The essential JTBD tool for teams navigating the complexity of problem-framing and innovation.
Uncertain if you're solving the right problem? The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas helps teams quickly scope customer discovery and find the sweet spot between what matters to customers and what matters to your business.
A Strategic Alignment Tool for Customer-Focused Teams
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas is a tool to help you scope out your Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) landscape prior to conducting field research. It frames your field of inquiry and scopes of your innovation effort.
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas prevents teams from solving the wrong problem.
Start Applying JTBD today
The canvas serves as both a learning framework and a practical tool, allowing teams to learn JTBD by doing it rather than just reading about it.
Find Opportunities in Plain Sight
The canvas provides structured categories that eliminate conflicting interpretations and align teams around consistent customer insights, turning chaotic discussions into focused decisions.
Make Decisions Your Customers Will Thank You For
The canvas reveals hidden market opportunities by focusing on what customers are actually trying to accomplish, not internal assumptions about who they are.
A core strength of JTBD is its categories of information.
The who, what, how, why, when and where are analyzed separately. Each category then has its own specific way of formulating information to provide consistency.
The language you use is critical in JTBD. Think of JTBD as a filter to sort real-world observations into different buckets of information—the different elements in the canvas. Once you do that sorting, you can then build models and run exercises to find opportunities for innovation and improvement.
It is important to note that this tool is meant to help you scope your JTBD landscape as a team before conducting field research. The canvas doesn't replace a thorough and rigorous investigation. Instead it aligns the group around your growth target through discussion.
Add Structure to accelerate customer insights
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas eliminates this frustration by helping you determine your exact scope of inquiry and unit of analysis during the problem-framing phase—before you invest time and resources in research or solution development.
Instead of endless debates about whether or not you are solving the right problem, the canvas guides your team through a structured process that transforms conflicting opinions into focused strategic decisions.
By establishing your frame upfront, you'll avoid the costly mistake of solving nothing, ensuring your team's effort delivers meaningful customer value.
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas is meant to be a collaboration tool. Use it to facilitate conversations with your team. The point is to explore the domain and get agreement on your area of focus.
The canvas is not meant to be a data collection tool per se. With 50 or more outcome statements, dozens of emotions and many job differentiators, using a spreadsheet to collect data is best in the long run. However, the canvas may also help you structure capturing insights as your innovation effort unfolds.
Here’s how to bring the JTBD Hypothesis Canvas into your team conversations:
Invite a team to discuss the jobs you’ll be focusing on. Introduce them to the topic of JTBD in general before diving into the canvas.
Begin with the job performer — whose problems do you want to solve? List all of the actors in your area of interest and select a job performer.
Then explore the objectives that job performer has before deciding on the focus job.
Getting the right level of abstraction for the focus job is key. Add many sticky notes for each category at first and refine your language to adhere to the rules.
Once you have a job performer, focus job and some related jobs, consider possible aspirations. What does the job performer aspire to become by completing the job? Initially, these are assumptions to be validated, but noting them at this stage helps you understand the space.
Sketch out some of the key steps in the process of getting a job done. Think about the beginning, middle and end. Having a sense of the process can guide your subsequent interviews: you’ll be better able to ask job performers about the steps they take.
Remember that at this stage you're making assumptions to be validated with research. A complete job map comes from your research with job performers, which can be aided with the help of AI.
Using your existing knowledge and prior team conversations, sketch out your initial assumptions about the following elements:
Success Criteria – How does the job performer evaluate whether the job is done well?
Emotions – What feelings are present before, during, and after doing the job?
Circumstances – What contextual factors influence how easily or effectively the job can be done?
Consult AI tools to help flesh out each area. At this stage, you're forming hypotheses—not final answers—to be validated through research later.
Detailed Instructions
For step-by-step instructions on using the canvas, check out our detailed article:
JTBD Hypothesis Canvas: Your Blueprint for Guided Discovery
Key Changes and Insights to the JTBD Toolkit's most popular tool!
In this video, Jim explains how five years of JTBD learning shaped the key updates that make the canvas more effective for strategic alignment.
FAQ section
You've got questions. We've got answers.
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas is designed to help you learn how to apply Jobs to Be Done in your organizational context, regardless of your experience working with JTBD.
The downloadable PDF file contains both a blank version of the canvas and a version with instructions for each section.
A typical session takes 60-90 minutes with a cross-functional team. The collaborative discussion is as valuable as the completed canvas itself.
The canvas prepares you for the Discover phase - conducting customer interviews to validate your hypotheses. Use the assumptions you've captured in the canvas to guide your research questions and interview structure.
Guided Learning Journey
Get started with Jobs to Be Done with these resources
Workshops and Training
The JTBD Toolkit offers workshops and corporate training. Get in touch or schedule a call with Elaine using this booking link.
we've helped thousands of teams transform how they approach customer discovery and innovation.
The JTBD Hypothesis Canvas is created by The JTBD Toolkit, a leading authority on Jobs to be Done, co-founded by seasoned practitioners Jim Kalbach and Elaine Matthias, who have refined JTBD principles through years of real-world application through our courses and working with organizations across industries.
Every tool we create—including this canvas—represents the practical wisdom gained from helping corporate teams, consultants, and innovation leaders achieve better alignment, clearer focus, and more successful customer discovery initiatives, making us the trusted choice for teams ready to transform their approach to understanding what jobs customers are truly trying to get done.
For more on how to conduct a complete JTBD project, see our self-paced online learning course or look out for one of our live training cohorts.