Finding Your JAM: The People United by the Job

If you're a marketer or product person of any kind, you're probably familiar with the business school acronyms TAM, SAM, and SOM. If not, here's a quick refresher: TAM is your Total Addressable Market — the total demand for your product or service. Think of it as a whole pizza. A jumbo pie that fills an entire table at a pizza party.

That TAM pizza is every single person who could possibly want or need your product or service. Obviously no one product can capture the entire TAM any more than one person can reach every piece of a table-sized pizza with their own two hands.

That's where SAM, or Serviceable Addressable Market, comes in — the parts of the pizza you can actually reach. And SOM, or Serviceable Obtainable Market, is the portion you can actually capture. That's the part you get to pick up and eat.

Here's the problem: all three of those are defined by who people are. Demographics, geographies, firmographics, market categories. None of them tell you the thing that actually matters: what those people are trying to get done.

This mistake has yet another facet in the AI gold rush. Teams start talking about “AI users,” “companies adopting AI,” or “buyers looking for automation” as if that tells them anything useful. But “wants AI” is not a market. It still doesn’t tell you what people are trying to get done, what they’re trying to escape, or what promise of progress would make them switch.

That's where JAM comes in — your Juicy Addressable Market. Your JAM isn't a demographic slice. It's the group of people who are all trying to make progress on the same Job. You find them first — real people with real behaviors and real struggles — and through studying them, you discover the Job that unites them.

Yes, that Job may very well point to AI. It may point to automation, augmentation, explanation, better defaults, a human-in-the-loop workflow, or no AI at all. You only know once you understand the progress your JAM is already trying to make.

This article shows you how to find your JAM and nail the Job by understanding the progress they're trying to make — and why that changes everything about how you find, attract, and keep customers.

Each article in this category helps you get better at the same thing: identifying the people who need progress, understanding the Job that unites them, and using that understanding to build, position, and sell something they'll actually hire. It starts here, because until you know who your JAM is and what Job they're trying to get done, everything else is guesswork.

Your market is a group of people trying to get a Job done

TAM, SAM, and SOM define markets by slicing up populations. Industry, company size, role, geography, buying power.

The JTBD lens defines markets differently: a market is a group of people trying to get the same job done. Not the same title. Not the same industry. The same progress.

A single mom who drives to work and a college senior who commutes to campus might share the same job: "make this boring drive less miserable without needing both hands." McDonald's figured this out (with a little help from JTBD guru Clayton Christensen) when they stopped asking what people wanted in a milkshake and started asking when people were buying them.

Turns out, a massive chunk of sales happened before 8 AM to people alone in their cars. The milkshake wasn't competing with ice cream. It was competing with bagels, bananas, and boredom. Same job. Completely different demographics. A TAM analysis would never have put those people in the same market.

When you define your market around the job, your targeting gets sharper and your messaging gets more specific — because you're speaking to a situation people recognize, not a demographic they happen to belong to.

"Mass market" is the wrong answer

"Our appeal is mass market" is the fastest way to waste money and build nothing that sticks.

You can't target something that's too broad to test, too vague to message, and too diffuse to validate. There are no specific behaviors to hone in on. No struggling moments to speak to. No forces to design for. You end up chasing "everyone" around the marketplace with generic copy that nobody recognizes as their situation.

Finding your JAM is about getting specific. And getting specific means understanding the progress your JAM is trying to make and the struggling moment that triggers them to start looking for a new way to make it. Not "people who need project management" or “people who want an AI assistant,” but "team leads who get blindsided in Monday standups because they can't see what's blocked until someone tells them in the meeting."

That level of specificity does three things. It makes your advertising cheaper because you're targeting a recognizable behavior, not a broad demographic. It makes your conversion rate higher because the person reading your copy thinks "that's me." And it makes your CAC go down because specificity attracts the people who are ready to act, not the people who are vaguely browsing.

Snakes on a Plane found the Job

This is a weird example but it's a perfect one.

When Snakes on a Plane was announced, New Line Cinema didn't try to appeal to everyone. They found a specific audience — action film nerds who hung out in internet chat groups — and went all in. They workshopped ideas with these fans. They tweaked the movie based on their feedback. They doubled down on the absurdity the audience loved.

As the Washington Post put it, the authentic communication between fans and producers was a relationship that marketing departments dream about.

New Line found the job: "Give me something ridiculous to be excited about with the people I geek out with online."

That's a job with all three layers. Social — the shared excitement, the being part of something. Emotional — the anticipation, the fun of something that doesn't take itself seriously. Functional — give me a movie I'll actually go see opening weekend.

They didn't find a demographic. They found a group of people united by the same job — and a struggling moment (boredom with formulaic action movies) that made them hungry for something they could rally around with their community. And they served it so specifically that the movie went viral before "going viral" was even a phrase people used.

How to find the Job your JAM is hiring for

You don't sit in a conference room and brainstorm jobs. You start with real people — a hypothesis about who your JAM might be — and then you go talk to them.

You screen for behaviors, not demographics. Does this person actually do the thing your product helps with? How often? What triggers it? What are they using now? What's broken about it? Age, role, and company size won't tell you any of that.

And when you talk to them, the conversation changes completely. Instead of asking what features they want — which produces a wish list disconnected from real behavior — you ask them to walk you through what actually happened. When did you first realize you needed something different? What were you using before? What finally pushed you to switch? What almost stopped you?

Those questions surface the four forces that shape every switching decision: frustration with the current way (push), attraction to something better (pull), comfort of familiar habits, and anxiety about change. And those forces tell you everything you need to know about how to position, message, and design for the job.

The three areas to dig into

When you interview people in your JAM, explore three things.

Problems. What are they actually struggling with? Not what features do they want — what's the job they're hiring solutions to do, and where are those solutions failing? Ask: what were you trying to accomplish? How do you do it now? What did you hope your current solution would do? What actually happened? What does a perfect outcome look like — and feel like? What worries you about not getting there?

Priorities. Not everything hurts equally. What are their top three challenges? What's the number one outcome they're after? What's the most intense frustration? Rating intensity is critical — because products that serve high-desperation jobs get more tolerance, more loyalty, and more willingness to pay than products that serve mild inconveniences.

Patterns. This is where you find the triggers and the rhythms. When do they face this problem? What triggers them to remember they have it? Where did they look to find the solutions they use now? When do they actually engage with those solutions? These patterns tell you when and where the job shows up — which tells you when and where your product needs to be.

Why finding the Job changes everything

When you know the job, everything downstream gets easier.

Your messaging gets sharper because you're speaking to a moment the buyer is living, not a category they might fit into. Your product decisions get clearer because you have a filter: does this help users make progress on the job? Your competitive positioning gets stronger because you're not comparing feature lists — you're owning a struggling moment that competitors haven't named.

And your CAC goes down while your LTV goes up — because people who hire something for a real job in a real struggling moment stay longer and pay more than people who were vaguely attracted by a broad message.

The pizza party is loud and crowded. Finding your JAM — finding the Job — is how you cut through the noise with a voice specific enough to make the right people stop and listen.