Uncover Customer Progress & Motivations

This skill acts as a behavioral economist and consumer motivation researcher that uncovers the functional, emotional, and social jobs a customer is hiring a product or service to do, rather than stopping at a feature list. Before analyzing, it gathers the target human (using a psychographic profile when available), the objective progress that must happen, the intended JTBD-map output, and the category, budget, trust, and ethical constraints - asking for more detail if the input doesn't describe a real user context. Its psychological framework, Progress Job Decomposition, holds that people switch products when a current solution blocks progress, increases emotional friction, or fails the social story they need to tell themselves, drawing on the Christensen JTBD tradition alongside behavior-change research (Volpp & Loewenstein 2020; Sheeran et al. 2020). Execution runs five steps: define the before-state and after-state of the progress the customer wants in plain language; separate the functional, emotional, and social job layers and keep them distinct, since consumer behavior carries utilitarian, symbolic, and relational meanings (Bagozzi et al. 2021); name the hiring trigger, the specific pain, frustration, opportunity, or identity threat that sends the customer looking for help (Gidlof et al. 2017; Houdek 2016); list competing alternatives including direct competitors, manual workarounds, status quo behavior, and adjacent substitutes, since people evaluate solutions against their whole available progress set (Houdek 2016; Nagy et al. 2022); and specify success criteria in the customer's own terms, including emotional relief and social reinforcement, since progress definitions matching autonomy and competence raise adoption and persistence (Sheeran et al. 2020; Gillison et al. 2019). A decision matrix then tunes emphasis by job type - functional jobs stress speed, reliability, accuracy, and cost; emotional jobs stress relief, confidence, calm, or excitement; social jobs stress signaling, belonging, legitimacy, or status - by trigger strength, where acute pain calls for immediate-relief messaging, aspiration calls for progress and identity framing, and habit friction calls for ease and reduced-effort framing, and by the alternative being displaced, where manual-work comparisons emphasize time and error savings, competitor comparisons emphasize unique progress or trust, and status-quo comparisons emphasize the cost of inaction. It explicitly guards against three failure modes - writing a feature list and calling it a JTBD, collapsing emotional and social jobs into one vague statement, and ignoring the status quo and workarounds a customer already has - and against inventing hidden motives with no evidence, keeping the line between persuasion and manipulation intact.

Use it to understand the real progress a customer is trying to make, or to anchor positioning and product messaging in functional, emotional, and social jobs rather than a feature list. It should not be used on input that doesn't describe a real user context without first asking for more detail, and it must not fabricate a customer pain point that has no evidence just to manufacture demand.

Input is a described user context - target human, objective, and constraints - ideally following a completed @customer-psychographic-profiler pass. Output is a JTBD map covering the progress state, the three separated job layers, the hiring trigger, competing alternatives, and success criteria, checked against five questions before finalizing: is progress defined in the customer's language, are the three job layers separated, are real alternatives and triggers included, does the map explain why the customer would switch now, and is the result grounded in behavior rather than a feature inventory. That output is designed to feed downstream skills: @awareness-stage-mapper, @copywriting-psychologist, @ux-persuasion-engineer, @onboarding-psychologist, and @pitch-psychologist.

Product marketers, positioning strategists, and UX researchers who need a customer's real switching motivation, not just their feature requests, to brief downstream copywriting, onboarding, or pitch work.