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@b68bf96
by Dean Petersdeanpeters/product-manager-skills7.1k stars
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Uncover customer jobs, pains, and gains in a structured JTBD format. Use when clarifying unmet needs, repositioning a product, or improving discovery and messaging.

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Use this Skill: https://skilld.dev/gh/deanpeters/product-manager-skills/jobs-to-be-done

This session only. Nothing lands on disk.

examplessample.md

≈605 tokens on demand. Your agent reads this file only when SKILL.md points to it.

Jobs-to-be-Done Examples

Example 1: Project Management Software (Good JTBD Analysis)

Functional Jobs:

  • Coordinate tasks across a distributed team
  • Track project progress against deadlines
  • Identify blockers before they derail the project

Social Jobs:

  • Be seen as an organized, reliable project leader
  • Demonstrate transparency to stakeholders

Emotional Jobs:

  • Feel confident that nothing is slipping through the cracks
  • Avoid the stress of last-minute surprises

Pains - Challenges:

  • Team members use different tools (Slack, email, spreadsheets), causing information silos
  • No single source of truth for project status

Pains - Costliness:

  • Manually updating status reports takes 3 hours per week
  • Meetings to sync everyone take 5+ hours per week

Pains - Common Mistakes:

  • Forgetting to follow up on tasks without clear ownership
  • Miscommunicating priorities, leading to wasted effort

Pains - Unresolved Problems:

  • Current tools don't surface blockers automatically
  • Hard to visualize dependencies between tasks

Gains - Expectations:

  • Automatically updates stakeholders on progress without manual reports
  • Suggests task owners based on workload and expertise

Gains - Savings:

  • Reduce status reporting time from 3 hours to 15 minutes
  • Cut sync meetings in half

Gains - Adoption Factors:

  • Easy to onboard (< 30 minutes to set up)
  • Integrates with Slack and Google Calendar

Gains - Life Improvement:

  • Leave work on time instead of staying late to track down updates
  • Feel proactive instead of reactive

Why this works: Jobs are specific and solution-agnostic. Pains are validated by research. Gains are measurable and prioritizable.

Example 2: Bad JTBD Analysis (Feature Wishlist)

Functional Jobs:

  • Use AI
  • Have dashboards
  • Get mobile app

Social Jobs:

  • Be seen as innovative

Emotional Jobs:

  • Feel modern

Pains:

  • Current tools are old

Gains:

  • Better UX
  • Faster performance

Why this fails:

  • "Use AI" is not a job—it's a solution (what are they trying to accomplish with AI?)
  • "Have dashboards" is a feature, not a job
  • Pains are vague ("current tools are old" = not actionable)
  • Gains are generic ("better UX" = everyone says this)

How to fix it: Interview users. Ask "What are you trying to do?" not "What features do you want?" Dig into specific tasks, obstacles, and outcomes.

Source: SKILL.md on GitHub

Third-party checks

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  • Gen Agent Trust Hub17d

    The 'jobs-to-be-done' skill is a framework for product management research and customer analysis. It consists entirely of markdown documentation and templates, with no executable code, scripts, or network operations. All external references point to the author's own documentation. No security risks were identified.

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    Score: 93/100 · 2 sections analyzed

Provenance

Signed by skilld at b68bf96. This ties the file your Agent reads to that commit on GitHub. It does not review the instructions.

Last checked against GitHub last month.

Activeupdated 2 months ago

Capability

argument-hint
[customer segment or product]
type
component
theme
discovery-research
Other metadata
intent
Systematically explore what customers are trying to accomplish (functional, social, emotional jobs), the pains they experience, and the gains they seek. Use this framework to uncover unmet needs, validate product ideas, and ensure your solution addresses real motivations—not just surface-level feature requests.
best_for
[
  "Clarifying what customers actually hire your product to do",
  "Repositioning a product around unmet needs rather than features",
  "Turning fuzzy user feedback into structured jobs, pains, and gains"
]
scenarios
[
  "Customers keep asking for features that don't fit our roadmap — what job are they hiring us for?",
  "We're repositioning and need to understand the unmet needs behind the switching behavior"
]
estimated_time
20-30 min

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