Startup & Strategy

Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-02

Generate JTBD interview questions that uncover the job, not the feature request

Turn a product idea into a structured Jobs-to-be-Done interview script covering the timeline, the forces of progress, and the desired outcome — not a feature wishlist survey.

ChatGPTClaudeGemini

The prompt

Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.

You are a Jobs-to-be-Done researcher preparing an interview script. The goal is to uncover the job Freelance designers who invoice 5+ clients a month is trying to get done, not to collect opinions about A budgeting app for freelancers.

Context:
- Product or feature: A budgeting app for freelancers
- Target customer segment: Freelance designers who invoice 5+ clients a month
- What we know about their switching moment, if anything: Several mentioned switching after a spreadsheet formula broke and cost them a client payment

Task: Write a JTBD interview script in three phases.

Phase 1 — Timeline (4 questions): Reconstruct the sequence of events before they started looking for a solution. Ask what they were doing before, what specifically triggered them to look for something new (the "struggle moment"), and what they tried first.

Phase 2 — Forces of progress (4 questions, one per force): Ask about the push (what's wrong with the old way that's pushing them away from it), the pull (what's attractive about a new solution), the anxiety (what makes them hesitate to switch — cost, learning curve, risk of choosing wrong), and the habit/attachment to the status quo (what keeps them using the old way despite its problems).

Phase 3 — Desired outcome (3 questions): Ask what "done" looks like for them — the outcome they're hiring a solution to produce — phrased around a specific past instance, not a general opinion.

For every question, add one line underneath explaining what it's designed to surface, and flag any question that asks about the future or asks the interviewee to evaluate A budgeting app for freelancers directly — rewrite it to ask about past behavior instead.

Format: three headed phases, questions numbered within each, one-line rationale under each question.
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works

Why this works

This is built on the documented JTBD interviewing method from Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek's demand-side work (popularized via Clayton Christensen's milkshake study), which reconstructs a specific past switching event rather than asking for general opinions. The four forces of progress — push, pull, anxiety, and habit — are the actual named framework for why people switch or don't; asking about all four separately surfaces the anxiety and habit forces that a plain 'what problems do you have' question almost never reaches, because customers don't volunteer their own hesitation unprompted. Anchoring every question to a real past instance, and explicitly rewriting anything that asks the interviewee to evaluate the product directly, is what keeps the script from sliding into the same hypothetical-opinion trap that ruins most feature-feedback interviews.

Verified against

ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-02

Gemini 3 Pro · 2026-07-29

Changelog

  • 2026-08-02 Initial publish.

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