Jobs To Be Done: Why People Hire Products to Make Progress

People don’t want your product. They never did.

What they want is for their life to get a little better, and your product is just one tool they might reach for to make that happen. Get that one idea right and a surprising amount of product confusion melts away. Get it wrong and you can build a beautiful, well-engineered thing that nobody hires.

This is the heart of Jobs To Be Done, often shortened to JTBD, and it might be the most useful simple idea in all of product work.

Why this matters

Most product decisions go sideways for the same reason: we fall in love with the thing we built instead of the progress the customer is chasing.

We add features. We run surveys asking “would you like it thicker, cheaper, faster?” We ship exactly what people request. And then sales don’t move, because we answered a question the customer didn’t actually care about.

JTBD fixes the lens. It forces one stubborn question, asked over and over: what progress is this person trying to make? When you can answer that, you stop guessing about features, you discover competitors you never knew you had, and you finally understand why people switch to you, or away from you.

The core idea: people hire products, then fire them

A job is the progress someone is trying to make in a specific situation. The Christensen Institute, which studies this, defines it as “the progress they’re trying to make as they strive toward a goal or aspiration within particular circumstances.”

That’s a mouthful, so here it is in plain words:

• Progress means moving from a worse situation to a better one. It’s a change in the person’s life, not a feature on a spec sheet.
• Circumstances means the situation they’re in when the need shows up. The same person in a different situation often has a completely different job.
• Hire and fire is the mental model. You “hire” a product the way you hire a contractor: a need comes up, and you bring in someone to handle it. Do the job well and you get re-hired next time. Disappoint, and you get fired for something else.

The framework was popularized by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, in his 2016 book Competing Against Luck (co-written with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan). The interview method behind it was co-created with Bob Moesta.

One note so you don’t get confused later: there’s a second, separate school of JTBD from Tony Ulwick called Outcome-Driven Innovation, which treats a job mostly as a list of measurable outcomes. It’s a different thing. This article follows the Christensen and Moesta “jobs-as-progress” version.

The milkshake that taught everyone JTBD

This story made JTBD famous, and it’s worth telling in full because it shows the whole idea in one go.

A fast-food chain (McDonald’s) wanted to sell more milkshakes. First they did the obvious thing. They grouped customers by age and profile, gathered panels of milkshake buyers, and asked the questions you’d expect: Should it be thicker? More chocolatey? Cheaper? Chunkier? They made the changes people asked for.

Sales didn’t budge.

Then a research team led by Bob Moesta asked a different question entirely: what job are people hiring this milkshake to do? A researcher stood in a restaurant for about eighteen hours and just watched. Who bought a shake? At what time? Were they alone? Did they drink it in-store or in the car? What else did they buy?

A strange pattern showed up. Nearly half of all milkshakes were sold before about 8:30 in the morning. The buyers were alone. The shake was the only thing they bought. And they almost always drove off with it.

The interviews revealed the morning job. These were commuters facing a long, dull drive. One hand on the wheel, the other hand free and bored. They weren’t hungry yet, but they would be by mid-morning. They needed something interesting to consume one-handed, something that lasted the whole drive, didn’t make a mess, and held off hunger until lunch.

The milkshake was perfect for it. It’s thick, so it takes about twenty minutes to suck through a thin straw, which fills the boring commute nicely. It fits a cup holder. It leaves no crumbs. It’s filling. The real rivals it was beating weren’t other milkshakes at all. They were:

• Bananas (gone too fast)
• Bagels (dry, messy, need two hands)
• Donuts (crumbs, finished too quickly)
• A Snickers bar (eaten at 7 a.m. with a side of guilt)

Now the twist. The very same product had a second job. In the afternoon and evening, parents bought shakes for their kids, a small treat after a long day of saying “no.” That shake wasn’t competing with bananas. It was competing with stopping at a toy store, or promising to play catch later. Same product, completely different job, completely different forces at play.

Once the team understood the morning job, the fixes were obvious: make it thicker, add chunks of fruit so it’s more interesting to sip, move the dispenser to a self-serve spot in front of the counter so commuters can grab and go, and market it for the drive. Christensen reports sales rose about seven times in the market where this was tried. (Treat that “7x” as his stated figure, not independently audited data.)

The hole, not the drill

There’s a famous line that captures all of this: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Get the credit right, because most people don’t. It was popularized by Theodore Levitt, a Harvard marketing professor, who himself credited it to Leo McGivena back in the 1940s.

The point is about where you aim your attention.

• Feature-thinking asks: “What should we add to the product?”
• Job-thinking asks: “What progress is the person trying to make, and what are they really hiring to make it?”

Nobody wants a faster horse. They want to get somewhere faster. Here’s the same shift across a few examples:

Feature-thinking	Job-thinking
”Add more shake flavors"	"Make the boring commute pass faster"
"Buy a quarter-inch drill"	"Get a quarter-inch hole in the wall"
"Add more storefront themes"	"Look professional and win the local order”

Your real competition is bigger than you think

Christensen defines competition as “anything a customer might hire to get the same job done,” not just the rivals in your category.

The milkshake competed with bananas, donuts, and coffee, so the real market was far larger than “all milkshakes sold by every burger chain combined.” In another case, tax-software users’ true job turned out to be spending less time on their taxes, not maximizing their refund, which pointed the product in a completely different direction.

So define your competitive set by the job, not the product category. Your real rival might be a spreadsheet, a Facebook page, a phone call, or simply “do nothing.” That last one, the status quo, is often the toughest competitor you have.

Every job has three dimensions

A job is never purely practical. Every one has three layers, and you have to design for all three:

• Functional - the practical task. Get the storefront up, take the order, accept payment.
• Emotional - how the person wants to feel. In control and confident, not anxious that they’re about to break something.
• Social - how the person wants to be seen. As legitimate and modern, not “behind the times.”

Miss the emotional and social layers and you’ll build something that technically works but feels wrong, and people will quietly fire it.

Common misconceptions

“Just ask customers what they want.” People are experts on their struggle, not on your solution. The milkshake panels happily told the chain to make it chunkier, and it changed nothing. Study the job; you design the feature.

“A good product sells itself.” Moesta separates the Big Hire (the moment of purchase) from the Little Hire (the moment of actual use). A product can be bought and never used. Value only arrives at the Little Hire, so a sale that never turns into use is a job left undone.

“Better features create demand.” Often the blocker isn’t a missing feature, it’s fear. This is why free trials, onboarding, and guarantees matter so much. They don’t add pull, they reduce anxiety and habit, which is a different lever entirely.

“My competitors are the other companies in my category.” Your fiercest competitor is frequently “do nothing,” a spreadsheet, or a free workaround the customer already trusts.

How to use this: the switch interview

You find jobs by interviewing people who already switched, who recently adopted a new solution, not prospects answering hypotheticals. The goal is to reconstruct one real decision and walk its timeline backwards.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Find a recent switcher. Talk to someone who changed solutions in the last few weeks, while the memory is fresh.
2. Find the first thought. When did they first feel the old way wasn’t working? That’s the start of the job.
3. Trace the push. What event finally made them go looking? It’s usually concrete, a lost order, a missed deadline, an embarrassing moment.
4. Trace the pull. What attracted them to the new option specifically?
5. Name the anxieties. What worried them about switching? What almost stopped them?
6. Spot the habits. What old routine or comfort was holding them in place?

Behind every switch are four forces, named by Moesta. Two drive change, two resist it:

• Push of the situation (the struggle they’re in)
• Pull of the new option (its attraction)
• Anxiety about the new (will it actually work?)
• Habit of the present (we’ve always done it this way)

A switch happens only when push + pull > anxiety + habit.

A clean way to write a job down, from the Nielsen Norman Group, is: “When [situation], I want to [job], so I can [outcome].” Notice it names no feature at all. And Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test pairs perfectly here: ask about real past behavior (“tell me about the last time this happened”), never “would you buy this?”

A worked example

Take a non-technical print-shop owner. The surface ask is “I want a website for my shop.” But the real job is something much richer:

“When walk-in traffic is slow and I’m losing local orders to bigger online printers, I want to take orders online and look professional, so I can grow revenue without hiring a web developer or becoming a ‘tech person.’”

Look at the three dimensions:

• Functional: stand up a storefront, take orders, accept payment, manage print jobs, fast, with no coding.
• Emotional: feel in control and confident, not anxious that they’re going to break something.
• Social: look as legitimate and modern as the bigger competitors, not behind the times.

And the competition isn’t just other print software. It’s the status quo (phone, email, walk-ins), a free Facebook page, a freelance developer, generic builders like Wix or Shopify, and marketplaces like Vistaprint.

Here’s the analogy that makes it click. The owner isn’t shopping for software the way an engineer would. They’re hiring a contractor to remodel their business, and they’re terrified of hiring the wrong one and wasting money. Every confusing label, every empty screen, every needless “are you sure?” is the contractor mumbling. It raises anxiety, and they fire you.

That’s why plain language and discoverability aren’t “nice polish.” For this owner, the job is make progress in my business without becoming technical. A checkout step buried in jargon fails that job no matter how correct the code underneath it is. Designing for the job is the product.

Conclusion

The single thing to carry away: people don’t buy products, they hire progress, and your job is to figure out exactly what progress they’re after and what they’re really competing against to get it.

Once you start seeing the world this way, you can’t unsee it. The drill becomes a hole. The milkshake becomes a boring commute. The website becomes a frightened shop owner who just wants to look legitimate.

But here’s the question that opens the next door: if every customer is hiring a product to feel a certain way, how do you actually get inside their head before you’ve ever shipped a thing? That’s where empathy stops being a buzzword and becomes a research skill, and it’s where the real product sense begins.