Jobs To Be DoneEdit

Jobs To Be Done

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for understanding why people buy and use products and services. Rather than focusing primarily on demographics, brand images, or long lists of features, JTBD asks what progress a customer is trying to make in a given context and what outcomes define success. In this view, people “hire” a product or service to get a job done, and they “fire” it when it no longer meets the desired progress. By centering inquiry on the job and the outcomes that matter, firms aim to align product design, marketing, and distribution with what customers actually value in a real-world setting. The approach has roots in the work of Clayton Christensen and Anthony Ulwick and has since been adopted across startups and established firms as a practical tool for shaping strategy and execution.

From a practical, market-driven perspective, JTBD is a way to improve how scarce resources are allocated. If a team can precisely articulate the job and the key outcome metrics, it can prioritize investments that meaningfully move customers forward, rather than chasing superficial advantages or trendy features. This emphasis on real customer progress is seen by supporters as a corrective to purely product-centered thinking, helping to ensure that innovation is truly buyer-driven and that value creation is anchored in tangible improvements to people’s lives. The method is also framed as compatible with competitive markets: when firms compete on delivering better progress at a reasonable price, consumers benefit and firms are compelled to reinvest in capabilities that reflect actual needs. In this sense, JTBD is less a political stance and more a disciplined approach to aligning supply with voluntary demand in a way that rewards productive risk and clear value propositions.

The article that follows surveys the history, core concepts, and applications of JTBD while acknowledging criticisms and debates. It treats JTBD as a tool within a broader toolkit of market-based business practices, not a universal solution or a political program. For readers exploring associated ideas, cross-links to related concepts such as Market research, Product-market fit, and Value proposition appear throughout the discussion.

History

JTBD emerged from a line of thought about innovation and consumer behavior that emphasizes why customers make choices in real life. The earliest formal discussions connected to this view were advanced by Clayton Christensen in his exploration of how customers decide which solutions to hire when faced with competing options. Christensen’s framing highlighted that customers evaluate outcomes and progress, not just the features a product offers. He and colleagues argued that by understanding the jobs customers are trying to do, organizations can identify opportunities where existing solutions fall short and where a new or improved offering would be hired.

Another major contributor is Anthony Ulwick, whose Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) methodology provides concrete tools for converting customer needs into measurable outcomes and prioritized opportunities. ODI emphasizes mapping the steps a customer takes to complete a job, articulating the desired outcomes at each step, and scoring opportunities by importance and satisfaction. Through this lens, product teams can develop roadmaps that directly target the gaps most likely to drive meaningful progress for customers.

Over time, JTBD has moved from academic and theory-grounded discussions into practical playbooks used by product teams, startups, and large organizations. Firms such as Innosight helped popularize the approach within corporate strategy and innovation programs, integrating JTBD with broad processes for disciplined experimentation and portfolio management. The method’s influence has extended into marketing and pricing, where the focus on jobs and outcomes reshapes messaging and value delivery.

Core concepts

Job-to-be-done: The central unit of analysis is the job a customer is trying to accomplish in a particular situation. The job is framed in terms of progress toward a goal, not merely a set of features or a product category. The job can have functional, emotional, and social dimensions, and it may be pursued in the context of competing solutions. See how the job framing connects to Disruptive innovation in some cases where new entrants redefine what counts as “getting the job done]].
Hire and fire mechanics: People hire a product or service to make progress and fire it when it no longer fits the need. This hiring metaphor helps teams identify why substitutes emerge and where improvements could change customer choices. The idea is to uncover the reasons customers switch, not just what they say they want.
Job statements and outcomes: A job statement combines the context, the progress desired, and the job to be done. Outcomes are the specific measures customers use to evaluate success. Outcomes can be functional (e.g., faster completion), emotional (e.g., peace of mind), or social (e.g., status among peers). The emphasis on outcomes distinguishes JTBD from feature lists and replaces vague needs with measurable goals. See Outcome-Driven Innovation for a formal approach to defining outcomes.
Job mapping: A structured method to unpack a job into the sequence of steps a customer takes to complete it, identify pain points, and reveal where improvements can have the greatest impact. Job mapping supports prioritization and helps align product development with the most consequential steps in the customer journey. See Job Mapping for more details.
Nonconsumption and growth: JTBD theory highlights opportunities in nonconsumption—where potential customers do not use any solution because none adequately helps them make progress. By identifying these gaps, firms can unlock new markets and improve overall welfare through voluntary exchange. See Nonconsumption for further discussion.
Context and constraints: Jobs are situational; the same person may have different jobs to do in different settings. Recognizing context helps avoid one-size-fits-all solutions and supports more targeted value propositions. This ties into broader discussions of market segmentation and customer needs in Market research.
Value proposition and pricing implications: When products are aligned with the job and outcomes, pricing and messaging can be anchored in the value delivered to the customer, rather than in category norms or internal cost structures alone. See Value proposition and Value-based pricing for related ideas.

Methods and practical applications

Discovery and interviews: Practitioners gather insights by asking about real situations where customers faced a pressing need, how they went about addressing it, and what would have improved the outcome. The goal is to elicit honest accounts of progress and the obstacles encountered.
Defining the job and outcomes: Teams translate interview findings into clear job statements and a catalog of outcomes. Importance and satisfaction ratings help prioritize which issues to address first.
Designing around the job: Product teams translate jobs and outcomes into features, workflows, and experiences that directly improve the customer’s ability to make progress. The emphasis is on delivering measurable improvements in the specified outcomes.
Marketing and messaging: Rather than promoting a product’s attributes, messaging centers on the progress customers are seeking and how the offering helps them achieve it more effectively than alternatives.
Pricing and go-to-market strategies: By understanding which jobs drive value, teams can tailor pricing to reflect the degree of progress achieved and can design distribution channels that minimize friction in the job’s execution.
Case examples and cautions: Real-world applications illustrate how JTBD can reveal unmet needs, reframe product categories, or uncover opportunities for nonconsumption. At the same time, practitioners are cautioned that JTBD is not a universal substitute for all market signals and should be integrated with other business disciplines.

Applications in business practice

Product development: JTBD helps product teams prioritize features based on the magnitude of progress they enable. Rather than building features that look good in isolation, teams invest where customers experience the largest gains toward a well-defined outcome. See Product management for related concepts.
Marketing and sales: Messaging is reframed to speak to the job being done, presenting the offering as a means of achieving specific outcomes more efficiently or effectively. This approach can improve conversion by aligning communication with customer priorities. See Marketing and Value proposition.
Strategy and portfolio management: By mapping jobs across customer segments, firms can identify growth opportunities, including underserved jobs and potential nonconsumption markets. This supports disciplined experimentation and resource allocation that favors higher-probability bets. See Strategy and Portfolio management.
Entrepreneurship and startups: JTBD is popular among early-stage ventures seeking product-market fit and path to scalable growth. Startups often use JTBD to uncover gaps that incumbents overlook and to design lean experiments around prioritized jobs. See Entrepreneurship.
Public and policy implications: While primarily a business framework, JTBD has implications for how services are designed in public-facing environments where efficiency and user outcomes matter, such as health care and education services, where customers seek to progress toward important life goals. See Public policy for related discussions.

Criticisms and debates

Scope and abstraction: Critics argue that JTBD can drift toward abstraction if practitioners rely too heavily on customer statements without triangulating with market data, technology feasibility, and business viability. Proponents counter that the job framing keeps attention on meaningful progress, while ODI-style methods help quantify and test the practical viability of proposed solutions. See Disruptive innovation for related debates about analysis depth and risk.
Relationship to traditional market research: Some observers view JTBD as a repackaging of existing research techniques (interviews, journey mapping, needs analysis) in a new vocabulary. Supporters maintain that the emphasis on jobs and outcomes provides clearer guidance for prioritization and measurement than traditional feature-centric approaches.
Short-term bias vs long-run bets: A critique is that JTBD can push firms to chase near-term improvements that fulfill current jobs at the expense of long-horizon breakthroughs. Defenders argue that a robust JTBD program includes exploration of nonconsumption and high-impact outcomes that can catalyze durable growth, even when those bets are riskier.
Overemphasis on consumer agency: Critics from some quarters argue that JTBD foregrounds consumer preferences at the expense of structural constraints, supply considerations, and policy contexts. From a market-oriented vantage, the reply is that JTBD looks to the agent’s progress within the prevailing market structure and complements, rather than replaces, other analyses of supply, distribution, and policy.
Privacy, data, and manipulation concerns: As JTBD research often rests on customer interviews and behavior data, concerns about privacy and data usage arise. The right-of-center view tends to emphasize voluntary exchange and consumer choice but acknowledges that privacy protections and transparent consent are appropriate, minimizing any potential for coercive targeting. Critics who frame JTBD as a tool of manipulation often misunderstand its empirical aims; when used responsibly, JTBD seeks to clarify genuine customer needs, not to engineer demand.
The woke critique and its rebuttal: Some critics argue that JTBD reduces people to “jobs” and treats human priorities as mere outputs to optimize, potentially overlooking broader social or ethical dimensions. Proponents respond that JTBD is descriptive, not prescriptive about values, and that it supports voluntary transactions that improve welfare. They argue that concerns about reducing humanity to metrics can be addressed by robust governance, privacy safeguards, and ethical standards, not by abandoning a practical method for understanding customer progress. In this view, the critique that JTBD inherently deepens inequality or erodes social norms is seen as a misapplication of the framework to political questions rather than a critique of the method itself.
Alignment with competitive markets: Advocates emphasize that JTBD, when used properly, reinforces competitive discipline by rewarding offerings that demonstrably help customers make progress at acceptable cost. Critics may worry that such focus can neglect broader social goals; proponents reply that a healthy market, informed by clear customer outcomes, tends to promote the highest value at the lowest friction, with broader social benefits arising from improved products, services, and productivity.