Jobs to Be Done

Clayton Christensen et al., Competing Against Luck (HarperBusiness, 2016). Customers don't buy products based on demographics — they "hire" products to do specific jobs in specific situations.

When to use

• Product / service / business design
• Differentiation from competitors (the real competitor is whatever currently does the job — often non-obvious)
• Failure analysis (a product that "should have worked" often was designed for a job customers don't have)
• Pricing (price in the unit of the job, not the cost of the product)
• Marketing copy (speak to the job, not the features)

Don't use when

• Artistic or expressive work — "what job is this novel hired to do?" collapses what makes it specific
• Civic / social design — imports market logic that's wrong here
• Pure-research questions (no customer, no hire — use compression-progress)
• You don't have access to actual customers

Core form

State the job as: "When [situation/trigger], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]."

The form forces specificity. Generic jobs ("when I want to be productive") are slop. Specific situations ("when I'm finishing a paper at 11pm and need a citation") are real.

The four forces of switching (Bob Moesta)

A customer changes from one solution to another when (push + pull) > (anxiety + habit):

1. Push of the situation — pain of current.
2. Pull of the new solution — appeal of where they're moving.
3. Anxiety about the new solution — fears it'll let them down.
4. Habit of the present — inertia.

Most failed product launches don't lose on (2). They have an excellent product. They lose on (3) and (4): unaddressed anxieties + inertia. Design for forces 3 and 4, not just 2.

Switch-interview procedure

Talk to someone who recently switched to your category, or recently bought it for the first time. Recency matters; memory degrades.

Walk the timeline:

• When did you first realize you needed something different? (Be specific: time of day, where, what had just happened.)
• What did you try first? Why didn't it work?
• What were the alternatives?
• When did you decide on this product?
• What were you afraid would go wrong?
• What was the moment of "I'm going to buy this"?

Then identify the job ("When... I want to... so I can...") and the four forces.

Worked example

Switch from Mendeley to Zotero (academic citation manager):

• Push: Mendeley sync failed for 6 months; lost references.
• Pull: Zotero free, open source, recommended by colleague.
• Anxiety: losing 6 years of notes.
• Habit: comfort with Mendeley UI.
• Buying moment: colleague's library imported cleanly with notes preserved.

Job: "When my reference manager fails me and I have years of accumulated work in it, I want to migrate to a new tool without losing my notes, so I can stay productive on my research."

Design implication: a citation manager whose strongest pitch is migration, not features. Killer feature: "import from anywhere with notes preserved." Verified import quality from each major competitor. Reverse-migration tool. All addresses force 3 (anxiety) and force 4 (habit) — what most competitors neglect. The features (citation management) are barely differentiating. The migration is the product.

Anti-slop notes

• Generic jobs ("customers want to feel valued") are not jobs; they're platitudes. Real jobs tie to specific situations and outcomes.
• Don't fabricate switch-interview data. If you don't have customers, acknowledge the limit and recommend running real interviews.
• Don't apply JTBD to artistic, research, or civic work. It's a market-logic tool.
• Don't reduce humans to job-doers. JTBD is useful for purchase decisions; not all human behavior.
• The "hired to do a job" can become catechism. Use where it fits; don't import where it doesn't.

Source: Christensen et al., Competing Against Luck (HarperBusiness, 2016); Moesta, Demand-Side Sales 101 (Lioncrest, 2020).