STEP 1
Product decision
State the Product choice this artifact must inform and the key unknown that matters.
Free Product Discovery tool
JTBD Statement GeneratorTurn evidence into a Job Story without inventing the missing research
Start with the Product decision and the evidence you actually have. CraftUp helps you translate that evidence into a qualitative Jobs To Be Done Job Story, keep provenance and contradictions visible, audit weak wording, and define what to validate next.
No fabricated specificity
Missing clauses, metrics, timeframes, emotions, forces, and evidence stay missing.
Evidence trace
Preserve source reference, status, evidence kind, current alternative, and contradictions.
Human final artifact
Applying a draft is explicit; your edited final statement is never silently overwritten.
Method boundary
This tool uses Job Story-style qualitative JTBD
The artifact format is Situation → Desired progress → Outcome, often written as “When…, I want to…, so I can…”. That is not the same method as Strategyn ODI Functional Job / Desired Outcome statements. The tool keeps those traditions separate instead of presenting all JTBD work as one interchangeable template.
Evidence → Job Story workspace
Autosaves in browser localStorage on this device; localStorage is not encrypted. No login. Follow your company policy before entering sensitive or regulated research.
1. Decision frame
Start with the Product decision, not the sentence
2. Job Story clauses
Translate only what the evidence supports
The actual event or condition in which the job arises.
The progress the person is trying to make, not the feature.
The meaningful end state; it can be qualitative.
Product, manual process, delegation, delay, or doing nothing.
3. Evidence trace
Make provenance and contradictions inspectable
Situation evidenceUnknown
Progress evidenceUnknown
Outcome evidenceUnknown
Alternative evidenceUnknown
4. Optional Four Forces, switch evidence only
Push, Pull, Anxiety, and Habit are qualitative lenses for switching/adoption evidence. They are not scores and they can remain unknown.
Push evidenceUnknown
Pull evidenceUnknown
Anxiety evidenceUnknown
Habit evidenceUnknown
5. Deterministic draft
Job Story suggestion
Incomplete, add Situation, Desired progress, and Outcome. CraftUp will not invent the missing clauses.
Applying is explicit. Later input changes do not overwrite your human-edited final statement.
6. Human final artifact
Edit the statement you will actually use
Artifact status: Needs follow-up
7. JTBD Evidence & Assumption Audit
Warnings are heuristics, not validation scores
Decision frame
- Product decision required. Start with the Product decision this artifact is meant to inform. A Job Story without a decision can become wording without a use.Next: State the concrete Product decision that could change because of this evidence.
- Key unknown required. The uncertainty that matters to the Product decision is not yet explicit.Next: Name the single important unknown this JTBD candidate should reduce.
- Participant / evidence population missing. The person or population represented by the evidence is not recorded.Next: Record who produced the evidence or which segment/population it represents.
- Evidence needed is not explicit. The workspace does not yet state what evidence would materially reduce the key unknown.Next: Describe the evidence you need before treating the Job Story as decision-relevant.
Evidence
- Evidence provenance incomplete. Situation, Progress, Outcome do not yet have inspectable evidence/status.Next: Return to the original note, quote, observation, or synthesis and record what actually supports the clause.
Situation
- Situation required. A Job Story needs an actual situation from your research; CraftUp will not invent one.Next: Add the real event or condition from the source evidence.
Desired progress
- Desired progress required. The progress clause is missing; CraftUp will not fill it with generic intent.Next: Add what the person was trying to accomplish, using the meaning already present in the evidence.
Outcome
- Outcome required. The end state is missing; CraftUp will not fabricate a metric or timeframe.Next: Add what became better for the person when the progress was achieved.
Current alternative
- Current alternative unknown. What the person already hires today is not recorded. That can be a product, manual process, delay, delegation, or doing nothing.Next: Check what actually happens today before assuming there is no alternative.
Method
No automated warning detected in this category. Human evidence review is still required.
Supporting dimensions: manual decision
Suggestions only point to words already present in supplied text. They do not classify emotional or social jobs as facts.
No text-supported dimension suggestion.
Product-team measurement hypothesis
Optional. This is not customer evidence and the tool does not invent targets.
8. Next validation
State the concrete Product decision that could change because of this evidence.
Share-link privacy
The share URL encodes the current workspace, including research notes, source references, alternatives, and final wording. Anyone with the link can recover those inputs.
Analytics for this tool record interaction metadata such as mode, export type, row count, and action. Situation, progress, outcome, evidence notes, source references, alternatives, and final text are not sent as event properties.
Loading saved JTBD workspace…
Decision-aware workflow
Evidence → clauses → audit → statement → validation
A JTBD sentence is useful only when the team can inspect what supports it and why it matters to a Product choice. This workspace therefore starts upstream of the sentence and ends downstream of it.
STEP 2
Evidence
Attach inspectable notes, provenance, status, and contradictions to the Situation, progress, outcome, and current alternative.
STEP 3
Clauses
Translate only supported meaning into Situation → Desired progress → Outcome. Missing input stays missing.
STEP 4
Audit
Review wording heuristics, evidence gaps, contradictions, solution leakage, compound jobs, and method boundaries.
STEP 5
Artifact
Apply the deterministic draft only when useful, then edit the human final statement without automatic overwrite.
STEP 6
Next validation
Record the smallest decision-relevant evidence gap instead of treating a polished sentence as validated truth.
Job Story Evidence Trace
Separate what happened from what you inferred
Each core clause can carry its own note, evidence kind, evidence status, source type, source reference, and contradiction. The labels are epistemic boundaries, not a score.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Observed | A concrete event, quote, behavior, or source detail you can inspect. |
| Supported pattern | A repeated pattern supported across evidence; still bounded by the sample/context. |
| Interpretation | A researcher or team inference that may explain the evidence but is not directly observed. |
| Assumption | A proposition the team is explicitly carrying without supporting evidence yet. |
| Unknown | Not enough evidence to make a responsible claim. Unknown is a valid state. |
Contradictory evidence stays attached to the clause it challenges. Do not collapse disagreement into a more confident average; ask whether segment, context, source quality, or a different mechanism explains the difference.
JTBD Evidence & Assumption Audit
Quality checks should expose uncertainty, not manufacture confidence
What the audit can flag
- Missing Situation, desired progress, outcome, decision frame, or evidence provenance.
- Vague triggers/progress/outcomes that deserve review.
- Whole-word solution leakage in desired progress or outcome.
- Outcome wording that mostly repeats the progress clause.
- Possible compound jobs, missing current alternatives, and mixed evidence.
- Four Forces filled without evidence from switching/adoption behavior.
What the audit does not prove
- That a Job Story is “validated” because no warning fired.
- That a word appearing in the text establishes an emotional or social job.
- That an outcome needs a numeric target to be legitimate customer evidence.
- That a repeated pattern is representative outside the observed sample/context.
- That a clean sentence should override contradictory evidence.
Switching dynamics
Four Forces are evidence-backed qualitative lenses, not numeric fields
Push, Pull, Anxiety, and Habit help reconstruct why someone moved toward, away from, adopted, rejected, or abandoned an alternative. They belong in the workspace only when the research supports them. An unknown force is more truthful than a plausible-sounding invention.
If your actual task is to run a JTBD switch interview and reconstruct the decision timeline, use the JTBD interview questions framework. The generator is downstream: it turns bounded evidence into an inspectable artifact.
Workshop / synthesis workflow
Review 1–30 candidates without stripping away the evidence trail
Batch mode supports CSV paste/upload, BOM-safe headers, multiline quoted cells, duplicate-header detection, malformed-quote errors, and a hard cap of thirty rows. Candidate ID, context, current alternative, evidence status, evidence notes, and source reference survive CSV, Markdown, and JSON export.
Batch mode is for comparing candidate artifacts, not for claiming that frequency makes a job important or validated. Prioritization still needs Product judgment and decision-relevant evidence.
Working rules
- Start with the Product decision and the key unknown, not with a sentence template.
- Keep the Situation tied to a real event or condition from the evidence.
- Describe desired progress before naming a feature, screen, app, or implementation.
- A qualitative outcome can be valid; do not add a metric just to make the sentence sound rigorous.
- Keep current alternatives visible because they reveal what the person already hires today.
- Treat Functional, Emotional, and Social labels as dimensions to review, not automatic classifications.
- Use Push, Pull, Anxiety, and Habit only when switching evidence supports them; unknown is a valid state.
- Keep contradictions next to the claim they challenge instead of averaging them away.
- Separate customer evidence from Product-team measurement hypotheses.
- Edit the final artifact yourself; the generated draft is a reversible wording aid, not research truth.
Common mistakes
The tool creates a complete sentence from blank or partial input.
Cause: Missing clauses are being silently filled with generic wording.
Fix: Keep the artifact incomplete and return to the evidence.
A precise metric or timeframe appears even though nobody supplied one.
Cause: The generator is fabricating specificity to make the statement look stronger.
Fix: Preserve the qualitative outcome and define Product measurement separately.
Words such as app or AI trigger warnings inside unrelated words.
Cause: The lint uses substring matching instead of token-aware matching.
Fix: Match complete terms and keep the current alternative outside solution-leakage lint.
The current workaround is flagged as solution leakage.
Cause: The lint treats alternatives as if they were the desired job.
Fix: Audit desired progress/outcome separately from the current alternative.
Four Forces are complete even though the research never covered a switch.
Cause: The framework is being treated as a mandatory fill-in exercise.
Fix: Leave unsupported forces unknown and record only evidence-backed switching dynamics.
A Job Story is presented as an ODI Desired Outcome statement.
Cause: Different JTBD traditions are being collapsed into one method.
Fix: Label this artifact as Job Story-style qualitative JTBD and route ODI work elsewhere.
Generated wording overwrites a human-edited final statement.
Cause: Draft generation and final artifact state are coupled.
Fix: Make applying a suggestion explicit and keep the final field editable.
Shared links or analytics expose research text unexpectedly.
Cause: Persistence and instrumentation boundaries are unclear.
Fix: Warn before sharing raw notes and track only interaction metadata, never the user text.
JTBD Statement Generator FAQ
What does this JTBD Statement Generator actually produce?
It produces a Job Story-style qualitative JTBD artifact using Situation, Desired progress, and Outcome. The workspace also preserves evidence provenance, current alternatives, contradictions, optional Four Forces, assumptions, and the next validation step. It does not silently turn missing research into a complete statement.
Is this the same as Strategyn ODI?
No. This tool uses the qualitative Job Story tradition commonly expressed as When…, I want to…, so I can…. ODI uses a different job and desired-outcome architecture. CraftUp labels the method explicitly so a Job Story is not presented as an ODI Functional Job or Desired Outcome statement.
Does every JTBD outcome need a number?
No. A customer outcome can be qualitative when the evidence is qualitative. Add a Product measurement hypothesis separately when it helps the team make a decision. The generator will not invent a percentage, baseline, target, deadline, or success threshold merely to make the wording look more precise.
What counts as evidence in the workspace?
Use an inspectable note, quote, observation, or synthesis and label its status: observed, supported pattern, interpretation, assumption, or unknown. You can also store a source reference and contradictory evidence. Those labels describe provenance and confidence boundaries; they are not a statistical validation score.
Why is the Product decision above the Job Story?
Research artifacts are more useful when they are tied to a decision and a key unknown. The decision frame makes it explicit why this candidate matters, who the evidence represents, and what evidence would change the choice. That keeps the exercise from becoming sentence polishing detached from Product judgment.
Do I have to fill Push, Pull, Anxiety, and Habit?
No. Four Forces are optional and should come from switching, adoption, rejection, or abandonment evidence. Leave a force unknown when the source did not support it. If you record a force as an interpretation or assumption, keep that status visible instead of upgrading it to observed evidence.
How does batch mode work?
Batch mode accepts one to thirty CSV rows. Each row can preserve the candidate ID, context, Situation, Desired progress, Outcome, current alternative, evidence status, evidence notes, and source reference. Exports keep those fields beside the generated Job Story, quality warnings, and next validation step.
Where is my JTBD research stored?
The workspace autosaves in localStorage in your browser so it can survive a refresh on that device. The page does not claim that browser storage is private or encrypted. Clear data removes the current local workspace. Follow your company policy before entering sensitive or regulated research.
What happens when I create a share link?
A share link encodes the workspace state in the URL, including research notes and other inputs. Anyone who receives the link can recover that content. The UI requires an explicit privacy acknowledgement before enabling sharing and warns when the URL is unusually large.
Does CraftUp send my JTBD text to analytics?
The JTBD interaction events are designed to contain tool and action metadata only, not the Situation, progress, outcome, evidence notes, source references, or final statement. The tool itself is deterministic and runs in the browser; no AI-generated research evidence is required for the workflow.
Next-step contract
A Job Story is a research artifact, not the end of discovery
Use the artifact to decide what evidence matters next. If you need the full research method, move to Product Discovery. If the supported job now needs problem framing or opportunity mapping, use the dedicated owners rather than stretching this generator into those jobs.
Further learning
Freshness
Last updated: 2026-09-18
- Rebuilt the generator around Product Decision → evidence → clauses → audit → artifact → next validation.
- Added clause-level provenance/status, contradictions, evidence-backed Four Forces, and human-editable final state.
- Hardened CSV import/export, share privacy, local-state migration, token-aware linting, and regression checks.