Forget Journey Mapping, It's All About Jobs-to-be-Done

I Did the Comparison So You Don't Have To

Today, I’m going to upset some of you. I’m going to compare Journey Mapping to Jobs-to-be-Done across twenty-two (22) dimensions. I just found this in my notes and thought “it’s not doing anyone any good sitting in my notes.” Therefore, I decided to write a controversial headline that ties in well to my controversial content.

This is a long one, so if you’re email provider truncates it, you may need to click through to read it directly on my blog. Okay, let’s go…!

Time (qualitative)

Journey mapping is essentially a qualitative process. The end result of all the work is a relatively low fidelity visualization with bulleted insights grouped in inconsistent ways (each to their own). Jobs-to-be-Done also has a qualitative phase, but the entire point of this exercise is not to generate insights, it’s to build a logical model of a problem-space.

That space could be a functional job (for product innovation) or it can be used to build a model of a consumption job, which is essentially a journey…