Book · ~230 pages

When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy

Alan Klement · jtbd.info / alanklement.com Free Intermediate

The most practitioner-friendly deep dive into JTBD, with interviews and case studies on applying it to real products. Free to read and written by a leading JTBD practitioner.

  • A job is the struggle to turn a current situation into a preferred one
  • Seemingly unrelated products (coffee vs kale) compete for the same job
  • Study switching moments, the push and pull that make people change
  • Attach value to what the product does for the customer, not to features
Open on alanklement.com ↗

It answers 4 questions

  1. How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs?
  2. How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for?
  3. Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done?
  4. How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions?

Read with it

  1. The primary-source telling of the milkshake story, the single most memorable illustration of Jobs to Be Done, straight from... HBS Working Knowledge Article · ~8 min read Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing Clayton Christensen (via Harvard Business School)
  2. 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... Harvard Business Review Article · ~20 min read Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done Clayton Christensen et al.
  3. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  4. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
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