Jobs to be done

Feature lists and demographic segments answer the wrong question. People do not buy a quarter-inch drill because they love drills; they buy it because they need a quarter-inch hole. Jobs to be done says: in a circumstance, a person is trying to make progress — and they "hire" a product or a workaround to do that job. Understand the job and you understand competition, messaging and which features matter.

JTBD sits on top of problems worth solving. Problems are often symptoms; the job is the progress. Strategy — positioning, differentiation — later hangs on a clear job. See product strategy.

Christensen's milkshake story is the picture: morning commuters hired a shake against bananas, bagels and nothing, not against other shakes. Afternoon parents hired a different job. Same product, different forces, different design.

Concepts in this section

Read them in order.

At work

When reviewing a feature request, ask: what job is this in service of? what do they hire today? When competitive intel arrives ("Competitor shipped AI summaries"), ask whether that helps your users' jobs or a different segment's. When drafting positioning, lead with the job and circumstance, not the adjective stack ("AI-powered next-gen platform").

Engineers can apply JTBD without a workshop. Before a spike, write the job statement in the ticket. In design review, ask which force you are changing — more pull, less anxiety, more push awareness. In postmortems of failed features, ask whether you optimized the wrong job or lost to habit and anxiety you never measured.

In product sense interviews, clarify the user's circumstance and progress before listing features; name non-obvious competitors (including "do nothing").

A usable statement for the freelancer invoice case: when a client is 14+ days late and I am deciding whether to start new work, I am trying to know payment status without digging through email, so I can protect cash flow without looking unprofessional. I currently hire a color-coded sheet plus memory. Success is a confident start/pause in under 30 seconds. A status badge and a pause-until-paid rule serve that job. A pretty PDF theme barely does. An AI writing coach is a different job.

Common mistakes

• Segmenting by age bracket or product category. Segment by job.
• Adding features to raise pull while anxiety and habit win. Import and undo are the work.
• User stories that name the widget. Keep the job visible when you cut scope.
• Competitor lists that skip spreadsheets and nothing.

Key takeaways

• Customers hire products to make progress in a circumstance — the job — not to buy feature lists.
• Jobs have functional, emotional and social dimensions.
• Switch decisions balance push and pull against anxiety and habit.
• Competition includes workarounds, humans and non-consumption — not only named rivals.

Further learning

Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan's HBR article is the canonical short introduction, with the milkshake framing.

Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done (HBR)Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles an…Harvard Business Review Lenny's NewsletterDeeply researched product, growth, and career advice for product leaders, founders, and ambitious builders. Click to read Lenny's Newsletter, a Substack publication with millions of subscribers.lennysnewsletter.com

Clayton Christensen explaining jobs to be done with the milkshake story.