Product

Jobs to be Done

People don’t buy products — they hire products to do a job. Get the job right and the product, the marketing, and the competition all clarify.

What it is

Clayton Christensen popularized Jobs to be Done with a simple reframing: people don’t buy products. They hire products to do a job.

The shift sounds semantic. It isn’t. Once you stop describing customers by demographics (“35-44, urban, college-educated”) and start describing them by the job they’re hiring something for (“help me feel less lonely on my morning commute”), product decisions get sharper.

The milkshake story

The canonical example: a fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. They ran customer surveys. Should they make them sweeter? Thicker? Cheaper? Results were inconclusive.

Then a researcher actually watched who bought milkshakes. Most were sold before 8am, to solo drivers on long commutes. The job they were hiring the milkshake to do: stay full until lunch, occupy a free hand, and be interesting enough to nurse for 30 minutes in traffic.

Competing products weren’t other milkshakes. They were bananas (too quick), bagels (too dry), donuts (too messy). Once the chain understood the job, the redesign was obvious: thicker, harder to suck through a straw, chunks of fruit for variety.

How to apply it

1. Interview real customers about a specific recent purchase. Not what they want. What they were trying to get done.
2. Capture the full context: when, where, what triggered it, what they considered, what they almost bought instead.
3. Write the job in the form: “When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].”
4. Map the competition by job, not by category. Your real competitor is whatever they’d use if you didn’t exist.
5. Design for the job, not the demographic.

Your competitor isn't the product that looks like yours. It's whatever your customer would hire instead.

A worked example: Slack

Slack’s job statement, roughly: “When my team is spread across tools and timezones, I want a single place to talk and share files, so we can move fast without losing context.”

That job had been hired to email, internal wikis, in-person meetings, and group texts for decades. None of them were “a Slack competitor” in the product-category sense. But all of them were the real competition. Once Slack reframed the job, the product’s scope (channels, search, integrations) followed directly.

Common pitfalls

Confusing the job with the feature. “Customers want a faster checkout” is a feature request. The job is “buy this and get back to my life” — which might also be solved by saved payment methods, one-click reorder, or skipping checkout entirely.

Asking instead of observing. Customers will tell you what they want. They won’t tell you the job — usually because they don’t know it explicitly. Watch what they do, not what they say.

Writing the job too broadly. “Be happy” is not a job. “Feel like a thoughtful gift-giver in under 10 minutes during my lunch break” is a job.

When NOT to use it

Jobs to be Done is weakest in deep B2B sales with long committees, where the “job” is fragmented across multiple stakeholders. Use it for the end user, but pair it with stakeholder mapping (Champion / Economic Buyer / Blocker) for the buying process.

Further reading

Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan (2016). The book that turned the milkshake story into a system.