Extracts Jobs To Be Done from qualitative research data - job stories in the "When I…, I want to…, so I can…" form, a forces-of-progress map (push, pull, anxiety, habit), and functional, emotional, and social dimensions, each backed by verbatim quotes. Use when someone says "extract the jobs from these interviews", "run a JTBD analysis on this diary study", "why do users switch to or from us", or has transcripts and wants solution-agnostic goals rather than feature requests. Do NOT use for clustering findings into themes across a study - use interview-synthesis instead; for building persona profiles from research, use user-persona; for planning the interviews themselves, use interview-guide-builder.
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name: JTBD Extractor
description: Extracts Jobs To Be Done from qualitative research data - job stories in the "When I…, I want to…, so I can…" form, a forces-of-progress map (push, pull, anxiety, habit), and functional, emotional, and social dimensions, each backed by verbatim quotes. Use when someone says "extract the jobs from these interviews", "run a JTBD analysis on this diary study", "why do users switch to or from us", or has transcripts and wants solution-agnostic goals rather than feature requests. Do NOT use for clustering findings into themes across a study - use interview-synthesis instead; for building persona profiles from research, use user-persona; for planning the interviews themselves, use interview-guide-builder.
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# JTBD Extractor
Jobs To Be Done reframes research around the progress people are trying to make, not product features or user attributes - the Intercom/Ulwick lineage, not a cargo-culted template. The costly failure this skill prevents is shipping a "jobs inventory" that is really a feature wishlist with JTBD grammar pasted on: jobs contaminated with solution language are unstable, and a roadmap built on them chases tools instead of progress.
## Inputs to collect
1. The raw data: interview transcripts, diary-study entries, support tickets, or switch-moment notes. Verbatim material is required - summaries strip the quotes that serve as evidence. If only summaries exist, proceed but downgrade all evidence strength and say so.
2. Sample size and who was interviewed. Fewer than 5 participants means the inventory is directional; label it that way.
3. The decision the jobs will inform (roadmap, positioning, onboarding redesign). This sets granularity - positioning wants the main job; roadmap wants the sub-jobs.
4. Any existing jobs inventory to reconcile against, so new jobs merge rather than duplicate.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: forces are mapped per candidate job, so candidates must be isolated first; dimensions come last because they need the accumulated quote evidence.
1. **Sweep for candidate jobs.** A job is a stable, solution-agnostic goal a person pursues in a specific situation; jobs do not change when products change. Flag moments where participants describe switching products, hiring a workaround, feeling frustrated a tool cannot do something, or repeating a task across multiple tools. Each is a candidate.
2. **Name each job verb-noun** ("reconcile monthly spend", "prove progress to my manager") - never a feature name.
3. **Map the four forces of progress per job**, each with at least one verbatim quote as evidence:
- **Push** - frustration or limitation of the current solution that motivates change.
- **Pull** - the appeal of a new or better way.