Jobs-to-be-Done Examples — Industrial
JTBD analysis from Northfield Automation, whose retrofit control systems keep aging production lines running.
The industrial twist: the person doing the job and the person paying for it are different people with different jobs. Analyze the wrong one and you build a product that demos well and gets worked around on the floor.
Example 1: Retrofit Control Platform (Good JTBD Analysis)
The job performer: maintenance technician
Functional Jobs:
- Get a stopped line running again without making the fault worse
- Determine whether the fault is the controller, a sensor, the wiring, or the machine
- Replace the failed part without re-commissioning everything around it
- Finish the shift without a callback
Emotional Jobs:
- Feel competent rather than made to look slow by the tool
- Avoid the exposure of calling the OEM, which reads as "I couldn't fix it"
- Trust the equipment enough to sleep after a night shift
Social Jobs:
- Be the person on the crew who can fix anything
- Give the shift supervisor an honest answer to "how long?"
- Pass knowledge to the next tech the way it was passed to them
The job performer: plant operations manager
Functional Jobs:
- Commit to delivery dates the plant can actually hit
- Decide whether to fund a controls refresh or defer it another year
- Attribute downtime to a cause specific enough to act on
Emotional Jobs:
- Feel confident defending a capital request with something better than anecdotes
- Stop feeling at the mercy of vendors who all claim the same fix
Social Jobs:
- Be seen by the plant manager as someone whose numbers hold up
- Not be the person who approved the upgrade that made things worse
Pains
Technician:
- One fault light meaning seventeen things
- Diagnostics requiring software on a laptop that can't come to the panel
- Guessing wrong and losing two hours re-commissioning
- Being blamed for downtime they diagnosed correctly and fast
Operations manager:
- Downtime logged as duration and line number, with no cause
- Vendor claims that can't be verified before purchase
- Capital requests judged against anecdote
Gains
Technician:
- Knowing which part failed before touching anything
- Swapping one module instead of a controller
- Not being phoned at 2am for the same fault twice
Operations manager:
- Downtime attributable to a cause, in a report
- A refresh decision defensible with plant data
Why this analysis works
- Two performers, analyzed separately. They share a product and share almost no jobs. Merging them produces "our customer wants reliability," which guides nothing.
- The emotional jobs are the honest ones. "Avoid the exposure of calling the OEM" explains behavior that functional analysis can't — why a tech spends 40 minutes with a meter rather than 20 seconds on the phone.
- The social job predicts adoption. "Be the person who can fix anything" means a tool that makes the tech look replaceable will be resisted no matter how well it performs. Position it as amplifying expertise, not substituting for it.
- The manager's job explains the sale. Downtime attribution isn't a technician feature at all — it's what turns a floor-level improvement into a funded purchase.
Example 2: Bad JTBD Analysis (same product)
Functional Jobs:
- Reduce downtime
- Improve efficiency
- Increase productivity
Emotional Jobs:
- Feel confident in their equipment
Social Jobs:
- Be seen as a modern operation
What breaks:
- "Reduce downtime" is an outcome, not a job. Nobody wakes up hiring a product to reduce downtime — they hire it to find out which module failed so the line restarts. The job is the work being done; downtime is what improves if you do it well.
- No performer named. These could belong to the tech, the manager, the integrator, or the plant manager. Since they belong to no one specific, they generate no design constraint.
- "Feel confident in their equipment" is a greeting card. Compare to "avoid the exposure of calling the OEM," which tells you something you could build for.
- It fits any industrial product ever sold, which is the reliable signal that a JTBD analysis has said nothing.