Customers & Research

What are the most common ways founders get JTBD wrong in practice?

A starting point

The big three: treating a demographic as a job ("millennials want convenience" is not a job), writing the job so broadly it fits any product, and mistaking the customer's stated preference for their actual struggle. A good job is specific enough to rule things out and rooted in a real moment of trying to make progress. As a starting point, if your job statement could describe ten unrelated products, it's too vague to be useful.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

2 resources 2 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the canonical newcomer walkthrough: Christensen shows a team improving a milkshake on every obvious dimension and moving nothing, because they had the job wrong. It makes the good-versus-bad framing concrete in a few minutes, which is exactly the trap founders fall into when they optimize a feature instead of the job. Start here if the concept still feels abstract.

Clay Christensen: The Jobs to be Done Theory (the milkshake example)

On YouTube by Clayton Christensen (HubSpot Marketing) ~5 min

Clay Christensen: The Jobs to be Done Theory (the milkshake example)
  • Improving a product on the wrong dimensions is what a bad job statement looks like in practice.
  • The same product can be hired for very different jobs (the morning commute versus the afternoon treat), so the situation defines the job.
  • Watch what people hire and fire, not just what they say they want, to name the job correctly.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

Why we picked it This is the canonical piece that put jobs to be done on the map, written by the people who coined it. It uses the famous milkshake story to show that customers do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific situation, which is the exact lens this question is about. Read it as the clearest short starting point before going deeper into JTBD.

Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done

From Harvard Business Review by Clayton Christensen et al. ~20 min read

  • Customers hire a product to make progress in a specific circumstance, so the job, not the customer profile, is the unit of analysis.
  • The same product can be hired for very different jobs, which changes how you build and market it.
  • You find the job by studying the struggle and the context, not by asking people to rank features.
Open hbr.org →

People also ask

What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean? People don't buy products, they 'hire' them to make progress in a specific situation, the famous milkshake was hired to make a boring commute beara... Beginner 2 resources → How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs? Personas describe who; JTBD describes the progress they're trying to make and the struggle that pushes them to switch. Features are your answer; th... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for? Interview people who recently switched to or bought something in your space and reconstruct the timeline: what triggered the search, what they used... Intermediate 3 resources → Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done? Anything the customer currently 'hires' to get the same job done, including a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a competitor, or doing nothing at all.... Intermediate 3 resources → How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions? Write the job as a struggling-moment statement ('when I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___') and use it as the filter for what to build and how to pi... Advanced 2 resources → How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the job I've found is real? There's no magic number, but the honest signal is repetition: when your last three interviews stop surprising you and start confirming the same str... Intermediate 3 resources →