jobs to be done
The lens for building the right product
People don’t buy products. They hire them to do a job.
Most products get replaced because some other product comes to market that does the job the original was doing, only better or more efficiently.
So if you are a product builder or a strategist, this is a concept you cannot miss.
Every morning, ask yourself one question.
“Is your product doing the job it was hired for in the best possible way for the customer?”
If the answer is no, then you know what the problem is.
And in this post, I’ll explore everything that you need to know about this lens for building the right product.
The Idea
Say I’m travelling to Delhi. I need to carry my clothes and accessories, so I buy a suitcase. The job is “get my things from here to there”. If something better than that suitcase came along tomorrow that did that job, I would probably drop the suitcase without a second thought.
Now let’s say I’m a price-sensitive customer. If another bag does the exact same job, holds my luggage to Delhi, but costs 1,000 less, will I switch to the cheaper one? Oh, absolutely.
And let’s say I’m someone who buys premium luggage. If a new brand comes along that looks and feels even more premium, will I switch? Well, yes.
Now say I’m going to my cousin’s wedding. Here the job is different. I just need to carry my phone, and I want to look good carrying it. Would I bring the same suitcase? Of course not, it doesn’t go with a saree. Sure, a suitcase can hold a phone. But holding the phone was never the whole job. Looking good was. So I’d carry a small, stylish clutch instead.
Do you see what happened here?
Will the same brand X suitcase work for all four cases above?
No!
That, in a nutshell, is the Jobs to be Done framework.
People want the job done. They don’t care about your product. And they’ll hire whatever does the job best.
The Lens
If we understand the job the customer is trying to do and develop a product that nails the job perfectly, then the probability that your innovation will be successful is improved in dramatic ways.
- Clayton Christensen
Most people think of solutions without thinking about the problem. I have seen a lot of product managers jumping directly to features. But if they don’t step back and deep-dive on the problem, all solutions will be half-baked.
So understand this. Finding the right problem is always the first step a product manager or strategist should take. Everything else is secondary.
A job is nothing but the problem the customer wants solved.
How do we understand the job the customer is trying to do? Is it even that obvious?
A job is not what the customer says they want. There’s a famous business adage attributed to Henry Ford. If he’d asked customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse. I don’t know if he actually said it, but the adage is full of wisdom.
A job is the progress the customer is trying to make in a specific situation.
So if customers can’t just tell you the job, how would you find it?
You observe the situation.
That gut feeling you had with the suitcase and the clutch? This is the theory underneath it.
Start with the situation, because the job lives there.
One of the best case studies of the Jobs to be Done framework in action is Clayton Christensen’s milkshake case study.
McDonald’s wanted to sell more milkshakes. They had done what most companies do. They surveyed the customers, asked them how the milkshake could be better. And they went to the solution directly! Make it more chocolatey? More chunky? Cheaper? Customers ticked the boxes. The chain made the improvements. Sales didn’t budge at all.
That’s when Christensen’s team went in. They asked a completely different question: “What job are customers hiring this milkshake to do?”
So instead of asking people what they wanted, they went and observed what people actually did. One of them actually stood in the restaurant for 18 hours and studied the situation.
What time were the milkshakes bought?
Were the buyers alone or with others?
Was the milkshake the only thing they ordered?
Did they drink it inside, or take it to go?
A strange pattern emerged. Nearly half the milkshakes were sold before 8:30 in the morning. The buyers were almost always alone. The milkshake was the only thing they bought. And every one of them walked straight out, got in their car, and drove off with it.
Now that’s odd. Who buys a milkshake at 6:30 in the morning, alone, and nothing else? I don’t think any question-answer session would have given these insights.
So the team came back and interviewed those early customers, and the same story came up again and again.
Each one had a long, boring commute to work, forty minutes on the highway with nothing to do. One hand was on the wheel. The other had nothing to do. They weren’t even hungry yet, but they knew that by mid-morning the hunger would hit. They needed something to get them through that drive.
What about the alternatives? As one customer put it, “I’ve tried bananas, but trust me, bananas don’t work. They’re gone in three minutes and I’m hungry again by 7:30.” Donuts crumbled all over the seat and left greasy fingers on the wheel. Bagels were dry, tasteless, and needed two hands.
But the milkshake was thick, it took a full twenty minutes to pull it up through that thin little straw. It kept one hand busy the whole drive. It fit right in the cupholder, and held off the hunger till lunch.
So the milkshake’s real competition was a banana, a donut, a bagel, a cup of coffee, whatever else could get that same commute job done. People bought the milkshake because it did the job better than anything else.
This was a very specific insight. And no amount of customer segmentation, targeting, or positioning would have led them to it if they didn’t know the right problem in the first place.
So what did McDonald’s do? They made the shake even thicker so that it lasted the full drive. They added chunks of fruit to make each sip a small surprise. And they moved the machine to the front so commuters could grab one and go without waiting in line.
Sales climbed sharply.
And Christensen found a second twist. The same chain sold plenty of milkshakes in the afternoon too, but to completely different people, doing a completely different job.
Parents, buying one for their kid after a long day. It was a small way to feel like a good mom or dad, a way to finally say “yes” after saying “no” all day. The interesting part is that it’s the same milkshake and the same store, but the job is different.
The morning milkshake needed to be thicker and last longer. The afternoon one needed to be smaller, so the parent didn’t feel guilty about giving junk food and the child could actually finish it.
And this is an insight that would never have come if the team hadn’t looked through the JTBD lens.
Layers of Jobs
Let me go back to the example of suitcase and the clutch.
There are three layers of jobs.
The functional job is the practical task. It is the literal thing you need done. In my suitcase example, it was “get my stuff to Delhi”. In case of the wedding example, it was “hold my phone”.
The emotional job is how you want to feel while the job gets done. Remember the wedding? A suitcase could physically carry your phone. Then why are you not using the suitcase? Because that would make you feel out of place, self-conscious and wrong. That feeling was part of the job all along.
The social job is how you want to be seen by others. This is why you would switch to the more premium luggage even when nothing functional improved. A premium bag says something about you to the people around you. It conveys that you have taste and that you belong here. The bag is doing a job of signalling.
Now, let me put them together.
When you chose the clutch over the suitcase, you were hiring one product that had to nail all three jobs at once: hold the phone (functional), feel right (emotional), and look right to the other guests (social). The suitcase aced the functional job and failed the other two, so it lost the hire.
And this is a good lesson for all the builders out there. If you master all three jobs, and keep iterating so that the jobs your product is hired for are done in the best possible way, better than any of your competitors, whether they’re product competitors or non-product ones, then you’ve mastered the strategy of building the right thing.
Why the Better Product Still Loses
Sometimes, even when your product does the job better, people still don’t switch. You’ve felt this yourself. You know a better app exists, and yet you keep using the clunky one anyway. I’ve done this quite a lot.
Whether a customer switches comes down to a tug-of-war between four forces.
Two forces push them toward you.
The first is the push of the situation. It is basically how frustrated they are with what they’re using now. The morning commuter was bored and hungry, and that discomfort pushed him to look for something better.
The second is the pull of your product. This is nothing but how much better your solution looks. A thick shake that lasts the whole drive, that’s a strong pull. This is where you can innovate.
But two forces pull them back.
The third is anxiety. It is the fear of the new. Will it actually work? What if I waste my money? What if I regret it?
The fourth is habit. It is nothing but the comfort of what they already do. The old thing is good enough, and switching feels like effort.
A customer only switches when the push and the pull together are stronger than the anxiety and the habit.
This changes your job as a builder. It’s not just enough to be better on paper. You also have to kill the anxiety, make it easy to try, safe to fail, and obvious that it works, and you hvae to break the habit by making switching effortless. And once they’ve switched, you have to make your own product the new habit, with a pull so strong that your customers never feel the need to move on to something else.
Where This Lens Actually Helps
By now the idea makes sense. But I want to make this post useful to you. So, how should you use this lens? Where will this lens help you as a builder or a strategist?
The honest answer is: almost everywhere a product decision gets made. A few of the big ones:
It helps you find the right problem to solve. This is the heart of it. Instead of guessing at features, you anchor on the job the customer is genuinely struggling with. It’s what stops you from building a better suitcase for someone who needed a clutch. The most expensive mistake in product is nailing a job nobody was trying to get done.
It shows you who you’re really competing with. Your true competition is defined by the job, not by your category. It is a very common mistake PMs and strategists make. The milkshake was up against bananas, bagels, and plain old boredom. If McDonald’s had benchmarked only against other shakes, they’d have missed the real fight entirely.
It tells you what to build next. Once you know the job and its three layers, your roadmap gets a filter. Does this change help the customer make progress on the job, or is it just another feature on paper?
It helps you see your customers clearly. JTBD groups people by the job they’re hiring for. Remember, the morning commuter and the afternoon parent were the same kind of person buying the same milkshake for two completely different jobs. Traditional segmentation would have blurred them into one.
It sharpens how you talk about your product. When you understand the job and the struggle behind it, your messaging can speak to that exact moment instead of reciting specs.
In short, the lens starts with “what problem am I really solving?” and then keeps paying off all the way through, who you compete with, what you build, who you build it for, and how you sell it. That is basically essence of product management!
I learnt about this framework as an MBA student, but it was when I joined my company as a product manager that this lens actually helped me build features that genuinely solved customer problems. As an enterprise SaaS PM, I often have customers come to me with feature requests, and it's tempting to just build what they ask for. But deep-diving on the problem behind the request often leads to a better solution than the one they came in asking for.
I don't usually believe in simply learning frameworks for their own sake, but this one is worth understanding, applying, and seeing in action for yourself. JTBD has now become a lens I solve problems through.
The Key Takeaway
If you remember one thing from all of this, let it be this.
Sorry, nobody wants your product.
They want their job done.
Your product is just the thing they’ve hired to do it. The moment something does that job better, or in a way that makes them feel more like the person they want to be, they’ll fire your product and hire that instead.
So the work is all about the job.
And this whole post comes down to four ideas:
First, people hire products for a job, and fire them without loyalty. The suitcase, the clutch, the cheaper bag, the premium one, each was hired for a different job, and dropped the moment something did that job better.
Second, the job is hidden, so you find it by watching the situation. Do not ask people what they want. If you’d asked, you’d have heard “a faster horse” or “make it chocolatier.” McDonald’s only cracked the milkshake once they stopped asking and started observing.
Third, every job has three layers - functional, emotional, and social. Winning only the functional job is the easy part, and the easy part to copy. The emotional and social layers are what make a product hard to replace.
Fourth, push and pull have to beat anxiety and habit. Even a better product loses if people won’t switch to it. So don’t just build something better. Make it easy to try, safe to adopt, and sticky enough to keep.
Which brings us back to the question from the very beginning.
Every morning, ask yourself: is my product doing the job it was hired for, in the best possible way for the customer?
If the answer is yes, keep sharpening it.
And if the answer is no, you now know exactly where to look.
Note: This is the first of many essays on product strategy and management. The goal is to help build mental models which will help you build the right products, build the products right and help you become a better builder or strategist.
References
The Jobs to Be Done Framework Explained & Real-World Examples