What Is Jobs-to-be-Done?

People don’t buy products. They hire them to make progress in a particular circumstance. Jobs-to-be-Done is the lens that makes that progress visible. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a way of understanding why customers really buy. Instead of describing people by their demographics or attaching them to a product category, JTBD focuses on the progress a person is trying to make in a specific situation, and the struggle that pushes them to look for something new.

We’re Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek. Bob was one of the original architects of the theory alongside Clayton Christensen, and together we’ve spent two decades applying it, refining it, and teaching it. This page is the plain-English version of what we’ve learned.

The core idea: progress, not products

Every purchase is really a story about change. Someone was getting along fine, until they weren’t. Something made their old way of doing things stop working, and they went looking for a better way to make progress. The product they “hired” is just the thing they grabbed to get the job done.

The famous example is the milkshake. A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes, so they improved flavor and texture, and nothing changed. When we actually studied when people bought them, we found a surprising job: commuters hiring a thick milkshake to make a long, boring morning drive more bearable, while keeping one hand on the wheel and staying full until lunch. The competition wasn’t other milkshakes. It was bananas, bagels, and boredom.

When you understand the job, you stop competing on features and start competing on progress.

Functional, emotional, and social dimensions

A job is never purely practical. Every job has three dimensions working at once:

• Functional: the practical task to accomplish (keep me full until lunch).
• Emotional: how the person wants to feel (calm, in control, not anxious).
• Social: how they want to be perceived by others (responsible, smart, capable).

Miss the emotional and social dimensions and your product looks like every competitor on a spec sheet. Nail them and you become the obvious choice.

Why people switch

JTBD pays special attention to the moment of switching, when someone fires their old solution and hires a new one. That moment is where demand is created, and it’s governed by four competing forces we call the Forces of Progress: the push of the current situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety of the unknown, and the habit of the present. A switch only happens when push and pull are strong enough to overcome anxiety and habit.

How do you actually uncover a job?

You don’t find jobs in surveys or focus groups. You find them by interviewing people who recently switched and walking backward through their decision in forensic detail. We call this the switch interview. Done well, it reveals the real timeline of the purchase: the first thought, the events that pushed them forward, the anxieties that held them back, and the moment they finally decided.

If you want to see what that looks like, listen to a real one. The JTBD Radio archive includes the mattress interview that was featured in Clay Christensen’s book Competing Against Luck, and a full library of interviews is available for you to watch and learn.

Who uses Jobs-to-be-Done?

Founders use it to find a beachhead and position a product. Product managers use it to prioritize a roadmap around real demand instead of feature requests. Marketers use it to write copy in the customer’s own words. Researchers and consultants use it as a repeatable method for turning interviews into insight. The framework is industry-agnostic because the underlying question, “what progress is this person trying to make?”, is universal.

Frequently asked questions

Is Jobs-to-be-Done the same as user personas?

No. Personas describe who a customer is (age, role, attributes). A job describes what progress they’re trying to make in a situation. Two very different people can hire the same product for the same job. The same person can hire different products for the same job on different days.

Who created Jobs-to-be-Done?

The theory grew out of work by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta in the 1990s. Bob and Chris Spiek went on to develop the complete framework around the theory to make it easy to apply.

How do I learn to do it myself?

Start with the Four Forces and the switch interview guides on this site. When you’re ready to practice on real interviews with feedback, take the course below.