Jobs to be Done

Origin

The concept was elaborated by Clayton Christensen and co-authors (Christensen/Hall/Dillon/Duncan, “Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'”, Harvard Business Review, 2016); in parallel, Anthony W. Ulwick developed a quantitative variant with Outcome-Driven Innovation (What Customers Want, McGraw-Hill, 2005). The method became vivid through Christensen’s milkshake example: morning buyers “hired” the milkshake for their long commute — drinkable with one hand, long-lasting, filling. The competition was not a better shake but the bagel and the banana.

Typical use

The jobs perspective serves product development, segmentation and market definition. Segments are formed around jobs rather than demographics — the same person hires different solutions in the morning and in the evening. For strategy work, the main value lies in remeasuring the competition: a competitor is anything that gets the same job done, including makeshift solutions and the decision not to do the job at all.

Procedure

1. Collect job situations

   The foundation is interviews about actual purchase and switching decisions: what was the trigger, which solution was used before, what tipped the scales? The questions target the situation, not opinions about product features.

2. Formulate the job

   The job is described solution-free and with context: the progress sought plus the circumstances. The functional, emotional and social dimensions are made explicit — only they explain why functionally equivalent offerings are chosen differently.

3. Determine success criteria and obstacles

   How does the customer judge whether the job is done well — and what keeps them from better solutions: habit, switching costs, anxiety about the new? This balance of forces decides adoption.

4. Test offerings against the job

   Your own offering and the actually existing competition — including makeshift solutions and non-consumption — are measured against the job. The gaps yield product decisions and positioning.

Limits and typical mistakes

The method’s greatest weakness is the arbitrariness of job formulation: framed too abstractly (“people want to be happy”) it yields no design guidance; framed too close to the product (“own a faster drill”) it merely reproduces the existing offering. Also widespread is retro-fitting: an already-decided product is retroactively assigned a fitting job. Without quantification — for instance along Ulwick’s approach of rating importance and satisfaction per success criterion — it remains open which of the identified jobs deserves priority. And finally, the jobs perspective does not replace a business case: that a job exists does not mean customers will pay to have it solved.

Relation to the Innovator’s Dilemma