Why Most Industrial Organizations Still Don’t Use Jobs to Be Done (And What to Do About It)
April 27, 2026
Voice of Customer (VOC) is widely recognized as essential in industrial markets. Most organizations are already talking to customers, gathering feedback, and investing in market research.
That’s why one finding from our recent webcast with the PDMA, “From Pain Points to Product Success with Problem-Led Insight,” stood out.
Even among an industrial audience specifically interested in VOC, a significant portion of attendees reported limited use and or familiarity with Jobs to Be Done (JTBD):
- Routinely: 24%
- Once or twice: 5%
- Familiar: 30%
- Not familiar: 41%
That result was surprising as JTBD has been part of the innovation conversation for years. Steve Hansen, head of Phase 5’s Innovation practice, says, "If anything, the numbers have to be higher than that, because this is a fairly self-selected group of people who were already interested in VOC." And yet, even within a VOC-focused audience, it’s not consistently understood, let alone applied.
At its core, JTBD shifts the starting point of customer conversations. Instead of asking what features people want, it asks what they're trying to accomplish, how that work unfolds, and where it breaks down. Steve puts it plainly: "JTBD-based VOC gives you the why and the target. Engineering chooses the how."
Which raises an important question: If teams are already investing in VOC, why isn’t JTBD naturally part of that process? And what is “to be done” about it? Here’s what we think.
Is Jobs to Be Done Challenging to Apply? Or Just Missing from VOC?
Is jobs to be done challenging to apply in industrial markets? In many cases, it’s less about difficulty and more about how VOC is currently structured.
Most industrial VOC efforts are designed to collect input such as feedback on products, reactions to ideas, and perspectives on performance. That input is valuable, but it often leads to a familiar pattern: teams evaluate features rather than fully understanding the problems those features are meant to solve. Steve Hansen notes, "When you ask 'what do you want,' people give you polite, rationalized answers. When you ask about failures, you get stories. And those stories are where the real product requirements live."
JTBD plays a different role within VOC. It shifts the focus toward what customers are trying to accomplish, how that work unfolds, and where it breaks down.
Without that structure, customer conversations tend to capture what happened, what failed, what was fixed, and how long it took. Product and engineering teams, however, need something more defined: where to focus and what to build.
This is where the gap emerges. Traditional, feature-first VOC approaches generate input, but they don’t always create clarity. A problem-led, jobs-focused approach connects those insights directly to decision-making.
Why Problem-Led, Jobs-Focused VOC Matters More in Mature Industrial Markets
How does JTBD help in mature industrial markets? It brings visibility to how work actually gets done, especially in areas that appear optimized from a product perspective.
As products evolve and standards are met, performance often begins to feel predictable. Over time, it can create the impression that the core problem has already been solved.
In practice, the work continues as customers interact with products across installation, use, maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair. Issues still surface. Systems don’t always behave consistently. Resolving problems can take more time and effort than expected.
These realities don’t always show up clearly in traditional VOC. They are often absorbed into daily routines, which makes them easy to overlook, especially in well-established categories.
This is where we believe problem-led, jobs-focused VOC outperforms feature-first approaches.
Rather than asking customers what they want or how they feel about a concept, it focuses on where work breaks down, what slows them down, and what it takes to recover. Over time, patterns emerge, revealing where value is being created and where it is quietly being lost.
This shift is especially important in industrial markets, where innovation often starts from a technology-first perspective. Teams develop an idea and then look for where it might fit. Yes, that approach can work, but it tends to evaluate interest rather than need. Steve Hansen adds, "You have a technology and you think it might apply here or there, but as soon as you take it into a new domain, there's no way you have a fully baked product. You're inevitably over- or under-promising."
However, a jobs-based lens grounds those decisions in a real-world context, ensuring that innovation is tied to meaningful problems rather than incremental feature improvements.
What’s “To Be Done” About JTBD in Industrial VOC?
In our webcast, we showed how Watts and Phase 5 moved beyond feature-led VOC by redesigning their learning approach, using structured, bias-resistant interviews to uncover critical, “hidden in plain sight” problems in a mature category. Those insights didn’t just validate assumptions; they reshaped product development and provided a clear, defensible path forward. Steve Hansen describes what surfaced, "Nobody walked in asking for cross-flow detection as a feature. They told us about the pain of diagnosing the problem. That's a very different input."
That example reflects a broader opportunity to make VOC more effective by shifting from a feature-first mindset to a problem-led, jobs-focused approach. At Phase 5, we help industrial clients do just that.
Our two-part approach consists of:
- Understanding the full context of the job, i.e., what customers are trying to accomplish, how the process unfolds, and where challenges arise.
- Then, introducing early-stage concepts within that context to see how they align with real-world needs.
This shifts the conversation from “Would you use this?” to “Where does this actually create value?”
When insight is grounded in real-world situations, alignment happens more quickly because teams work from a shared understanding of the problem. Specifications become more relevant; decisions are easier to navigate, and progress becomes more consistent.
Because we operate adjacent to our clients’ industries, not fully inside them, we’re able to build credibility with customers while also bringing an outside perspective. That combination helps translate what customers experience into a clear, actionable direction for product and engineering teams.
And that connection between real-world experience and what organizations build is often where the most meaningful progress happens.
Turning VOC Into Actionable Insight
If your team is already investing in VOC but still asking how to turn insight into action, JTBD may be the missing piece. Not as a new framework, but as a way to make your existing approach more effective.
To continue the conversation and explore how a problem-led, jobs-focused approach can strengthen your VOC and product decision-making, contact Phase 5 today!
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Author: Stephan Sigaud
Stephan Sigaud, MBA, is Phase 5’s Chief Marketing Officer. Stephan is passionate about partnering with clients to address their challenges and opportunities around customer centricity. He has more than 25 years’ experience in Market Research and Customer Loyalty and Experience. A past Board Director of the Insights Association, he has also been volunteering with the Customer Experience Professionals Association (as past Chair of the CXPA Toronto Network) and the Canadian Marketing Association (as member of the Leaders Network and past co-Chair of the CMA CX Council).