Jobs To Be Done

In the 1950s, a construction company hired a consultant to figure out why their workers kept quitting. The obvious answer was low pay. The real answer, after proper investigation, was that the workers felt embarrassed eating lunch in their dirty work clothes next to office workers in suits. The company built a separate canteen. Turnover dropped. Nobody asked for a separate canteen. But once you understood the job - “help me feel dignified at lunchtime” - the solution was obvious. That’s Jobs To Be Done in a nutshell 🔩

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What is JTBD?

Jobs To Be Done is a framework for understanding why customers buy products and services - not in terms of features or demographics, but in terms of the underlying progress they’re trying to make in their lives. The core idea, developed by Clayton Christensen and expanded by others including Tony Ulwick (whose book Jobs To Be Done goes deep on the practical application), is this: customers don’t buy products. They hire them to get a job done. When you buy a drill, you don’t want a drill. You want a hole. When you buy a hole, you don’t want a hole. You want a shelf on the wall. When you want a shelf on the wall, you want your house to feel like a home. The drill is just the most convenient solution available for the job right now. Understanding the job - not the product - is what leads to breakthrough innovation and better product decisions.

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The famous milkshake story

Christensen told this story often, and it’s worth repeating. A fast food chain wanted to increase milkshake sales. They did all the standard research - surveys, focus groups, taste tests. Nothing worked. Then they tried something different: they stood in the restaurant and watched. They noticed that a large portion of milkshakes were sold before 9am, to solo customers who ordered them to go, got in their car, and drove away. They asked those customers what job the milkshake was doing. The answer: commute. It was something to do with one hand during a long, boring drive. It kept them full until lunch. It lasted longer than a banana and was less messy than a bagel. The competition wasn’t other milkshakes. It was bananas, bagels, and boredom. That completely changed how the chain thought about improving the product - and none of it would have come from asking “how can we make the milkshake taste better?”

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The three types of jobs

Jobs aren’t just functional. When someone hires a product, they’re often doing it for multiple reasons at once: Functional jobs - The practical task they’re trying to accomplish. “Help me track my team’s work.” “Get me from A to B.” “Make this spreadsheet make sense.” Emotional jobs - How they want to feel, or not feel, as a result. “Make me feel in control.” “Help me not look stupid in front of my boss.” “Give me confidence that nothing is falling through the cracks.” Social jobs - How they want to be perceived by others. “Signal that I’m a serious professional.” “Show my team that I care about how we work.” “Look like someone who has their act together.” Most products focus almost entirely on functional jobs. The teams that understand emotional and social jobs often find the real reason customers stay - or leave.

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How to use JTBD in practice

In customer interviews - Instead of asking about features or satisfaction, ask about the moment of hire. “When did you first decide you needed something like this?” “What were you doing before?” “What was the last straw that made you look for a solution?” The story of the switch is usually where the job lives. In prioritisation - Before adding a feature, ask: what job does this help the customer do? If you can’t answer that clearly, it’s a red flag. A feature that doesn’t serve a job is a feature nobody needed. In positioning - JTBD reframes your competition. You’re not competing with other products in your category - you’re competing with every solution the customer might hire for the same job. Notion competes with Word, yes, but also with notebooks, email threads, and “I’ll just keep it in my head.” In onboarding - If you know the job customers hired your product for, you can design onboarding around helping them complete that job as fast as possible. The moment of first value becomes much clearer.

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The switch interview

One of the most useful JTBD techniques is the switch interview - a structured conversation with a customer who recently switched from one solution to yours (or away from yours to something else). You reconstruct the timeline: what triggered the search, what they considered, what made them decide, what the first days of use looked like. This gives you the job in full context - the push away from the old solution, the pull toward the new one, and the anxieties that almost stopped them switching. It’s some of the richest customer insight you can get. Lesson learned: the most surprising thing about JTBD, when you start using it properly, is how often the job customers are hiring your product for is different from the job you thought you were solving. That gap is where product decisions go wrong - and where the best opportunities hide 🔍