reason to bring in outside help.
Here are some of the best in the business:
1. DemandMaven (that’s us!)
We run done-for-you JTBD research projects specifically for SaaS and software companies. Our model is 10 interviews in the style of switch interviews, all recorded, transcribed, and synthesized into a research repository and insights brief. We also offer a done-with-you model for teams who want to be more hands-on and build internal research capability at the same time.
If you want to understand why your best customers hired your product (and what keeps them around), this is a good place to start.
2. The Re-Wired Group
Founded by Bob Moesta, one of the principal architects of the JTBD framework, The Re-Wired Group is one of the most rigorous places you can take a JTBD research project. They work across industries but have deep experience in tech and software.
If you want the most direct line to the source of switch interview methodology, this is it. Their engagements tend to run deeper and cost accordingly.⁴ At DemandMaven, we were trained by Bob Moesta himself and take pride in how our practice has evolved since his training.
3. Forget the Funnel
Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop run a boutique growth consultancy focused specifically on B2B SaaS. Their Customer-Led Growth™ framework is built on the same foundation of customer research: understanding why customers hire your product and using those insights to drive activation, retention, and revenue growth. They’re excellent if you’re trying to connect JTBD insights directly to messaging and go-to-market strategy.⁵
4. Strategyn
Founded by Tony Ulwick, the pioneer of Outcome-Driven Innovation, Strategyn is the place to go if you need the ODI variant of JTBD: rigorous quantitative validation of customer needs across a defined market. Their approach is more enterprise-oriented and more resource-intensive, but the output (a statistically validated map of underserved and overserved customer needs) is uniquely powerful for product strategy and market segmentation.⁶
5. Drive Research
A full-service market research firm that designs and executes JTBD research combining qualitative interviews with quantitative validation. A good option if you need both depth of insight and statistical confidence at scale, or if your team needs the scaffolding of a larger research operation.⁷
Why JTBD research pays off faster than you think
The knock on customer research is that it takes too long and costs too much relative to what you get. But this simply isn’t true.
I say to my clients all the time: “Slowness is a choice.” At DemandMaven, we deliberately choose to move fast.
A focused JTBD research project (12 switch interviews, cleanly synthesized) produces insights that inform your roadmap for 12–18 months, sharpen your positioning immediately, and give your team a shared language for talking about your best customer. Compare that to six months of building based on assumptions, only to discover that the job you thought you were solving wasn’t the one your best customers actually hired you for.
The fastest path to confident growth decisions is knowing why customers chose you in the first place. Everything else builds from there.
Ready to figure out why your customers actually hired your product? Book a discovery call to talk through your research goals.
¹ Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution, 2003; Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, “Demand-Side Sales” framework, The Re-Wired Group.
² Tony Ulwick, Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice, 2016. Available at strategyn.com.
³ The timeline of events arc is adapted from Bob Moesta’s demand-side research methodology as outlined in Demand-Side Sales 101, 2020.
⁴ The Re-Wired Group: therewiredgroup.com
⁵ Forget the Funnel: forgetthefunnel.com
⁶ Strategyn: strategyn.com
⁷ Drive Research: driveresearch.com