Chapter 3 of 8

Chapter 3: Target Customer & Jobs-to-Be-Done

Narrowing from TAM to SOM and understanding the "Jobs" customers hire products for.

Playbook Chapters
What You'll Learn By the end of this chapter, you'll know how to define exactly who your customer is (beyond age and location), understand what "job" they're trying to get done, and avoid the "everyone needs this" trap.

Step 2: Who Exactly Are You Building For?

"Everyone could use this" is the most dangerous sentence in startup history. If you're building for everyone, you're building for no one.

This step is about getting ruthlessly specific about who your customer is. Not demographics. Not "males 25-35." The real person—their situation, their struggles, their daily life.

Demographics Are Not Enough

Traditional marketing loves demographics: age, gender, income, location. That's fine for Facebook ads, but it's useless for building products.

Why? Because two people with identical demographics can have completely different needs.

Same Demographics, Different Lives

Consider two 35-year-old software developers in San Francisco making $150K:

  • Developer A: Works at a stable enterprise company, has kids, values work-life balance, hates unnecessary meetings.
  • Developer B: Just joined a pre-seed startup, single, works 70-hour weeks, obsessed with shipping fast.

Same demographics. Completely different problems. Completely different products they'd pay for.

Context Is Everything

What matters is the situation your customer is in. Give your persona a name and a context:

Vague Persona

"Marketing managers at mid-size companies."

This describes thousands of people with nothing in common.

Contextual Persona

"Marketing managers at B2B SaaS startups (10-50 employees) who just took over the content marketing function and need to prove ROI within 90 days."

Now you know their pain, their timeline, and their motivation.

What Job Are They Trying to Get Done?

Here's a mindset shift that changes everything: People don't buy products. They hire products to do a job.

A drill isn't bought for the drill. It's hired to make holes. A milkshake isn't bought for the milkshake. It's hired to make a boring commute less boring (true story—McDonald's discovered this through research).

The Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework

Instead of asking "What features should my product have?", ask "What progress is my customer trying to make in their life, and what's getting in the way?"

Job Stories Beat User Stories

You may have heard of "User Stories" from agile development: "As a [user], I want [feature], so that [benefit]." The problem? They bake the solution into the story.

User Story (Flawed)

"As a marketing manager, I want a dashboard to see content metrics."

You've already decided the solution is a dashboard. What if the real solution is a weekly email summary?

Job Story (Better)

"When I'm preparing for my monthly exec meeting, I want to quickly identify which content pieces drove signups, so I can justify my budget and avoid getting grilled."

Now you understand the context, the trigger, and the emotional stakes.

The Three Layers of Every Job

Every job your customer is trying to do has three layers. Miss any of them, and you miss what really matters:

Functional Job

The practical task they're trying to accomplish.

Example: "Transfer money to a vendor on time."

Emotional Job

How they want to feel while doing it.

Example: "Confident that I didn't make an error. Not stressed about cash flow."

Social Job

How they want to be perceived by others.

Example: "Seen as a competent, reliable finance person by my team."

What You Walk Away With

By the end of this step, you should have:

  • A Named Persona: Not "small business owners" but "Sarah, the solo freelancer who just hit $100K revenue and is drowning in admin work she used to handle easily."
  • Their Context: What situation are they in? What's changing? What's the urgency?
  • A Job Story: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]."
  • All Three Job Layers: What's the functional, emotional, and social job they're hiring your product to do?

Now that you know who you're building for and what job they need done, it's time to dig into the problem itself. How bad is it really?

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Works Cited & Recommended Reading
Lean Startup & Validation
  • 1. Features - Lean Startup Tools from Ideation to Investment. LeanPivot.ai
  • 2. Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation. Crown Business
  • 3. Maurya, A. (2012). Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. O'Reilly Media
  • 4. Blank, S. (2013). The Four Steps to the Epiphany. K&S Ranch
  • 5. An introduction to assumptions mapping. Mural
Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework
  • 6. Christensen, C.M. et al. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. Harper Business
  • 7. Ulwick, A. (2016). Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice. Idea Bite Press
  • 8. Klement, A. (2018). When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy. NYC Press
  • 9. Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs. Harvard Business Review
Problem Discovery & Validation
  • 10. Torres, T. (2021). Continuous Discovery Habits. Product Talk LLC
  • 11. Fitzpatrick, R. (2013). The Mom Test: How to talk to customers. Robfitz Ltd
  • 12. What Opportunities May Lead to Someone Becoming an Entrepreneur. MBA Disrupted
Blue Ocean & Differentiation
  • 13. Kim, W.C. & Mauborgne, R. (2015). Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition. Harvard Business Review Press
  • 14. The Four Actions Framework (ERRC Grid). Blue Ocean Strategy
  • 15. Strategy Canvas: A Visual Tool for Differentiation. Blue Ocean Strategy
Market Analysis & Signals
  • 16. How to Validate Your Startup Idea. Y Combinator
  • 17. Market Sizing for Startups: TAM, SAM, SOM. Forbes
  • 18. Maholic, J. (2019). IT Strategy: Issues and Practices. Scribd
Cognitive Biases & Decision Making
  • 19. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lean Canvas & Business Modeling
  • 20. The Lean Canvas Explained. Lean Stack
  • 21. Osterwalder, A. & Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business Model Generation. John Wiley & Sons

This playbook synthesizes research from lean startup methodology, Jobs-to-Be-Done theory, and behavioral economics. Some book links may be affiliate links.