Tool/Design and Human Factors/No. 0541
Jobs to Be Done
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is an innovation framework that studies the progress people seek in a specific situation. Associated with Clayton Christensen, Bob Moesta and Tony Ulwick, it examines practical, emotional and social needs rather than product categories or customer profiles.
Also called Jobs-to-Be-Done · JTBD
- Evidence
- Useful, modest evidence
- Read
- 7 min
- Links
- 8 connections
- Useful when
- Designing products · Persuading and explaining · Strategy and competition
01You've seen this when…
- in life
Your new commute leaves little time for grocery shopping. You subscribe to meal kits because getting dinner settled before you arrive home matters more than becoming a better cook.
- at work
A team ignores the project-management software and keeps a shared spreadsheet. Before the Monday meeting, everyone can update it without learning a new system.
- out in the world
A city adds buses, but parents still drive a short distance to school. They need to combine school drop-off with grocery shopping on the way to work. Traveling between two stops covers only part of that job.
02The idea
The moment someone changes what they do is often more revealing than their age, income, or favorite brand. They look for a way forward when an opportunity appears or when a difficulty or the failure of an old arrangement pushes them to change.
Jobs to Be Done calls that sought-after progress a job. A person uses a product, service, workaround, or habit to accomplish it in particular circumstances. A job describes progress in someone’s life. A product’s function describes what it does. A meal kit supplies ingredients; the job might be getting a decent dinner on the table without another decision after a draining day.
A job can have practical, emotional, and social parts. Someone may want to get dinner ready quickly and feel less disorganized while serving a meal their family will enjoy. These can be different requirements of a single job in that situation.
This changes the competitive picture. Takeout and batch cooking compete with the meal kit, as do having a partner handle dinner and simply eating cereal. The alternatives people consider extend across product categories.
The approach overlaps with goal-directed design. Its distinctive emphasis is on the circumstances that create demand and the alternatives people use to make progress. It is a research lens that allows for more than one explanation of a purchase.
03How to use it
- Choose a decision to explain. Focus on a concrete change: starting a subscription, replacing a tool, abandoning a service, or sticking with a workaround. A question about recent behavior is more useful than a broad question about what customers want.
- Recruit people who made that decision recently. Include people who chose you and those who chose an alternative or gave up. Interviewing only satisfied customers hides obstacles and makes your product seem inevitable.
- Reconstruct the sequence. Ask what was happening before the search began, what triggered it, which alternatives appeared, and what finally tipped the decision. Ask for details from the actual occasion. Where possible, use calendars, receipts, messages, or other traces to supplement people’s memories.
- Separate attraction from resistance. Record what made the old arrangement inadequate and the new one appealing. Then look for anxiety, established habits, switching costs, and behavioral friction that kept people from moving. Dissatisfaction is only part of the adoption decision.
- Write a situational job statement. A useful form is: When these circumstances arise, I want to make this progress, so I can achieve this result. Leave your proposed solution out. Then list what success means: time saved, uncertainty reduced, mistakes avoided, or a social requirement met.
- Test the opportunity behind the wording. Look for recurring circumstances across interviews. Build a small offer or pretotype that addresses the suspected job, and see whether people actually use it or pay. Interviews generate explanations; behavior tests whether those explanations support a viable product.
There are several schools of Jobs to Be Done. Some emphasize purchase stories and switching; others map a task and measure desired outcomes. Choose a method suited to the decision and use the worksheets that serve that purpose.
04A worked example
Imagine a meal-kit company whose customers often cancel after a month. Its team plans to add more recipes, assuming people leave because the menu gets boring. This example is illustrative, not a reported company case.
The team interviews recent subscribers and people who canceled. Several describe starting after a change in their routine: a new baby or work demands such as a longer commute or a partner working evenings. Cancellation stories repeatedly mention boxes that arrive too late and problems with the meals: recipes use several pans, and ingredients are left over when plans change.
What it looks like A food company needs more variety to keep customers interested.
What’s actually going on These customers are trying to make weeknight dinner dependable during an unsettled period. Variety helps only after the service meets that requirement. A restaurant delivery app competes on effort. Frozen meals compete on predictability. Repeating three familiar dinners competes on both. Adding recipes could create more choosing without addressing the reason people leave.
The team develops a small alternative offer: three reliably timed dinners with short preparation and limited cleanup, plus an easy way to skip a week. It keeps the price visible so the team can distinguish enthusiasm for convenience from willingness to pay.
What made it work The research changed the design question from expanding the menu to reducing dinner uncertainty. It also produced a testable hypothesis. The next step is a pilot that tracks use and shows whether customers buy again or cancel. A presentation declaring that the team has discovered the customer’s true job would be premature.
05When to reach for it
06When it misleads
- The job becomes too broad. Helping people feel confident could describe thousands of products. Specify the occasion, the difficulty, and the result that would count as progress.
- You merely rename a feature. A job statement about wanting a dashboard already assumes the answer. Ask what someone needs to accomplish without naming your product.
- An interview becomes a causal verdict. People forget details and simplify or rationalize purchases. Concrete timelines offer a partial remedy. Compare accounts with observable behavior and test competing explanations.
- One vivid story becomes the market. A memorable interview can suggest an opportunity while leaving its prevalence and value uncertain. Check prevalence, willingness to pay, and the cost of serving it.
- Understanding demand replaces testing usability. A person’s reasons for adopting a tool and their ability to operate it are separate questions. You still need usability testing and a build-measure-learn cycle.
- The framework is treated as universal. Some purchases are habitual, impulsive, or constrained by whoever controls the budget. Match the account to the evidence, including choices that resist a coherent progress story.
07Roots
At Harvard Business School, Clayton Christensen’s innovation work confronted an awkward problem: companies could listen carefully to customers and still misunderstand what would make them choose something new. The choice called for an explanation that went beyond descriptions of the buyer and product. His broader work on disruptive innovation made overlooked uses and alternatives especially important.
One consulting story associated with this work became famous: commuters buying thick milkshakes in the morning. As reported by Christensen and collaborators, the drink helped occupy a drive and keep hunger away. Seen through that situation, its competitors included other portable breakfasts, not merely other milkshakes. The story is a useful illustration. Assessing whether the framework improves innovation results requires controlled evidence beyond this account.
Bob Moesta helped develop the interview-centered approach, drawing on product-development work to reconstruct how people move from an old arrangement to a new one. Meanwhile, Tony Ulwick developed a related method through his consulting practice, Strategyn. He focused on the job as a process and on measurable outcomes customers wanted to improve, taking customer research beyond requests for features. That approach became Outcome-Driven Innovation.
These strands developed during the 1990s and 2000s and reached wider audiences through articles, books, and consulting. They share a starting point—understand what people are trying to accomplish—but differ in their definitions and research procedures. Jobs to Be Done is better understood as a family of related approaches than as one standardized technique.
08How solid is this?
An influential discovery framework supported mainly by qualitative case studies and commercial practice. Evidence that it reliably outperforms other research approaches is limited; interview patterns still need behavioral and market tests.
09Connections
- Often confused withGoal-Directed Design
- Part ofDesign Thinking
- See alsoPretotyping, Usability Testing, Behavioral Friction, Switching Costs, Build-Measure-Learn, Disruptive Innovation
10Origin and sources
Developed through related innovation approaches associated with Clayton Christensen, Bob Moesta, and Tony Ulwick during the 1990s–2000s. Christensen and Moesta emphasized progress and switching; Ulwick developed Outcome-Driven Innovation.
- [1]Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. HarperBusiness.
- [2]Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”. Harvard Business Review, 94(9), 54–62.
- [3]Ulwick, A. W. (2002). Turn Customer Input into Innovation. Harvard Business Review, 80(1), 91–97.
Suggest an edit· Updated 2026-10-02