In our latest Arkaro Insights Podcast, we explored a deceptively simple idea that has transformed product innovation across industries: people don’t buy products, they hire them to get jobs done.
Our guest, Scott Burleson—author of The Jobs to Be Done Pyramid and Chief Product Officer at the AIM Institute—has spent two decades applying this framework. His work at John Deere produced one of the most successful tractor launches in the company’s history, not through technological wizardry, but through understanding what customers truly needed to accomplish.
The Power of a Simple Idea
Jobs to Be Done theory emerged from Clayton Christensen’s work at Harvard. The core insight is elegantly straightforward: customers don’t form relationships with products based on features or specifications. They hire products to accomplish specific goals.
As Scott notes, even brands with devoted followings like John Deere—where customers wear the logo on shirts and install branded light switches—are engaged in transactional relationships. The loyalty exists only as long as the product helps accomplish the job better than alternatives. Kodak and Blockbuster learned this lesson the hard way
From Instructions Ignored to Market Success
Scott’s John Deere story illustrates how Jobs to Be Done transforms product development. His team received clear instructions: replicate the successful 2305 tractor in the United States, add nothing, reduce costs. Management insisted the market wanted only cheaper prices.
The team took a different approach. They studied not just what the tractors did, but the jobs customers performed whilst using them. One insight proved particularly valuable: changing the mid-mower deck was physically demanding, dirty, and frustrating work.
Rather than following instructions, the team developed two models: an economy version that met the brief, and a premium version that solved numerous customer jobs. The premium model included an innovative drive-on deck system that connected and disconnected largely automatically—a technically challenging feature that required parallel engineering teams and significant investment.
Management ridiculed the approach. The premium model launched at substantially higher cost than the economy version.
Result? The premium model outsold the economy version whilst delivering substantially higher margins.
The Jobs to Be Done Pyramid: An Innovation Architecture for Humans
Scott’s latest book, The Jobs to Be Done Pyramid™, addresses a fundamental gap that has limited the framework’s effectiveness: whilst Jobs to Be Done excelled at addressing functional product challenges, it struggled with emotional needs. The missing link was identity.
His pyramid structure provides a visual innovation architecture that unifies function, emotion, and identity—solving a dilemma that has plagued companies for years: should innovation focus on the buying experience, on usability, or on what the product helps customers accomplish?
The pyramid organises customer motivations across five levels:
Foundation – Function (Levels 1 & 2):
- Product Jobs – How you use, maintain, purchase, and store the product itself. Nobody buys a tractor for the joy of maintaining it, but these jobs fundamentally affect the overall experience.
- Core Jobs – The actual reason for purchase. Mowing grass, maintaining property. At this level, you see true competition: other products, services, even robotic mowers.
Middle – Identity (Levels 3 & 4):
- Role Identity Jobs – How the purchase helps you fulfil the role you play or aspire to play
- Image Identity Jobs – How others perceive you through your choices
This identity domain represents the breakthrough. It’s not just about feeling good (emotional) or getting tasks done (functional)—it’s about who you wish to become. The artist creating beautiful landscapes. The engineer who keeps the plant running. The purchasing agent who protects profitability.
Apex – Emotion (Level 5):
- Emotional Jobs – Defined with greater precision than classical Jobs to Be Done, these represent the emotions and feelings experienced throughout the entire process.
This framework enables teams to segment customers by motivation, understand emotional resonance and loyalty drivers, and translate customer conversations into structured innovation opportunities—applicable across strategy, marketing, sales, and product design.
The B2B Emotional Blindspot
One of the most persistent myths in B2B markets is that emotional considerations don’t apply. Scott recounts working with industrial engineers evaluating redundant machinery. On the surface, this seems purely analytical: prevent plant shutdowns, ensure production continuity.
But consider the identity element. That engineer isn’t just preventing downtime. They’re the person who keeps the plant running. The person colleagues depend on. The person who protects jobs when machinery fails. These identity considerations are inseparable from the decision.
Similarly, a purchasing agent beating down suppliers on hydraulic hose prices isn’t just saving money—they’re establishing their identity as the protector of profitability.
Yet B2B websites remain stubbornly focused on specifications and features. We present boring lists when we should speak to these deeper motivations: “With our equipment, you keep the plant running. You protect livelihoods.”
The Stability Advantage
In our increasingly uncertain world, one aspect of Jobs to Be Done provides comfort: core jobs remain stable over time. People have travelled from point A to point B since biblical times. The solutions change—horses, trains, cars, planes—but the job endures.
This stability doesn’t mean markets stagnate. New product jobs emerge with new solutions (updating software didn’t exist before computers). But the fundamental jobs people hire products to accomplish remain remarkably consistent.
This stability provides a foundation for innovation in uncertain markets. Rather than chasing the latest technology trend, focus on jobs that will matter tomorrow as much as today.
Avoiding Over-Engineering
Jobs to Be Done research reveals not just what to add, but what not to overdo. Scott describes acoustic engineers at John Deere working to make tractor cabs quieter. Early gains come relatively easily and cheaply. Incremental improvements become progressively more expensive.
The question becomes: when have you satisfied the customer’s job sufficiently? Continuing past that point adds cost without adding value. The same principle applies to making products lighter or stronger.
Understanding both importance and satisfaction levels for each job prevents wasted engineering effort on improvements customers neither want nor value enough to pay for.
Where AI Fits (and Doesn't)
In October 2025, every conversation seems to circle back to artificial intelligence. Scott sees both opportunity and limitation in current applications.
AI excels at secondary research. Rather than reading dozens of technical journals or medical papers before interviewing surgeons, AI can synthesise that information rapidly. It’s excellent for generating comprehensive lists of potential customer needs—the divergent phase of research.
However, AI today cannot reliably prioritise those needs. You still require real customers and proper research methodology to understand what matters most and to whom. The synthetic users necessary for reliable prioritisation may arrive eventually, but not yet.
One nuance: expertise won’t disappear, but experts must adopt AI as part of their toolkit. The twenty-year statistics professional who masters AI will outperform the novice using the same tools.
Moving Forward
Whether you’re developing agricultural equipment, industrial machinery, or chemical processes, your customers are hiring your products to accomplish jobs. Some are functional. Some are emotional. All matter.
The question isn’t whether these deeper motivations exist in B2B markets. They demonstrably do. The question is whether you’ll acknowledge them and speak to them—or continue presenting boring lists of specifications whilst your competitors connect with what truly drives decisions.
Related Reading from Arkaro
Understanding Customer Needs Through Jobs to Be Done:
- B2B Win-Loss Analysis for Cross-Functional Growth – Explores how Jobs-to-Be-Done methodology transforms win-loss analysis from routine data collection to strategic intelligence, revealing the fundamental progress customers seek rather than just stated requirements.
- Beyond Volume and Revenue: The Power of Needs-Based Customer Segmentation in B2B – Shows how understanding distinct customer jobs (cost optimisation, innovation partnership, or supply reliability) drives more effective segmentation than volume-based approaches.
Preventing Value Proposition Failures:
- Value Proposition Mistakes: Why 80% of B2B Products Fail – Demonstrates how starting with customer Jobs to Be Done prevents the three critical failure modes: misunderstanding customer needs, insufficient differentiation, and inadequate switching value.
Building the Foundation for Innovation Success:
- Collaborative Culture: How Silos Destroy Product Launches – Examines how cross-functional collaboration enables teams to better understand the complete picture of customer jobs across technical and commercial perspectives.
Product Management Excellence:
- Boost Your Product Management Effectiveness – Discusses how product managers must tension what customers want against what can be profitably delivered—a core challenge that Jobs to Be Done thinking helps address.
This blog post draws from the Arkaro Insights Podcast conversation with Scott Burleson. To hear the full discussion, listen to the podcast. To learn more about Scott’s work and The Jobs to Be Done Pyramid™, visit thejtbdpyramid.com or connect with him on LinkedIn at W. Scott Burleson.
Ready to move beyond feature-focused innovation? At Arkaro, we help organisations in agriculture, food, and chemicals industries implement Jobs to Be Done and other innovation frameworks that deliver sustainable value.
Our collaborative ‘do it with you’ approach ensures these methodologies become embedded capabilities, not just slide decks. We work alongside your teams to understand what jobs your customers truly hire your products to accomplish—including the identity and emotional jobs your competitors may be missing.
Contact us for a conversation about how Jobs to Be Done thinking could transform your innovation approach, or connect on LinkedIn to continue the discussion.
