In one of the most-cited episodes of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, Clayton Christensen sits down with Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek to explain why Jobs-to-be-Done is, in his words, the causal mechanism at the core of marketing. He walks through the quarter-inch-hole idea he learned from Ted Levitt, the data behind why a jobs lens roughly triples new-product success rates, and why OpenTable is a textbook example of nailing a job-to-be-done.
Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript, organized by topic with short explainers of the core concepts.
Key takeaways
- Jobs-to-be-Done is about causality, not correlation. Demographics describe who you are. They don’t explain why you buy. The job that arises in your life is the cause.
- “The customer is rarely buying what the company thinks it’s selling.” People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. Christensen calls this the core idea of marketing that business schools stopped teaching.
- A jobs lens dramatically raises the odds of success. Christensen cites disruption studies (6% to 35%) and P&G’s shift to JTBD (15% to 50%) that, combined, move success probability toward 60% to 70%.
- Progress hides in the struggling moment. Innovation lives where customers struggle and resort to non-consumption, not where they’re already well served.
- OpenTable wins on the bottom half of the forces. The pull to dine out is never in short supply. OpenTable succeeded by removing the anxiety and friction of making the reservation.
Why Jobs-to-be-Done matters: it explains causality
Chris: Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio. I’m Chris Spiek and, as always, I am joined by my partner Bob Moesta.
Bob: Hey, what’s up?
Chris: We’re going to take you to some audio we recently recorded. We made a trip out to Boston to see Clay Christensen. We do that about once a quarter. We took some friends with us: Jason Fried, Lauren Lackey, Mike McBrian and our other partner Brian Tolle, and asked Clay some questions about his interpretation of Jobs-to-be-Done and why he thinks it’s important to the market.
Bob: So we have two questions for you for the podcast. Why is Jobs-to-be-Done an important framework to you?
Clay: The Jobs-to-be-Done framework is important to me because I need to understand causality in my life. If I try to understand the world by collecting data, the problem is that data is available only about the past. It can measure the result but not the cause. I’m Clay, I turned 60, our youngest child went to college, and I live in the suburbs. These are all characteristics about myself. But these characteristics have not caused me to go out and buy the New York Times today.
Bob: Right.
Clay: There might be a correlation between these characteristics and the propensity to buy the New York Times, but it doesn’t cause me to do it. What causes me to buy it is the job. A job just arose in my life that I need to get done, and I go out and find something that will get the job done. That’s the causal mechanism. In innovation, if I want to know whether customers are going to buy my product, I’ve got to understand the job. That’s the unit of analysis.
Concept · The basics
What is a “job-to-be-done”?
A job is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. It’s not a demographic and not a product feature. It’s the reason a customer “hires” a solution. Christensen’s point here is the foundation of the whole framework: jobs are causal, demographics are merely correlated.
The quarter-inch hole business schools forgot
Clay: The problem isn’t just with Jobs-to-be-Done. In almost every dimension of management, the business schools have evacuated from the core. To me, Jobs-to-be-Done is the core of marketing. It’s the essence of what you’ve got to understand. Ted Levitt, who taught on our faculty, taught that people don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
Bob: Yep.
Clay: Ted Levitt said the customer is rarely buying what the company thinks it’s selling. But if you look at the marketing curriculum in any business school, the core idea of Jobs-to-be-Done isn’t taught. They have all of these peripheral techniques. This is a core idea, the causal mechanism at the core of marketing, and almost nobody teaches it.
“The customer is rarely buying what the company thinks it’s selling.”Clayton Christensen, paraphrasing Ted Levitt
Attendee: Why is that? Why do you think marketing has strayed from that?
Clay: I have no idea. It might be that it’s so intuitively obvious that you can’t study it. You can’t write papers in academic journals because it’s just so obvious.
Bob: For the most part, when we do work it’s with the business owner or the product-research people, because they’re interested in the causal mechanism. A lot of marketing’s job is to buy media, and demographics and psychographics are how media is bought. If they don’t have that data, they don’t know how to buy media. But their primary job is to buy media, not to develop products. It’s the analogy of a gasoline engine versus a rocket engine: demographics works in one, but not the other.
Why JTBD is essential to disruptive innovation
Bob: So why is it so important for disruptive innovation?
Clay: If I want to successfully create a new product or business, there are several important questions you’ve got to address. Disruption answers one: how can I be sure I kill my competitors rather than them killing me? If you come in underneath them, they’re happy to cede the low end. Their profitability improves every time they exit it. If you’re a little boy who wants to kill a giant, define a fight where the giant is motivated to flee rather than fight.
Clay: But there’s a totally different question: have I made a product the customers will actually buy? In my studies of excavators and disk drives, if your strategy was disruptive, the probability of success increased from 6% to 35%. And under Lafley, P&G changed its religion around new-product development to focus on Jobs-to-be-Done. Historically 15% of new products were successful. Under Jobs-to-be-Done it was 50%.
Bob: Wow.
Clay: If you add up those two effects, the probability of success moves from roughly 10% or 20% to 60% or 70%. So, big, big issues.
Non-consumption and the struggling moment
Bob: It gets back to being able to define non-consumption, because old marketing terms don’t address it: where people want to use something but choose not to. Jason has picked up on the notion we always talk about: the struggling moment and the switch. He feels the pearl in all of this is studying how people switch: why they fire and why they hire new things.
Clay: Yeah.
Bob: We do it every day, and like you said, it’s almost so obvious. It’s right in front of us and we can’t see it.
Concept · The struggling moment
Why struggle is the seed of innovation
Bob calls the struggling moment “the seed of innovation.” It’s the point where a customer’s current approach stops working and the energy to change is created. That includes non-consumption, where people would rather do nothing than hire a bad option. Find the struggle and you’ve found the opening.
OpenTable: a job-to-be-done in the wild
Clay: The reason I see Bob Moesta everywhere is that whenever somebody nails the job, or just misses it, I think, “there’s Bob Moesta again.” For example, OpenTable. What do those guys do? It’s such a pain to make all those phone calls to find a restaurant that has space at the time you want, for the number of people you have. So you call your wife, she says “we have to go at that time.” Just think about how many phone calls you’ve got to make. OpenTable saw that clearly there’s a job-to-be-done here.
Bob: It does a job.
Clay: When you see a school dramatically improve student outcomes, it’s because Bob goes in and says “school isn’t a job. School is something that you can hire to get the job done, but that’s not the job.” The job is that every day students need to feel successful. I could hire school to feel successful. But I could also drop out and cruise around in a car to feel successful. When school administrators get that, it becomes very clear how you improve schools.
The Four Forces: why the bottom half decides the switch
Chris: Something that’s been coming up a lot lately is the bottom half of the forces diagram. Picture the diagram, with the push on top, the pull of the new solution, and the counteracting forces on the bottom. We’ve changed the bottom to the familiarity with the present solution (habit) on one side, and the anxiety of the new solution on the other. OpenTable does such a great job addressing that bottom half.
Chris: What we’re recognizing is that for more and more successful products, as much push and pull as you can create, until you address the bottom half they’re not going to switch. With OpenTable there’s no shortage of attraction to going out to eat. But there’s the anxiety. “I have to make plans, and I’m going to tell them all a specific time, and then I’ve got to hunt down a restaurant. If the time doesn’t work, I’ve got to call everybody back.” That’s the emotional energy. Nobody would explicitly say “I hate making reservations.” But if you ask about the last time they made a reservation, you get enough stories to pull that energy out.
Concept · The Four Forces of Progress
Push, Pull, Anxiety, and Habit
Two forces drive change: the push of the situation and the pull of a new solution. Two forces hold it back: the anxiety of the new and the habit of the present. As Chris explains, most products over-invest in push and pull. OpenTable won by attacking the bottom half: the anxiety and friction of the reservation itself.
“Until you get that bottom half addressed, they’re not going to switch, they’re not going to use it.”Chris Spiek
Inside the method: coding and dimensions
Chris: A lot of software people listen to this program, and “coding” means something different to them than how we use it. So what does it mean for us?
Bob: We break each interview down into very discrete slices, in some cases second by second. Based on those slices we look at: where is the emotion? Where is the push? Where is the pull? Is it positive or negative? Is it emotional or physical energy? What’s holding them back? We’re building the causal theory of where the contradiction is between what people say and what they do, then we put it into a spreadsheet and apply a bunch of math to it.
There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.
Chris: So the analysis piece is watching an initial set of interviews and pulling out the dimensions, a list of attributes we keep hearing. The coding piece is watching every interview, time-slicing it, and recording the level of each dimension. We end up with a database of information we can analyze.
Concept · The Switch Interview
How the data behind the forces gets made
The “coding” Bob describes starts with the interview. The Switch Interview reconstructs the timeline of a real purchase (first thought, passive looking, active looking, the decision, and first use) so you can hear the push, pull, anxiety, and habit in the customer’s own words. It’s the raw material everything else is built on.
Chris: We’re going to continue throwing clips of our conversation with Clay into the podcast, so for the next couple of weeks we’ll have more of Clay’s thoughts on Jobs-to-be-Done. As always, follow the #JTBD hashtag on Twitter and give us your two cents.
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