What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean?

The short answer

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 bearable, not because it was tasty. Find the job, and you understand why people switch, what they compare you to, and what would make them fire you.

Go deeper, your way

2 hand-picked resources, 2 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it The primary-source telling of the milkshake story, the single most memorable illustration of Jobs to Be Done, straight from Christensen and HBS. The best on-ramp to JTBD.

Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing

From HBS Working Knowledge by Clayton Christensen (via Harvard Business School) ~8 min read

Customers 'hire' products to do a job in a specific situation
The milkshake was hired to make a boring commute bearable, not just for taste
Understand the job, and the right product improvements become obvious
Demographics miss the point, situation and job drive purchases

Open library.hbs.edu →

📄 Article

✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

Why we picked it The canonical HBR article that formalizes JTBD from its originators, the authoritative reference every founder citing 'jobs to be done' should have actually read.

Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'

From Harvard Business Review by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan ~20 min read

A 'job' is the progress a customer is trying to make in a circumstance
Jobs have functional, social, and emotional dimensions
Innovation succeeds when it's organized around the job, not the product category
Understanding the job reveals who and what you truly compete with

Open hbr.org →

Terms in this answer

Jobs to Be Done

People also ask

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 → Customers say they want feature X, but is that the job or just a solution they've imagined? Almost always it's a solution they've imagined, and building it verbatim is how founders ship features nobody uses. The job hides one layer beneath... Intermediate 3 resources →

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