AJTBD / CORE JOBS / SUCCESS CRITERIA
Segmentation that actually tells you what to do next
Moving beyond “small and medium businesses” to a buying situation, success criteria and the customers worth building for.
“Our customer is a small or medium business.” This helps sketch a market but says little about the next product decision. Which features come first? How much will the customer pay? What would make them start looking for a solution at all?
Two companies of the same size may buy the same service for entirely different reasons. Conversely, a small contractor and a large chain may face a similar situation that one product configuration can address.
A segment should change the team’s choices
In AJTBD segmentation people are grouped by similar Core Jobs and success criteria. A Core Job is the job the product competes to perform. The criteria define what a satisfactory result means: its speed, accuracy, cost and level of control.
Company size and industry can help when they explain differences in buying, implementation or service. But matching a questionnaire answer is not enough. A simple test: remove the segment’s name. Is it still clear how your offer for these people differs from your offer for everyone else?
Three needs behind the same “scheduling” request
Consider a hypothetical scheduling service. Research might uncover three situations.
| Situation | Required result | What matters most |
|---|---|---|
| An employee calls in sick before a location opens | Find a replacement before the shift starts | Speed of confirmation and staff availability |
| A manager prepares next month’s schedule | Cover staffing needs | Constraints, workload and fair allocation |
| Finance reviews costs across the chain | Agree on an acceptable payroll budget | Comparable data and a controllable budget |
Everyone talks about shifts. But one buys the ability to cover a gap quickly, another a workable plan, and the third a basis for a financial decision. A universal feature list can easily become an expensive compromise that beats the existing approach in none of these situations.
This is not a finished segmentation. The table contains hypotheses to check against real experience, differences within the groups and accessible demand.
Recruit people based on a situation they experienced
To study the first scenario, find people who recently replaced an absent employee rather than simply inviting “managers of companies with fewer than a hundred people”. The AJTBD interview principles focus is on specific past experience, the circumstances of a choice and the resources spent.
Ask them to reconstruct the last such day. Who noticed the absence? Who did they call first? Why did that approach fail? What did urgency make them accept? How did they know the replacement was suitable? How long did confirmation take?
Keep the participant’s words, observable facts and your interpretation separate. “It was inconvenient” is evidence of an experience. “We spent forty minutes making calls” describes an event. “The customer will pay for automatic allocation” is still the researcher’s hypothesis.
The choice needs economics and a channel
Suppose urgent replacement really is painful. Does each customer need it often enough to pay a subscription? Perhaps paying per filled shift works better. That changes revenue, the service’s responsibilities and its requirements for available workers.
Work out how to identify new customers with this situation before a sale. “Our best customers use the product a lot” cannot qualify someone who has not signed up. Multiple locations, regularly unfilled shifts and authority to hire replacements can be checked in the first conversation. Until their connection to successful use is confirmed, these remain working hypotheses too.
Compare directions using at least ranges: accessible buyers, task frequency, current spending, sales cost and the cost of delivering the promise. Qualitative interviews explain how people choose; they do not, by themselves, measure the whole market.
Turn the segment into working decisions
Choosing urgent replacement changes more than an audience profile. The website describes that scenario. Sales checks hiring authority and staff requirements. The product shortens the route to a confirmed shift. Support prepares for last-minute failures, and the economics includes the cost of that assistance.
Record what you will not do, too: for example, do not build monthly payroll optimisation yet. If it is still promised in every other sale, the company has effectively chosen two directions, however often the strategy mentions focus.
Useful research produces a situation description, qualification criteria, testable value, economics and a list of changed decisions. The team should know whom to say yes to, whom to offer an alternative and what to build first.
