By George Spedding (Senior Consultant)
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework has earned its place in the toolkit of product teams across financial services and payments. It’s a practical way to get beyond surface needs and really understand what your customers are trying to achieve and where you can help.
But a lot of teams aren’t getting the full value from it. They’ve done the workshops, pinned the post-its, and created the job statements. But somehow it still doesn’t quite lead to better decisions or sharper strategy. That’s usually not because the framework’s broken, it’s because the inputs are weak.
To get the most from JTBD you need more than assumptions; you need strong, up-to-date insight from the people you're building for and the market you’re operating in.
The problem we see time and time again is that teams are using JTBD in name, but not in practice.
They build their understanding of customer jobs around internal hunches, or research that’s out of date, too shallow, or based on the wrong audience segment. They might speak to a few customers, but it’s rarely enough to reveal the complexity of the job or the friction around it. And instead of digging into the context (what’s triggering the job, what’s making it hard, how success is really judged) they jump too quickly into design or feature decisions.
As a result, they end up with broad, generic job statements that could apply to almost anyone, so when it comes to roadmap prioritisation or go-to-market planning, those statements don’t actually help.
We’ve also seen teams try to “do JTBD” once, treat the output as a static model, and then move on. But customer needs evolve, and so your insight needs to be regularly refreshed and re-analysed.
In short, without fresh, deep, reliable insight, the framework can become a box-ticking exercise. And in a market as fast-moving and competitive as financial services, that’s just not good enough.
Most customers don’t tell you about their true needs in the first five minutes of a conversation. What they say they want and what they actually need can be miles apart, so it’s your job to dig beneath the surface.
That means talking to customers in a way that reveals what’s going on behind the scenes emotionally, practically, and contextually. Qualitative methods are essential here, not just for hearing what people say but for understanding how they say it, and what’s driving their thinking. Layer in quantitative data, and you can start to validate patterns, size opportunities, and identify distinct segments with shared needs.
Finally, behavioural insight brings it all together, helping you see where intent and action don’t match up, and why.
🔍 Example: One client assumed young professionals wanted tools to help them “save more.” But the real job was deeper: “Give me confidence I can deal with a surprise cost without panic.” That insight changed everything, shifting the solution from generic savings features to proactive emergency buffers and stress-reducing design.
Jobs don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by what’s happening around us, such as changes in tech, shifts in culture, economic pressures, and regulation.
Understanding the wider context helps you see not just what customers need today, but what they’ll need tomorrow. It gives you a sense of urgency (what people are struggling with now) and helps you spot emerging jobs, such as managing multiple income sources or monetising side hustles, before they become mainstream.
🔍 Example: The rise of embedded finance has reshaped what SMBs want from their financial tools. Where they once just needed simple invoicing, they’re now looking for ways to offer financing options to customers without taking on the burden of becoming a bank. That job – “Help me offer payment plans without building banking infrastructure” – didn’t exist a few years ago, but now it’s driving real innovation.
Competitor analysis through a JTBD lens helps you move beyond feature comparison and start asking a more useful question, “what jobs are others trying to solve, and how well are they doing it?”
When you look at competitors this way, you can identify where customers are under-served or over-served, spot the moments that cause them to switch, and find real points of differentiation.
🔍 Example: Spend categorisation is now a given in most banking apps. But what’s missing is tailored advice that changes how people spend. The job isn’t just “show me where my money’s going.” It’s “help me change my habits without stress or judgement.” That’s where you can stand out.
When you pull together customer insight, market context, and competitor understanding, and plug it into a JTBD framework, you get something powerful: a product strategy that’s grounded in the real world.
It gives you clarity on what to build and why. It helps you prioritise features based on actual customer outcomes, not internal politics or gut feel. It sharpens your messaging because you're speaking directly to the job the customer is trying to do in their language, not yours. And it saves you time and money by steering you away from features or propositions that no one’s asking for.
The JTBD framework gives you structure. But structure alone won’t help you build products that people truly value.
When you layer in deep, relevant insight about your customers, your market, and your competitors you turn JTBD from a strategic framework into a practical tool for growth. It becomes something that guides decisions, sharpens propositions, and makes go-to-market efforts more effective.
At KAE, we help provide financial services and payments companies with the customer, market and competitor insights that makes JTBD really work - not just as a framework, but as a driver of growth.
When we work with clients, we start by understanding where they are: are they refining an existing product, entering a new vertical, or expanding into new customer segments? Then we build the right insight base to support those goals.
That might mean building JTBD models informed by fresh qualitative research. Or segmenting the market to understand who’s struggling most with what job and why. Or mapping out the landscape to see where opportunities are emerging, and where competitors are falling short.
Often, it’s a combination of all of the above and from that you’ll get a clearer path forward, based on what your customers really need.
If you would like to talk about how we can help you, just get in touch.