Jobs to Be Done

Also known as: JTBD

framework · management · organizing-schema

Customers 'hire' products to make progress on a job in a context.

Jobs to Be Done is a customer-research and innovation framework holding that customers don't fundamentally buy products — they 'hire' products and services to make progress on a 'job' they need done in a particular context. Theodore Levitt's quarter-inch-drill quote ('people don't want a drill, they want a quarter-inch hole') is the conceptual ancestor, but the framework was formalized in two related but distinct schools: Tony Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation from the early 1990s, which operationalizes jobs as desired outcome statements with importance and satisfaction scores, and Clayton Christensen's narrative version popularized in Competing Against Luck (2016), which emphasizes the 'switch interview' and the social and emotional dimensions of jobs alongside the functional. The framework has become widely adopted in product management and innovation consulting, though its multiple competing variants and lack of falsifiable predictions have drawn methodological criticism.

Originators

Tony Ulwick (Outcome-Driven Innovation, 1991 onward); Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta (narrative JTBD); Theodore Levitt (precursor concept) high

Year / Decade

Early 1990s (Ulwick ODI); 2003-2016 (Christensen popularization); 1960s (Levitt precursor) high

Primary sources

Ulwick, A.W. (2005). What Customers Want, Christensen, C.M., Hall, T., Dillon, K. & Duncan, D.S. (2016). Competing Against Luck, Levitt, T. (1960). 'Marketing Myopia', Harvard Business Review high

Core components

Job (functional, social, emotional dimensions)
Circumstance and progress
Hiring and firing of solutions
Switch dynamics and the four forces (push of current, pull of new, anxiety, habit)
Desired outcome statements (Ulwick variant)
Importance vs satisfaction scoring (Ulwick variant)
Job stories

Primary use case

Customer research and segmentation by job rather than demographic; product strategy and roadmap prioritization; new-product opportunity identification; positioning and messaging.

Common criticisms

Multiple incompatible variants (Christensen narrative vs Ulwick quantitative) confuse practitioners about what JTBD actually requires
'job' boundaries are subjective — almost any customer behavior can be relabeled as a job ex post
predictions are difficult to falsify
over-reliance on small interview samples in the narrative variant
methodological rigor varies widely
consultant-driven proliferation has diluted the framework's discriminating power.

Lineage

Siblings: Disruptive Innovation Theory, Value Proposition Canvas, Kano Model