Jobs to be done: finding the progress customers hire you for

Customers rarely buy for the reasons on your feature list. They buy because something in their life isn’t working and they want it to work better. Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a way of finding out what that something is, and who you are really competing with.

The idea is most closely tied to Clayton Christensen, who set it out with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done'”. Their central claim is simple. When we buy a product, we “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does the job badly, we fire it and look for something else.

What a job is

The Christensen Institute describes a job as the progress people are trying to make “as they strive toward a goal or aspiration within particular circumstances”. Two words carry the weight: progress and circumstances.

Progress means moving from where someone is to where they want to be. Circumstances are the situation they are in when they decide: the time of day, who they are with, what they have tried before and what stands in the way. The HBR authors argue that circumstances explain buying better than customer characteristics do. Jobs also vary in size. The article’s examples run from “pass the time” to “find a more fulfilling career”.

This changes the question you ask. Instead of “who is our customer?”, you ask “what were they trying to get done when they chose us, and what else could they have chosen?”

The milkshake story, as Christensen told it

The best-known JTBD example comes from Christensen’s own work and was reported by Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge in 2011. It is often retold with details added, so this is the version in that article.

A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. It began the usual way: it built a profile of the typical milkshake buyer and asked people who fitted it to describe their ideal milkshake. Thicker or thinner, chunkier or smoother. The chain made changes based on the answers. Sales did not improve.

One of Christensen’s fellow researchers then spent a full day in a restaurant, recording who bought milkshakes, when, and whether they drank them on the premises. He found that 40 per cent were bought first thing in the morning by commuters ordering to go. The next morning he interviewed customers leaving with milkshakes. They faced a long, boring drive and wanted something to keep one hand busy and make the commute more interesting. They were not hungry yet, but expected to be by 10am, and wanted something to tide them over until noon. They were in a hurry, in work clothes, and had at most one free hand.

Seen this way, the milkshake was competing with a bagel or a doughnut. It won because it was tidier and more filling, and sucking a thick drink through a straw kept the driver occupied. The same product was also hired for a separate job: a treat for young children that parents did not want to wait half an hour for. That job called for a thinner milkshake. The commuter job called for a thicker one that would last the drive, perhaps with chunks of fruit for interest.

As Christensen put it: “The fact that you’re 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product.”

Functional, emotional and social dimensions

The HBR article stresses that jobs are “never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions.” The Christensen Institute says every job includes functional, social and emotional forces.

• Functional: the practical task. Keep me going until lunch. Get the stock counted by Friday.
• Emotional: how the person wants to feel, or stop feeling. Less bored on the drive. Less worried about a mistake in the accounts.
• Social: how they want others to see them. A parent who treats the children. A founder whose tools look professional to investors.

The HBR article’s condominium example shows why the non-functional side matters. Developers selling flats to retirees who were downsizing struggled until, in the article’s words, they “realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives.” They added help with moving and clearing out possessions instead of more features, and sales rose.

The forces of progress: why people switch, or stay put

Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, who run the jobstobedone.org site (Spiek co-founded the Re-Wired Group), describe four forces acting on every switch:

• Push of the situation: the problem with today that makes someone want a change.
• Pull of the new solution: the appeal of life with something better.
• Anxiety of the new solution: doubt about the new option. Will it work? Is it too complicated? Will I regret it?
• Habit of the present: attachment to the current way, described by one guest on their show as “the way I’ve always done things”.

Push and pull favour switching. Anxiety and habit resist it. A customer moves when the first pair outweighs the second. Two points from their discussions are useful for small teams. Raising the pull can backfire, because “sometimes increasing the pull actually increases the anxiety”. And lowering anxiety, through guarantees, free trials or expert opinion, can move people as well as adding appeal does. Habit is the easiest to miss: they describe a customer who researched a Roomba for a year but kept using his Dyson.

Running switch interviews

A switch interview reconstructs a real purchase, step by step, from the first moment someone thought about changing. The guide on jobstobedone.org suggests the following.

• Talk to recent switchers, ideally people who changed in the last 30 to 90 days, while the details are fresh. Include people who considered switching and didn’t.
• Walk the timeline: first thought, passive looking, a triggering event, active looking, decision and purchase.
• Ask about events, not opinions. What happened next? Where were you? Who was with you? Don’t ask about “forces” directly; they surface from the story.
• Allow 45 to 90 minutes, and record only with permission.
• Write down the customer’s exact words. They often make better marketing copy than anything you would draft.

The same guide says patterns often appear within five to eight interviews for a given job. You are looking for repeated forces and timelines, not statistical proof.

Turning findings into product decisions

Interviews only matter if they change what you build, say or charge. One way to work through them:

1. Write the job as a sentence that includes the circumstance: “When [situation], I want to [progress], so I can [outcome].” Use the customer’s words.
2. List what customers fired when they hired you, and what they would fire you for. Those are your real competitors, and they may be spreadsheets, a relative who helps for free, or doing nothing.
3. Sort your roadmap by force. Some work adds pull. Some reduces anxiety, such as clear pricing, refunds or a setup call. Some makes it easier to leave the old habit, such as imports and templates.
4. Rewrite your messaging around the push. Describe the struggling moment, in the customer’s language, on your homepage and in ads.
5. Drop or delay features that no job needs, even if one loud customer asked for them.

An example (illustration only): an inventory app for small shops runs eight switch interviews and finds that most buyers switched in the week after a stock count went wrong before a big sale. The push is the embarrassment of running out. The anxiety is moving years of stock data. So the team builds a spreadsheet import and a pre-sale stock check reminder before adding any new reports, and rewrites the homepage headline to describe that week.