What are the most common ways founders get JTBD wrong in practice?
The short answer
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, your way
2 hand-picked resources, 2 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
▶️ Video
✓ Link checkedFreeBeginner
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.
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.
