What is Jobs to be Done in one sentence?
People do not buy products, they hire them to get a job done. The skill says it with the example of the drill: whoever buys a drill is not hiring a drill bit, they are hiring a hole in the wall. And that hole is itself a means as well, for instance to hang up a family photo. The product is the means, the job is the goal, and the progress someone wants to make is what you are looking for.
What does the AI Jobs to be Done Analyst skill cost?
Nothing. The skill is free, falls under the MIT licence, and you do not have to create an account or leave an email address. You download a 4.4 KB zip containing one folder, ai-jobs-to-be-done-analyst, and inside it a single file: SKILL.md of 1,633 words. That is the complete skill. There is no paid version and no sales email follows.
Does this skill work in Codex, Cursor or Gemini CLI?
Yes. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same file works in Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other tools that follow the standard. In Codex you unzip it into .agents/skills/ in your project, or into ~/.agents/skills/ for all your projects; Codex has supported SKILL.md directly since the open standard of December 2025. Pasting the contents of SKILL.md into your AGENTS.md still works too. The instructions themselves are plain readable text, so any assistant that accepts instruction files can handle it.
Why does the skill never use the word persona?
Because it is in the rules, with the reason attached: personas are demographic, jobs are situational. Two people with identical demographics can have completely different jobs. A persona describes who someone is, a job describes why someone does something at that moment. The skill therefore refuses to work from age, job title or company size and asks instead about the situation someone was in when they started looking.
Which parts are in an analysis?
Eight fixed sections, always in the same order: the primary job in job story format, the three job dimensions, the job map of eight steps, the four forces as a two by two matrix, five to eight outcome statements, the competition including indirect solutions, the untapped opportunities, and three test hypotheses. Those last ones are measurable and falsifiable, so you can test them in real customer conversations.
What is the difference between a job story and a user story?
A user story starts at the role: as a user I want X so that Y. A job story starts at the situation: when I am in that situation, I want this, so I can achieve that. The skill writes everything in the second form and explicitly rejects the first. The difference is not cosmetic. The role fixes who someone is, the situation fixes why they are doing something right now, and that last one is what you can influence.
Do I need customer interviews to use the skill?
You can start without them, but the skill accepts no assumptions as input. Say that your customer wants to work faster and it asks why you think that, on which observations it rests and whether you have ever done a switch interview to validate it. So it does deliver an analysis, but it marks where that rests on air. The more real conversations you supply, the less there is to guess.
Does Jobs to be Done work outside software and B2B?
Yes. The framework looks at the progress someone wants to make, and that is not tied to a sector. The skill makes that visible itself in the competition analysis: a Netflix subscription competes with a glass of wine as evening relaxation. As soon as you take the job as your starting point, who your competitor is changes, and that works in services, retail and physical products just as well as in software.
