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Applying jobs-to-be-done to Zepto's 10-minute delivery
Assignment: pick a product you use daily and identify the job-to-be-done that the existing alternatives were failing at.
Product: Zepto (10-minute grocery delivery, India)
My analysis: the job is not "get groceries delivered fast." The job is "resolve the anxiety of not having something you need right now." The competitor is not BigBasket (scheduled delivery) or your local kirana (walk 10 min). The competitor is the mental load of planning ahead. Zepto's insight: if you eliminate planning, you eliminate the anxiety. The 10-minute promise is not about speed — it is about removing the need to think ahead.
Where I am unsure: is "removing planning" the real JTBD, or is it simpler — "I forgot milk and need it now"? The aspirational framing (anxiety removal) might be overthinking a mundane use case.
1 response
I ran JTBD interviews for a similar quick-commerce product. What we found: users rarely use the language of "anxiety" or "planning." They say things like "I just did not want to go downstairs" and "my wife asked me to get dahi and I did not want to pause my match." The real job for 70% of our interviewees was not anxiety removal — it was laziness optimization. They had a kirana 200 meters away. The 10-minute promise competed with walking 5 minutes, not with planning. Your analysis might be projecting a more sophisticated motivation onto what is essentially a convenience arbitrage. The emotional framing works for investor decks but does not match the actual language of users.