2025 has been a strong year for Catapult Insights and one big highlight has been working with Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) frameworks. We’ve had the opportunity to work across client industries, countries, and varying JTBD frameworks, and learned a lot along the way.

Just as a refresher, the JTBD framework was developed by Tony Ulwick (product manager at IBM in the 80’s) and popularized by Clayton Christensen (a published professor with the Harvard Business School) as an approach to product innovation by viewing products as the solutions to consumer needs or problems. The JTBD approach to innovation is used by some of the largest companies in the world to create a portfolio of products that help consumers address their ever-evolving needs. JTBD is also a great way for organizations to understand their customer base at a deeper level which opens up possibilities for customer targeting and messaging.

JTBD frameworks are not one size fits all

Across our clients and partners, there is no monolithic approach to applying a JTBD framework within an organization. We work with major consumer and retail brands, each with unique structures, customers, products, and tailored frameworks to suit their needs. In no way is this detrimental but it is actually the best use case for the framework. Overly rigid frameworks tend to crack and buckle under pressure.

Taking your JTBD framework above and beyond

What else can you do with your JTBD framework at your organization? Anything really, your imagination is the limit. We’ve seen organizations fully adopt the framework as a consumer lens for product development and targeting, and we’ve seen clients want to adopt it mid-project as a means to dig deeper into consumer perceptions and the benefits they seek. In the latter case, we’re always happy to pivot and shift as we adopt these findings into our reporting and recommendations. There is a wide gamut of use cases for the framework at an organization, but what if you want to take it to the next level?

By viewing products and consumer behaviors through a Jobs lens, you can better understand how consumers are going to market to solve a particular need and what products are sought out. But what if you wanted to dig even deeper into your Jobs to determine if different consumer mindsets exist within each one? That’s the exact question one of our clients had this year and we turned to segmentation as our tool to answer their question.

Segmentation is a powerful analytic technique that identifies groups based on shared characteristics. It can be applied across many different settings – from segmenting consumers to segmenting occasions, or even segmenting within Jobs.

In the JTBD framework, you typically have several jobs that consumers experience, and if you’re lucky, they’re addressing them with several of your products. But are all consumers within a Job approaching it with the same mindset? And do they hold that same mindset across all of the Jobs they experience? This is where a segmentation analysis shines – you can explore the mindsets of consumers within each Job to see if they differ (in our experience, they do). And you can compare mindsets across Jobs to understand if the same mindsets exist within every Job or if different ones emerge (in our experience, there are differences). This information is invaluable as it allows an organization to create specialized marketing plans to target specific mindsets within key Jobs for more effective and customized communications which can result in increased market share and revenue.

Wrapping up

The Catapult Insights team is incredibly well-versed in segmentation research and are experts in blending quantitative and qualitative methodologies to bring every segment to life. Even our trusted partners have strong viewpoints on the topic and have shared their thoughts with us along the way.

Catapult Insights strives to accurately represent everyday people to the brands that want to connect with them – that means we need to be well versed in a variety of methodologies and frameworks to help facilitate and establish those connections. A JTBD framework is one such tool that many of our clients use to help make sense of their product and organizational strategies. I’m hoping this blog post can help plant a seed on how you can always improve on something, even if you’ve been doing it for a long time. You aren’t alone in navigating the consumer research and marketing landscape – reach out to us, we’ve got ideas on how to help.

 Andre Barroso

DIRECTOR, INSIGHTS & INNOVATION
CATAPULT INSIGHTS