Jobs To Be Done: People Hire Products to Make Progress

Here is one of the most useful ideas in all of product work, and it is also one of the simplest. People do not really want your product. They want their life to get a little better. They reach for a product the way you reach for a tool: to get a specific result. The product is just the means. The result is the point.

This is the heart of a framework called Jobs To Be Done, usually shortened to JTBD. A framework here just means a structured way of thinking about a problem. JTBD asks one question over and over: what progress is this person trying to make?

What is a "job"?

The Christensen Institute, which studies this idea, defines a job as "the progress they're trying to make as they strive toward a goal or aspiration within particular circumstances." Let's unpack that in plain words.

Progress

The person wants to move from a worse situation to a better one. Not a feature — a change in their life.

Circumstances

The situation they are in when the need shows up. Same person, different circumstance, often means a different job.

Hire / fire

You "hire" a product like you hire a contractor: when a need arises. If it does the job well, you re-hire it next time. If it disappoints, you fire it and hire something else.

The framework comes from Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who popularized it (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. (Christensen died in January 2020; the idea outlives him.) Note there is a second, distinct school of JTBD from Tony Ulwick called Outcome-Driven Innovation, which treats a job mostly as a list of measurable outcomes. The two are not the same thing — this chapter follows the Christensen/Moesta "jobs-as-progress" version.

The milkshake story

This story made JTBD famous, so it's worth telling in full.

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: should the shake be thicker? More chocolatey? Cheaper? Chunkier? They made the changes people asked for. Sales did not move at all.

Then Christensen's team, with research led by Bob Moesta, asked a different question: what job are people hiring this milkshake to do? A researcher stood in a restaurant for about eighteen hours and simply watched every milkshake sale — who bought it, what time, alone or with others, drank in-store or in the car, and what else they bought.

A surprising pattern appeared. 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.

Interviews revealed the morning job. These were commuters facing a long, boring drive. One hand on the wheel, the other hand free and bored. They were not hungry yet, but they would be by mid-morning. They needed something that was interesting to consume one-handed, lasted the whole drive, wasn't messy, and held off hunger until lunch.

Now the twist. There was a second job for the same product. In the afternoon and evening, parents bought shakes for their children — a small treat after a day of saying "no." That shake didn't compete with bananas at all. It competed with stopping at a toy store, or playing catch later. Same product, completely different job, completely different forces.

Once the team understood the morning job, the fixes were obvious: make it thicker, add chunks of fruit to make it more interesting to sip, move the dispenser to a self-serve spot in front of the counter, and market it for the commute. Christensen reports sales rose about seven times in the market where this was done. (Treat the "7x" as Christensen's stated figure, not independently audited data.)

Features vs. the job: the hole, not the drill

There's a famous line for 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 the direction of 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.

JTBD reframes who you compete with

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 bigger than "milkshakes sold by all the burger chains combined." In another case, tax-software users' true job was to spend less time on taxes, not to maximize their refund — which pointed the product in a different direction entirely.

How to uncover a job: the switch interview

You find jobs by interviewing people who already switched — who recently adopted a new solution — not prospects answering hypotheticals. You reconstruct one real decision. Walk the timeline backwards from the purchase: when did they first feel the old way wasn't working? What pushed them to look? What pulled them in? What worried them?

Moesta describes four forces that decide whether someone switches:

   DRIVE CHANGE  -->        |        <-- RESIST CHANGE
                            |
  1. PUSH of the situation  |  3. ANXIETY of the new
     (the struggle)         |     (will it work?)
                            |
  2. PULL of the new        |  4. HABIT of the present
     (the attraction)       |     (we've always...)
                            |
   A switch happens only when PUSH + PULL  >  ANXIETY + HABIT

Push and pull drive change; anxiety and habit resist it. This is why free trials, onboarding, and guarantees matter — they don't add pull, they reduce anxiety and habit. Moesta also 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 design for both.

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

A worked example from our world

Take a non-technical print-shop owner. The surface ask is "I want a website for my shop." The real job is: "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.'"

The three dimensions of that job (every job has all three):

• Functional — the practical task: stand up a storefront, take orders, accept payment, manage print jobs, fast, with no coding.
• Emotional — how they want to feel: in control and confident, not anxious ("am I going to break something?").
• Social — how they want to be seen: as legitimate and modern as bigger competitors, not "behind the times."

The real competition is not just other print SaaS. 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. The struggling moment is usually a concrete event: a lost order, a customer who "couldn't find them online."

This is exactly why this codebase insists that every feature be discoverable, plain-language, and developer-free. That is not "nice polish." The owner's job is make progress in my business without becoming technical. A checkout step labeled in jargon, or a settings page only a developer could navigate, fails the job no matter how correct the code is. Designing for the job is the UX mandate.

Key takeaways

• People hire products to make progress; study the job, not the feature ("the hole, not the drill" — Levitt, crediting McGivena).
• Every job has functional, emotional, and social dimensions — design for all three.
• The milkshake won by serving a hidden job (the boring commute), and a different job meant entirely different competition.
• Define competitors by the job, which usually includes "do nothing," a spreadsheet, or a Facebook page.
• Uncover jobs with switch interviews and the four forces; push + pull must beat anxiety + habit, and value lands only at the Little Hire (actual use).
• For a non-technical shop owner, the job is "grow my business without a developer" — so plain language and discoverability are the product, not a coat of paint.