jobs-to-be-done

jobs-to-be-done is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 117 tokens per session (1,972 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A customer-research method called Jobs to Be Done, which looks at the progress people are trying to make in a situation rather than only their age, industry, or features they request.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify real customers and their needs, investigate churn, understand product switching, and shape products or AI tools around the job users are trying to complete.
Why use it?
It helps explain why customers switch, leave, or ignore a product, so teams can focus on the underlying need instead of debating features.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to identify real customers and their needs, investigate churn, understand product switching, and shape products or AI tools around the job users are trying to complete.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill jobs-to-be-done
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for jobs-to-be-done

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for jobs-to-be-done

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/jobs-to-be-done.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,972 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00117 $0.01972
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00986
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00394
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00197

Measured 9d ago against content hash e1de7d9f40a5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

jobs-to-be-done scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

jobs-to-be-done/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

Overview

People don't buy products — they hire products to do a job (make progress in a specific circumstance, across functional, emotional, and social dimensions). Customers switch when a new hire does the job better; they churn when your product stops serving the job. Developed by Christensen, Moesta, and Taddy Hall; codified in Competing Against Luck (2016). Rooted in Levitt's 1960 insight: "People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole."

Composes with pmf-crossing-the-chasm, mvp, switching-costs, first-principles.

When to Use

  • Product is technically excellent but customers don't switch from incumbents
  • Demographic segmentation produces segments that don't behave alike
  • Churn is high but exit surveys don't predict it; roadmap debate is feature-vs-feature
  • New market entry: "who is our customer" instead of "what job"
  • Building an AI-native product or "AI wrapper": are users hiring us for output/features, or for progress (get unblocked, ship faster) — and are we losing to AI adoption, the base model's own app, or non-consumption?

Not when: commodity; regulatory-compliance purchase; org buyer with different motivations than end-user.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

  • Engine mode: concrete product/customer case → run The Process directly.
  • Coach mode: unfamiliar or no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. One-line: people hire products to do a job — the competitor set is everything the buyer considered, not just your category.
  2. Check fit: commodity / regulatory-buy / no-choice → not this lens.
  3. Elicit the real product and customer behavior they're trying to understand.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. One question at a time: what job is the customer hiring this for? what circumstance? what did they hire before?

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

  1. Close: job statement + the non-obvious competitor they're actually choosing between.

[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 124 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A e1de7d9f40a5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

jobs-to-be-done is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 1,972 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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