Jobs to Be Done
Jobs to Be Done: Customers don't buy products; they hire them to accomplish a job. "I hired a milkshake to make my commute less boring." Understanding the complete job — functional, emotional, and social dimensions — reveals why customers switch, stay, or churn, and predicts which innovations will win. Reframe from "what do users want?" to "what job are they trying to get done?"
What Is Jobs to Be Done?
Jobs to Be Done was developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School, building on work with colleagues Anthony Ulwick and Bob Moesta. Christensen articulated the theory most accessibly in The Innovator's Dilemma (1997) and The Innovator's Solution (2003), and the milkshake example — one of the most famous in business education — appeared in his lectures and in Competing Against Luck (2016).
The foundational insight: demographic and feature-based thinking about customers is inadequate for innovation. Knowing that your customer is a 35-year-old urban professional woman with two children doesn't tell you why she uses your product. Knowing that your product has these five features doesn't tell you which features actually matter and which she would abandon without noticing.
JTBD reframes the question. Every product is "hired" by a customer to accomplish a job — and that job has functional dimensions (what does it actually do?), emotional dimensions (how does it make the customer feel?), and social dimensions (what does using it communicate to others?). When a customer switches from your product to a competitor's, they "fired" you and "hired" someone else. Understanding why reveals what job you were failing to do well enough.
The "hire/fire" metaphor has practical implications: the competition isn't just other products in your category. The milkshake's competition was a banana, a bagel, or boredom itself — whatever else the commuter might "hire" for the morning commute job. This broadens competitive analysis and reveals growth opportunities outside the obvious category.
How It Works
Step 1: Identify the job, not the feature
— Interview customers about what they were trying to accomplish
— "What were you doing before you used this product?"
— "What problem were you trying to solve?"
Step 2: Understand the full job context
— When does the job arise? (trigger)
— What has the customer tried before? (competition)
— What made those alternatives inadequate? (job failure modes)
Step 3: Map functional, emotional, and social dimensions
— Functional: what does it actually need to accomplish?
— Emotional: how does the customer want to feel?
— Social: what does using this communicate to others?
Step 4: Identify "job to be done" statement
— "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]"
Step 5: Evaluate product against job dimensions
— Which dimensions are well-served? Poorly served?
— Where are competitors outperforming on the job?
Three Real-World Examples
The Milkshake Study
McDonald's hired Christensen's team to increase milkshake sales. Traditional research — surveying customers on flavour preferences and price — wasn't helping. The team observed who actually bought milkshakes, when, and what they did afterwards.
Finding: nearly half of milkshakes were sold before 9am to solo commuters who immediately drove away. The functional job was "give me something to do during my commute that gets me to work without being hungry." The milkshake competed not with other desserts but with bagels (messy, hard to eat while driving), bananas (eaten too fast), and coffee (not filling). The milkshake won on its job: it took 20 minutes to consume through a straw, kept you full until lunch, fit in a cupholder, and required only one hand.
The insight: make the morning commute milkshake thicker and add fruit chunks (extend the commute job duration and add functional satisfaction). Don't change flavour; change the experience of the job.
Intercom's Product Strategy
Intercom was founded using JTBD as the core product philosophy. Co-founder Des Traynor has written extensively on how JTBD shaped Intercom's product decisions: rather than competing with Zendesk on feature count for "customer support software," Intercom identified the job customers actually hired support tools to do — "talk to customers during critical moments in the product experience." This job framing led to in-app messaging (reaching customers in context), not just ticket management (responding to customers who already had a problem).
The JTBD analysis revealed that the real competition wasn't Zendesk but the silence between companies and their customers during key product moments.
Airbnb and the Travel Accommodation Job
Airbnb identified a job that hotels weren't doing well: "Help me feel like I live in this city, not like I'm visiting." The functional job (place to sleep) was adequately served by hotels. But the emotional job ("feel local, not tourist") and social job ("have a story to tell about where I stayed") were not. Airbnb's positioning — "belong anywhere" — maps directly to the emotional and social dimensions of the job that hotels, optimised for functional efficiency and standardisation, couldn't serve.
When to Use It
✅ JTBD is essential for:
- Understanding why customers switch to or from your product
- Identifying non-obvious competitive threats
- Generating innovation hypotheses grounded in real motivation
- Repositioning products that aren't growing despite feature investment
❌ Less useful for:
- Commodity markets where the job is fully standardised
- Situations requiring quick tactical decisions rather than strategic insight
- B2B products with highly standardised procurement (the "job" is often defined by policy, not user need)
| Pairs well with | Why |
|---|---|
| Design Thinking | Design Thinking's Empathise phase operationalises JTBD research |
| First Principles | JTBD reveals the fundamental job; First Principles rebuilds the solution from scratch |
| Reframing | JTBD is a reframing of the competitive landscape |
| Working Backwards | JTBD defines the end state; Working Backwards plans to it |
Common Misuses and Limitations
Identifying the wrong level of job. Jobs can be described at multiple levels of abstraction. "I need to get from A to B" is too abstract (almost any product could claim this). "I need to transport my family safely at 11pm when no taxis are available" is specific enough to drive product decisions. Finding the right level of specificity requires iteration.
Ignoring emotional and social dimensions. Most practitioners default to the functional job and stop. But for consumer products especially, emotional and social dimensions often drive switching behaviour more than functional ones. Nike's job isn't "make running comfortable" — it's "make me feel like an athlete." Ignoring this produces incomplete analysis.
Using JTBD as a replacement for data. JTBD is a qualitative framework. It generates hypotheses about why customers behave as they do; those hypotheses need to be validated with quantitative data. "We think the job is X" is the starting point of validation, not the conclusion.
Mistaking features for jobs. "Customers want faster load times" is a feature preference, not a job. The job might be "get results quickly so I don't fall behind at work." Feature preferences are evidence about jobs; they're not jobs themselves.
Related Models
| Model | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Design Thinking | Design Thinking provides the process; JTBD provides the analytical lens |
| Empathy Map | Empathy maps are a tool for capturing the full dimensions of the job |
| Reframing | JTBD is a systematic reframing of what business you're in |
| Adjacent Possible | JTBD often reveals adjacent job opportunities adjacent to the current product |
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you conduct a JTBD interview?
JTBD interviews focus on the moment of "hiring" — when the customer decided to try or buy the product. Key questions: "Walk me through the last time you used [product] — what triggered it?" "What were you trying to accomplish?" "What else did you consider or try?" "What made you choose this over those alternatives?" "Was there a moment when you almost didn't?" The goal is to reconstruct the decision story, not to get opinions about features. Chronological narrative interviews — not surveys — produce the most useful JTBD insight.
What's the relationship between JTBD and customer personas?
They're complementary but different. Personas describe who customers are (demographics, psychographics, behaviours). JTBD describes what they're trying to do. The key insight: two people with identical personas may have completely different jobs — a 45-year-old executive and a 45-year-old entrepreneur may both use the same project management tool but hire it for entirely different jobs. JTBD often reveals that demographic segmentation is less predictive of behaviour than job segmentation.
How does JTBD relate to Clayton Christensen's disruption theory?
They're deeply connected. Disruption occurs when a new entrant serves a job for a segment the incumbent ignores (usually because the job seems too small or the customer seems unprofitable). The disrupting product is "hired" by underserved customers for a job the incumbent's product does poorly. JTBD explains the mechanism of disruption: incumbents lose because they optimise for the job their current best customers hire them for, while ignoring the job that lower-margin, under-served customers are trying to accomplish — which is where the disruptor enters.
Further Reading
- Christensen, C., Hall, T., Dillon, K. & Duncan, D. (2016). Competing Against Luck — the definitive JTBD book
- Ulwick, A. (2005). What Customers Want — the Outcome-Driven Innovation version of JTBD
- Klement, A. (2016). When Coffee and Kale Compete — JTBD applied to product strategy
Apply with AI
🚀 Identify the job your product is hired to do with MindMax →
This page is part of the MindMax Mental Models Knowledge Base.