Are Your Journey Patterns Obsolete? Rethink Them with JTBD Abstraction

Learn to identify your customer's "Meta-Job" for breakthrough innovations that create sustainable competitive advantage

Introduction: The Unseen Limitation of Existing Journeys

In our quest for innovation, we often focus on optimizing existing processes, shaving seconds off steps, or adding features to current solutions. We meticulously map customer journeys, identifying pain points and trying to smooth them out. But what if the journey itself—the very sequence of steps customers take—is the actual limitation? What if, by focusing on the trees (the individual tasks), we miss the forest (the customer's true underlying Job-to-be-Done)?

Many businesses fall into the trap of refining a journey that shouldn't exist in its current form. The real breakthroughs, the innovations that redefine markets, often come from elevating the level of abstraction. This means understanding the higher-context job the customer is trying to accomplish, enabling us to design solutions that consolidate or even eliminate entire stages of their current journey. This isn't just about doing things better; it's about doing better things