Jobs to be Done says people hire a product to make progress in a situation. The framework works. The interviews that feed it fail in Indian B2B for a reason worth naming.
The problem with the standard interview
Ask an Indian B2B buyer why they bought your product and you usually get the business case they wrote for approval. Improve efficiency, reduce cost, meet compliance. That is the justification, not the job.
The actual job is often personal and political. Stop getting blamed for the monthly report being late. Have an answer when the founder asks about the number. Avoid the quarterly argument with sales. People do not put these in procurement documents and will not volunteer them to a stranger.
Questions that get past the business case
Walk me through the day you decided to look for something. Not the month, the specific day. What happened that morning?
What were you doing before this, and what specifically went wrong with it the last time?
Who else knew you were looking, and what did you tell them?
When you brought it to your manager, what did you say? And what did you not say?
That last pair is the one that works. The gap between what they said and what they left out is usually the real job.
The template
- Situation: what was happening when they started looking
- Trigger: the specific event that moved it from annoyance to action
- Stated job: what they told their organisation they were solving
- Actual job: what they were personally trying to make stop
- Alternatives considered, including doing nothing and building internally
- Anxiety: what nearly stopped them buying
- Success: how they would know six months later it worked
How many interviews
Eight to twelve of the same buyer type gets you to repetition. If you are hearing new jobs at interview twelve, you are talking to more than one segment and should split them rather than average across.
What to do with it
Rewrite your homepage headline against the actual job rather than the stated one, and watch conversion. Most Indian SaaS sites lead with the stated job because it is safer and reads more professional. It also sounds identical to every competitor, because everyone is quoting the same procurement language back.