jobs-to-be-done

jobs-to-be-done is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from wdavidturner/product-skills. It costs 78 tokens per session (961 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A framework for understanding the progress people are trying to make when they choose a product. Jobs-to-be-Done, or JTBD, treats a product as something people “hire” to handle a situation or need, rather than focusing only on features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare customer interviews, improve positioning, find unmet needs, understand churn, identify competitors, prioritize the roadmap, and discover new market opportunities.
Why use it?
It helps explain why customers buy, switch, or leave, including alternatives that are not direct competitors. That context can make product decisions and messaging more relevant.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to prepare customer interviews, improve positioning, find unmet needs, understand churn, identify competitors, prioritize the roadmap, and discover new market opportunities.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wdavidturner/product-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 wdavidturner/product-skills --skill jobs-to-be-done
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wdavidturner/product-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/wdavidturner/product-skills/jobs-to-be-done/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/jobs-to-be-done)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wdavidturner/product-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/wdavidturner/product-skills/jobs-to-be-done"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wdavidturner/product-skills/jobs-to-be-done.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 961 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.
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 $0.00078 $0.00961
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00481
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00192
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00096

Measured 12d ago against content hash bc776c42f53a, 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 12d 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.

skills/jobs-to-be-done/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)

What It Is

Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework for understanding customer motivation. The core insight: people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their lives.

When someone buys a product, they're not buying features or benefits—they're hiring that product to do a job. Understanding that job unlocks everything: positioning, messaging, feature prioritization, and competitive strategy.

The key shift: Move from asking "What do customers want?" to asking "What progress are customers trying to make?"

When to Use It

Use JTBD when you need to:

  • Understand why customers buy (not just what they buy)
  • Discover your true competitive set (often not who you think)
  • Find product-market fit for a new product or feature
  • Improve positioning and messaging that resonates
  • Reduce churn by understanding why customers leave
  • Prioritize your roadmap based on real customer progress
  • Identify new market opportunities through struggling moments

When Not to Use It

  • There's no real customer choice (e.g., employer-mandated software)
  • The purchase is pure habit with no conscious decision
  • You want to validate a hypothesis you've already decided on

Patterns

Detailed examples showing how to apply JTBD correctly. Each pattern shows a common mistake and the correct approach.

Critical (get these wrong and you've wasted your time)

Pattern What It Teaches
interview-asking-why Don't ask "why did you buy" — ask "walk me through what happened"
job-statement-too-broad "Save time" is useless — needs context + motivation + outcome
missing-forces Analyze all four forces, not just Push and Pull
interviewing-prospects Only interview people who already switched
conference-room-jtbd You can't hypothesize jobs without talking to customers

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 84 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A bc776c42f53a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

jobs-to-be-done is a skill published in the GitHub repository wdavidturner/product-skills (20 stars, last pushed 7mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 961 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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