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Jobs-to-be-Done

Clayton Christensen · Christensen Institute

People don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their lives. A commuter doesn't want a podcast app; they want their morning drive to feel less tedious. A small business owner doesn't want accounting software; they want to stop dreading tax season. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) strips away demographics, personas, and feature lists to ask one question: what progress is this person trying to make, and what's standing in their way?

The framework was developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School after studying why established companies kept getting disrupted. The answer wasn't that disruptors had better technology. It was that they understood the customer's job better. The famous milkshake example showed that people were "hiring" milkshakes for their morning commute, not because they wanted a dairy product, but because they needed something to make a boring drive more interesting and keep them full until lunch. The competitors weren't other milkshakes. They were bananas, bagels, and boredom.

JTBD reframes competition entirely. You're not competing with look-alike products. You're competing with every other way a person might get that job done, including doing nothing at all. This is why understanding the four forces of progress matters so much: the push away from the current situation, the pull toward something new, the anxiety about switching, and the inertia of existing habits. For someone to adopt your solution, push plus pull must exceed anxiety plus habit.

How Distil uses it

JTBD is most active during the warmup phase, where Distil needs to understand the problem landscape before evaluating the solution. Rather than asking "what does your product do?", Distil asks about the progress your customer is trying to make. What situation triggers their need? What are they switching away from? What does success look like for them?

The framework directly shapes Distil's Problem Clarity score. If you can articulate a clear job statement ("When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]"), that's a strong signal. If you can identify the struggling moment that triggers action, even stronger. If you can map all four forces of progress, Distil knows you truly understand your customer's world.

During later phases, JTBD continues to influence the conversation. In exploration, Distil checks whether your solution actually addresses the job or just a surface-level symptom. In the deep dive, it looks at whether the forces of progress are strong enough to drive adoption. Is the push painful enough? Is your pull compelling enough? Are you addressing the anxiety and habit that block switching?

Key principles

  • Focus on the job, not the customer segment. Demographics don't explain behaviour. The same person hires different products for different jobs at different times of day.
  • Competing with non-consumption is the hardest sale. If people aren't trying to solve the problem at all, you need to understand why. Often the job simply isn't painful enough.
  • Map all four forces before building. Push, pull, anxiety, and habit. If you can't identify strong push and pull, or if anxiety and habit are too high, your solution won't get adopted.
  • The job stays stable even as solutions change. People have been hiring products to make commutes bearable for decades. Radio, cassettes, CDs, podcasts, audiobooks. The job hasn't changed; the solutions have.
  • Find the struggling moment. The best time to discover a job is when someone is actively frustrated. That's when they're most honest about what they really need.
  • Every job has functional, emotional, and social dimensions. A functional job ("organise my finances") comes with emotional needs ("feel in control") and social ones ("look competent to my business partner").
  • Circumstance matters more than customer type. The same person behaves differently in different circumstances. A parent buying lunch for themselves vs for their child hires very different solutions.

Common mistakes

  • Defining the job too broadly. "People want to be healthy" is not a job. "When I get home from work exhausted, I want a meal that's ready in under 15 minutes so I don't order takeaway again" is a job.
  • Confusing the job with the solution. "People need a better calendar app" describes a solution, not a job. The job might be "I need to stop double-booking myself and feeling scattered."
  • Ignoring the forces that block switching. Even if your solution is brilliant, high anxiety ("will I lose my data?") or strong habit ("I've used Excel for 10 years") can kill adoption.
  • Assuming one job per customer. People have many jobs. The key is finding the one that's most urgent, most frequent, and most underserved by existing solutions.
  • Skipping the struggling moment. If you can't describe a specific moment when the customer feels frustrated or stuck, you probably haven't found a real job worth solving.

Recommended reading

  • 📖 Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen. The definitive book on JTBD, full of real-world examples from McDonald's to Intuit.
  • 🌐 Christensen Institute. Research, articles, and case studies from the team that developed the theory.

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