Jobs to be Done

Jobs to be Done frames demand around what someone is trying to accomplish. The formulation associated with Clayton Christensen is that people “hire” a product to make progress in a particular circumstance, and “fire” it when something does better.

The canonical illustration is the milkshake study Christensen described: a fast-food chain found a large share of milkshakes sold early in the morning to solo commuters. The job was not “have a tasty drink”. It was to make a long dull drive more bearable with one hand, without crumbs, lasting the whole commute. Understood that way, the competition was bananas and bagels rather than other milkshakes.

What it is good at

Cutting through demographic segmentation. Two people with nothing in common demographically can be hiring a product for the same job, and one person can hire the same product for different jobs on different days.

It also reframes competition usefully: the alternative is often a spreadsheet, a phone call, or doing nothing.

Where it is oversold

It is a lens, not a research method. “Jobs” still have to be discovered by talking to people, and a job statement invented in a workshop is a persona with different formatting.

In practice

It works well alongside personas rather than instead of them: the persona says who and in what context, the job says what progress they are trying to make.