Jobs to be Done

In one paragraph

Customers do not want your product. They have something they are trying to get done, and your product is one way of getting it done. Understanding the job explains behaviour that demographics cannot.

The classic illustration is the milkshake study: a chain wanted to sell more milkshakes and studied who bought them. Segmenting by customer type produced nothing useful. Watching *when* they were bought found a large morning trade — people driving to work, hiring a milkshake to make a boring commute less dull and to stop them being hungry until lunch.

The competition, therefore, was not other milkshakes. It was bananas, bagels and doughnuts. And the improvements that mattered — thicker so it lasts the journey, easier to hold in a car — were not the ones a taste panel would have suggested.

Why it beats demographics

Two people with identical demographics hire wildly different products in the same week depending on the job in front of them. The job is stable; the person is not.

The useful question is not 'who is our customer?' but 'what was happening in someone's day just before they came to us?'

How to actually use it

• Ring five recent customers and ask what was going on when they decided to look. Not what they bought — what prompted them. The pattern is your job.
• Then ask what they would have done if you had not existed. That is your real competition, and it is usually not who you think.

Where it breaks down

• The definition is slippery — jobs can be framed at any level, and framed too broadly they stop being useful.
• Better at explaining and improving than at sizing. It will not tell you how many people have that job.

If you are being examined on it

Identify the job, then name the real competitive set implied by it. That step is what is being assessed.

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