Definition
Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a theory of customer behavior and innovation holding that customers do not buy products or services for their own sake; instead, they “hire” them to make progress in a particular circumstance — to get a “job” done. A job is the task, goal, or objective a customer is trying to accomplish in a given situation. When a product helps customers accomplish that job better and/or more affordably than the alternatives, it wins in the market.
The framework’s central reframing is often summarized by a quotation attributed to Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The hole — not the drill — is the job.
JTBD has two principal lineages:
- Tony Ulwick is credited with formally creating the theory in 1990 by applying Six Sigma and process thinking to innovation. Ulwick conceptualized JTBD in 1990 by applying Six Sigma thinking to the innovation process. His first major success using this methodology came in 1992 when he helped Cordis Corporation reinvent its line of angioplasty balloon products. In 1999, Ulwick officially named his innovation process Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), and he introduced ODI to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Ulwick founded the firm Strategyn and authored What Customers Want (2005) and Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice (2016). University of Sydney
- Clayton Christensen popularized the concept and its application to marketing and innovation. Christensen first articulated this concept in a 2005 paper titled “The Cause and the Cure of Marketing Malpractice,” writing that when people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them. He developed it further in The Innovator’s Solution (2003, with Michael Raynor) and Competing Against Luck (2016, with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan). The famous milkshake case study — in which a fast-food chain discovered customers “hired” morning milkshakes to make a boring commute more interesting and stave off hunger — is the most cited illustration of the theory and is closely associated with Christensen and practitioner Bob Moesta. Parametricpro
These lineages produced two schools of practice: the job-as-process / outcome-driven approach (Ulwick), focused on breaking the job into measurable steps and outcomes; and the job-as-progress / forces approach (Christensen and Moesta), focused on the circumstances and emotional forces that cause customers to switch.
How It Relates to Marketing
JTBD reframes core marketing decisions around customer progress rather than product features or demographics. Common applications include:
- Market definition — defining a market as a group of customers plus the functional job they are trying to get done, rather than by product category or demographic segment.
- Segmentation — segmenting by job and desired outcomes rather than by age, income, or firmographics.
- Positioning and messaging — articulating value in terms of the progress the customer makes (“get this job done better”), not feature lists.
- Competitive analysis — identifying the true competitive set, which often includes non-obvious alternatives (in the milkshake case, bananas, bagels, and boredom — not other milkshakes).
- Demand generation — targeting the circumstance in which the job arises rather than a persona in the abstract.
- Product marketing and roadmap input — prioritizing features that advance the customer’s job and removing those that do not.
- Switch and churn analysis — using the “Forces of Progress” to understand what pushes customers toward and away from switching.
How to Apply Jobs-to-be-Done
JTBD is a qualitative theory and methodology rather than a numerical calculation. A general process (combining both schools):
- Identify the job executor and core functional job. Determine who is trying to make progress and the fundamental task they are trying to accomplish, stated independent of any solution.
- Map the job’s dimensions. Capture the functional (the practical task), emotional (how the customer wants to feel), and social (how they want to be perceived) dimensions of the job.
- Break the job into steps (Ulwick/ODI). Decompose the job into a process of discrete steps and define the desired outcomes customers use to measure success at each step.
- Understand the forces of progress (Christensen/Moesta). Identify the four forces acting on switching: the push of the current situation, the pull of a new solution, the anxiety of the new, and the habit of the present.
- Identify underserved and overserved outcomes. Find jobs and outcomes that are important but poorly served (innovation opportunities) and those that are over-served (cost-reduction opportunities).
- Define the competitive set by job. Identify everything customers currently “hire” to get the job done, including non-obvious substitutes.
- Innovate and position around the job. Design and message products to help customers get the job done better, faster, or more cheaply, and measure success against the desired outcomes.
Three Dimensions of a Job
| Dimension | Question It Answers | Example (Milkshake / Morning Commute) |
|---|---|---|
| Functional | What practical task is being accomplished? | Stay full and occupied during a long, boring drive |
| Emotional | How does the customer want to feel? | Less bored; a small treat to start the day |
| Social | How does the customer want to be perceived? | (Low salience in this case) |
The Four Forces of Progress (Christensen/Moesta)
| Force | Effect |
|---|---|
| Push of the situation | Dissatisfaction with the current way of getting the job done |
| Pull of the new solution | Attraction of a better alternative |
| Anxiety of the new | Uncertainty and risk of switching |
| Habit of the present | Comfort and inertia of the existing solution |
How to Utilize JTBD
Common use cases include:
- Product innovation and development — uncovering unmet needs and prioritizing features against customer jobs and outcomes.
- Market and opportunity identification — finding underserved jobs that represent growth opportunities.
- Repositioning existing products — reframing value around progress to escape feature-based commoditization.
- Customer research — structuring interviews around the customer’s struggle, timeline, and switching moments.
- Pricing and packaging — aligning offers to the value of getting the job done.
- Reducing innovation risk — Christensen argued that jobs are stable while products are not, making jobs a more durable basis for innovation strategy.
- Cross-industry competitive analysis — identifying competitors that share the customer’s job even if they are in different product categories.
Comparison to Similar Frameworks
| Framework | Focus | Origin | Primary Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jobs-to-be-Done | The progress/job customers hire products to accomplish | Ulwick (1990); popularized by Christensen | Customer-centric innovation and market definition |
| Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) | Measurable desired outcomes within a job | Tony Ulwick / Strategyn | Rigorous, metrics-based JTBD execution |
| Design Thinking | Empathy-led problem solving and ideation | IDEO / Stanford d.school | Human-centered design process |
| Value Proposition Canvas | Fit between customer jobs/pains/gains and offering | Osterwalder | Designing value propositions |
| Customer Journey Mapping | End-to-end customer experience over time | Multiple origins | Experience design and CX improvement |
| Disruptive Innovation Theory | New entrants displacing incumbents | Christensen (1995) | Anticipating market disruption |
| Personas | Archetypal user profiles | Cooper (1998) | User-centered design and marketing |
JTBD is frequently contrasted with personas: personas describe who the customer is (often demographic), while JTBD focuses on what the customer is trying to accomplish. The Value Proposition Canvas explicitly incorporates a “customer jobs” component drawn from JTBD thinking.
Best Practices
- State the job independent of any solution. A well-formed job is solution-agnostic (“monitor my health day to day”) rather than product-specific (“use a fitness tracker”). Solution-bound jobs limit innovation.
- Capture all three dimensions. Functional jobs are easiest to identify, but emotional and social dimensions frequently explain switching behavior and should not be ignored.
- Define competition by job, not category. The real competitive set includes anything the customer hires for the same job — often including non-consumption and non-obvious substitutes.
- Use the forces of progress to understand switching. Analyzing push, pull, anxiety, and habit reveals why customers do or do not adopt — not just what they say they want.
- Distinguish stated preferences from the underlying job. The milkshake case demonstrates that asking customers what they want (more flavors, thicker shakes) often misses the actual job.
- Anchor metrics to desired outcomes (ODI). For rigorous execution, attach measurable success criteria to each step of the job so progress can be quantified.
- Recognize jobs are stable, products are not. Anchoring strategy in durable jobs reduces the risk of building solutions that become obsolete.
- Be aware of the two schools. Teams should be explicit about whether they are using the job-as-progress (Christensen/Moesta) or job-as-process/outcome-driven (Ulwick) approach, since methods and outputs differ.
Future Trends
- AI-assisted job discovery. AI is increasingly used to mine support tickets, reviews, and interview transcripts to surface candidate jobs, struggling moments, and switching forces at scale.
- Continuous, embedded JTBD research. Organizations are shifting from one-off JTBD studies to ongoing customer-struggle research integrated into product discovery.
- Integration with product-led growth. JTBD is widely used to define activation and onboarding around the first job a user is trying to get done.
- Convergence with Value Proposition and experience design. JTBD increasingly feeds the Value Proposition Canvas, journey maps, and service blueprints as the customer-need input.
- Expansion beyond products. JTBD is applied to services, B2B solutions, internal tools, content strategy, and even public-sector and healthcare service design.
- Continued methodological debate. The two schools (Ulwick’s outcome-driven approach and the Christensen/Moesta progress approach) continue to evolve in parallel, and practitioners increasingly blend them.
FAQs
1. Who created Jobs-to-be-Done? Tony Ulwick is credited with formally creating the theory in 1990 by applying Six Sigma thinking to innovation, later naming his methodology Outcome-Driven Innovation. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, popularized it through the milkshake case study and books including The Innovator’s Solution (2003) and Competing Against Luck (2016).
2. What is the milkshake story? A fast-food chain trying to sell more milkshakes discovered, through JTBD analysis, that many customers “hired” a milkshake in the morning to make a long, boring commute more interesting and to stay full until lunch. The real competition was not other milkshakes but bananas, bagels, and boredom. The insight reframed the product strategy.
3. What does “hire” mean in JTBD? “Hire” is the metaphor for choosing a product or service to accomplish a job. When the product fails to make adequate progress on the job, the customer “fires” it and “hires” something else.
4. What is the difference between JTBD and personas? Personas describe who the customer is, often using demographics and attributes. JTBD focuses on what the customer is trying to accomplish (the job) and the circumstance in which it arises. JTBD proponents argue jobs are more stable and predictive of behavior than demographic profiles.
5. What are the three dimensions of a job? Functional (the practical task to be accomplished), emotional (how the customer wants to feel), and social (how the customer wants to be perceived by others). Strong solutions address all three where relevant.
6. What are the “Forces of Progress”? A model (developed by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek) describing four forces that determine whether a customer switches: the push of the current situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety of the new, and the habit of the present.
7. What are the two schools of JTBD? The job-as-process / Outcome-Driven Innovation approach (Tony Ulwick), which decomposes the job into measurable steps and outcomes; and the job-as-progress / forces approach (Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta), which focuses on the circumstances and emotional forces driving customer switching.
8. How does JTBD relate to Disruptive Innovation? Both are associated with Clayton Christensen. JTBD provides the lens for identifying the job customers are trying to get done, which is often the basis for new-market disruption — serving non-consumers whose job is currently unmet.
9. Why is JTBD considered useful for innovation? Because jobs tend to remain stable over time while products and technologies change. Anchoring innovation in durable jobs reduces the risk of building solutions that quickly become obsolete and helps identify unmet or poorly served needs.
10. What are common criticisms of JTBD? Critics note that the term “job” is defined inconsistently across the two schools, that poorly scoped jobs can be too broad or too narrow to be actionable, that it can be difficult to operationalize without a defined methodology, and that it complements rather than replaces other research and design methods.
Related Terms
- Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI)
- Crossing the Chasm
- Bass Diffusion Model
- Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)
- SMART Goals
- Objectives and Key Results (OKR)
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- FAST Goals
- Balanced Scorecard (BSC)
- HARD Goals
- V2MOM Framework
- Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment)
- Strategy Diamond
- Disruptive Innovation Theory
- Value Proposition Canvas
- Design Thinking
- Customer Journey Map
- Personas
- Forces of Progress
- Product-Market Fit
- Lean Startup
- Customer Discovery
Sources
- Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., and Duncan, D. S. Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. HarperBusiness, 2016. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/competing-against-luck-clayton-m-christensentaddy-hall
- Christensen, C. M., Anthony, S. D., Berstell, G., and Nitterhouse, D. “Finding the Right Job for Your Product.” MIT Sloan Management Review, 2007. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/finding-the-right-job-for-your-product/
- Christensen, C. M. and Raynor, M. E. The Innovator’s Solution. Harvard Business School Press, 2003. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=164
- Christensen Institute — “Jobs to Be Done Theory.” https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/
- Ulwick, A. Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice. IDEA BITE PRESS, 2016. https://strategyn.com/jobs-to-be-done-book/
- Strategyn — “The History of Jobs to Be Done: How Tony Ulwick Created JTBD.” https://strategyn.com/jobs-to-be-done/history-of-jtbd/
- Strategyn — “Jobs to Be Done (JTBD): The Original Framework by Tony Ulwick.” https://strategyn.com/jobs-to-be-done/
- The Re-Wired Group — “Milkshakes in the Morning: The JTBD Story.” https://therewiredgroup.com/case-studies/milkshakes/
- INNODYN — “The Roots of Jobs-to-be-Done.” https://innodyn.net/the-roots-of-jobs-to-be-done/
- FullStory — “Clay Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done Framework.” https://www.fullstory.com/blog/clayton-christensen-jobs-to-be-done-framework-product-development/