Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

What is Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)?#

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) theory, pioneered by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, asserts that customers do not buy products; they "hire" them to perform a specific "job".

A "job" is distinct from a mere "problem." While a problem is a situation a user doesn't want to be in, a job requires intentionality—a clear desire to move from a current state "A" to a desired state "B". To have effective demand, the customer must be actively searching for a solution or have an intention to get the task done.

Key definitions#

• Job executor: The person who experiences the struggle and decides to "hire" a solution (may differ from payer/admin in B2B).
• Job statement (functional core): Help [actor] [make progress] in/when [circumstance] despite [constraints].
• Job story (format): When ___, I want to ___, so I can ___.
• Desired outcomes (ODI lens): Metrics the customer uses to judge success (speed, effort, reliability, risk, compliance).

Mental model#

The Forces of Progress

To understand why a customer "hires" your startup, you must look at the four forces acting on them at the moment of purchase:

1. Push of the Current Situation: The pain of the status quo (e.g., "This spreadsheet is breaking").
2. Pull of the New Solution: The appeal of your product's promise (e.g., "This dashboard looks effortless").
3. Anxiety of the New: Fear of the unknown (e.g., "Will this be hard to learn?").
4. Allegiance to the Old: Habit and inertia (e.g., "I already know how to use my messy spreadsheet").

Rules of thumb#

Interview count

Approximately 90% of key customer needs can be identified by conducting just 10–12 in-depth interviews per market segment. (source: The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing)

The Drill/Hole Maxim

"People don't want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole."

The "Workaround" Rule

If you see people using a tool for something it wasn't intended for (e.g., using Excel as a CRM), there is a massive JTBD opportunity there.

Why do Jobs to Be Done matter?#

For startup founders, JTBD is the bridge between understanding customer demand and designing products, pricing, and messaging that align with real switching triggers.

• Predictable Demand: A package built around a job taps into a pre-existing stream of demand. As one entrepreneur noted, it is like "holding your cup out—the water was already running".

• Efficiency in Sales: Aligning packaging with specific jobs makes the product instantly understandable to the buyer, which reduces sales cycles and minimizes the need for heavy discounting.

• Portfolio Integrity: Using JTBD prevents the creation of "Monoliths" (overengineered products that deliver too much functionality for most users, leading to under-monetization) and "Hydras" (products that grow in unmanageable complexity because every new feature is spun out as a new module).

Worked example: identical firmographics, 10x different WTP#

Two prospects for the same data-observability product. On every filter a normal ICP uses — Series B, ~300 employees, fintech, US, modern data stack — they are indistinguishable.

Same segment on paper. A 10x spread in willingness to pay, because WTP is set by the alternative the buyer is comparing against, and the job determines the alternative.

What this changes. One tier priced somewhere in the middle loses both: too expensive for B, and it leaves roughly $100,000 on the table with A. The structure the jobs imply instead:

• A reliability base tier priced against engineer hours — alerting, lineage, incident routing.
• A compliance module priced against the analyst — audit-ready evidence export, retention policies, access attestation.

The module is also the fence. Company B has no use for audit evidence and will not buy up to reach it, so the two prices hold without either buyer feeling penalised.

Why firmographics missed this. Firmographics describe who the buyer is. The job describes what they are trying to get done, and only the second one has a price attached. This is why JTBD segments routinely cut across the personas a marketing team has already built.

How do you implement Jobs to Be Done step-by-step?#

Inputs you need#

• 10–15 recent "hired" or "fired" customers (bought or churned in the last ~90 days)
• A place to observe real work (screenshare, ride-along, session replays) to see where they struggle
• Context notes: team setup, stakes (deadlines/risk), constraints (security/compliance), who approves (B2B)
• Light product data: time-to-first-value, retention, key activation events

Risks & anti-patterns (and how to fix them)#

References & Links#

Sources:#

• Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K., & Duncan, D. S. (2016a, September). Know your customers' jobs to be done. Harvard Business Review.
• Christensen, C. M., Dillon, K., Hall, T., & Duncan, D. S. (2016b). Competing against luck: The story of innovation and customer choice. HarperBusiness.
• Ghuman, A., & Pasternak, J. (2021). Price to scale. Paget Publishing.
• Lehrskov-Schmidt, U. (2023). The pricing roadmap. (Self-published).
• Moesta, B., & Dander, G. (2019). Demand-side sales 101: Stop selling and help your customers make progress. Re-Wired Group.
• Ramanujam, M., & Tacke, G. (2016). Monetizing innovation: How smart companies design the product around the price. Wiley.
• Ulwick, A. W. (2005). What customers want from your products. Harvard Business Review, 83(1), 70–82.
• Ulwick, A. W. (2016). Jobs to be done: Theory to practice. Idea Bite Press.