Article · ~20 min read

Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done

Clayton Christensen et al. · Harvard Business Review Freemium Intermediate

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.

• 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.