they listen to music. Not only can they listen to music on an iPod or iPhone, but they can also acquire and manage music with the iTunes system. Integrating various jobs—acquiring, managing, and listening to music—all in a single platform provided incredible market advantage. These days, streaming music services get that job done even better, but the job is the same.
4. Making the job the unit of analysis makes innovation more predictable.
In a time when businesses are encouraged to “fail fast” and “break things,” JTBD offers a more structured way to find solutions that resonate with customers in advance. Although there is no guarantee, understanding individuals’ objectives and needs provides more targeted insight from the beginning. Product success isn’t just left to luck or experimentation.
Additionally, making factors like “empathy” the unit of analysis, as seen in Design Thinking, is problematic. When does empathy begin and end? How do you know when teams have achieved empathy? Instead, JTBD provides a concise focus: the job as an objective. Aspects like empathy, emotions, and personal characteristics of users can then be added later in a second phase when developing a particular solution.
5. JTBD isn’t limited to one discipline: it’s a way of seeing that can be applied throughout an organization.
JTBD detaches up-front understanding from implementation. It gives a consistent, systematic approach to understanding what motivates people. As a result, JTBD has broad applicability inside of an organization, beyond design and development. Various teams inside an organization can leverage JTBD:
• Sales can leverage JTBD thinking in customer discovery calls to uncover the objectives and needs that prospects are trying to accomplish.
• Marketing specialists can create more effective campaigns around JTBD by shifting language from features to needs.
• Customer success managers can use JTBD to understand why customers might cancel a subscription.
• Support agents are able to provide better service by first understanding the customer’s job to be done.
• Business development and strategy teams can use insight from JTBD to spot market opportunities, e.g., to help decide the next acquisition target.
Ultimately, JTBD can guide decisions and help craft solutions for any aspect of the business.
Benefits of JTBD
Overall, JTBD provides a human-centered way of viewing people you serve. The approach lets you connect with customers on their own terms. Use JTBD to focus your business on customer needs for improved performance and success.
JTBD is a foundational activity that enjoys longevity. Findings can be valid for years to come, helping you avoid the volatility of opinion-based research. As a result, you should find it is easier to future-proof your offering: since jobs are stable in time, they typically don’t change at a rate faster than solutions do.
More importantly, JTBD shows causality: people act and decide in ways that help them achieve their objective. This, in turn, reveals real opportunities. Your ultimate aim is to use jobs thinking to find those solutions that have a good product-market fit and increase demand.
The effect is that JTBD helps break down silos between units within an organization. The common language fosters cross-departmental collaboration and aligns different teams to consistent targets. JTBD can be part of an overall mindset shift and cultural transformation.
Finally, JTBD is compatible with modern techniques, such as Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean. For instance, take an unmet need from JTBD research and turn it into a “how might we...” statement to kick off empathy-building exercises and ideation. Or user stories in Agile could be generated and organized based on jobs. Lean experiments could be framed around hypotheses statements that are grounded in JTBD research.
Recap
A job to be done is an objective that someone is trying to achieve in a given context. It’s not about your product, solution, or brand, but what people want to accomplish. Thinking about how customers perceive value shifts your focus from inside-out to outside-in.
Precursors to JTBD go back to Theodore Levitt, who told his students, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Peter Drucker was the first to use the term “job to be done” in conjunction with what he called a “process need,” or objective that people wanted to accomplish.
Clayton Christensen is universally credited with popularizing the concept of JTBD. But divergent schools of thought have divided the field into two camps. On one side is the Switch technique, which reverse-engineers motivations from a purchase experience. On the other is ODI, a comprehensive technique for determining business opportunity through unmet needs. Contentious debates between proponents of each side cause newcomers to experience confusion and distaste.
Regardless of the point of view, common core principles hold JTBD together as a field:
• People want to get a job done, not to interact with an organization.
• Jobs are stable over time.
• People seek services that help them get more of their job done, better.
• The job predicts behavior and becomes the key unit of analysis.
• JTBD isn’t limited to one discipline; it applies across the organization.
The benefits of JTBD are many: JTBD shows causality, enjoys longevity, reflects a human-centered approach, helps break down silos and shift mindsets, and fits with modern techniques.
JTBD provides a consistent language for understanding people’s motivations to reach an objective. The approach is not a single method or technique, but rather a way of seeing. This book gathers together many of the common approaches that have developed over the last 30 years of JTBD research and practice.
TABLE 1.1 COMPARING DEFINITIONS OF A JOB TO BE DONE
| SOURCE | DEFINITION |
| Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck (New York: HarperBusiness, 2016) | “A job to be done is your customers’ struggle for progress and creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well.” |
| Bob Moesta, "Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done," interview by Des Traynor, Inside Intercom (podcast), May 12, 2016 | “A job is really the process of making progress... It’s helping them understand the struggles they have to go through to get to the progress they want... Remember, it’s not Jobs—it’s Jobs-to-Be-Done. It’s about the thing they want to do better, and that’s where innovation has to be.” |
| Anthony Ulwick, “What Is Jobs-to-be-Done?” JTBD+ODI (blog), February 28, 2017 |
“The theory is based on the notion that people buy products and services to get a ‘job’ done. A ‘job’ is a statement of what the customer is trying
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