Jobs to Be Done

Jobs to Be Done Plot Summary

Introduction

What drives consumers to choose one product over another? Why do businesses often struggle to innovate effectively despite having talented teams and substantial resources? The challenge lies not in creating new features or following market trends, but in understanding the fundamental jobs that customers are trying to accomplish in their lives. The Jobs to be Done framework offers a paradigm shift in how we approach innovation—focusing not on demographic data or purchasing patterns, but on the underlying motivations that drive customer behavior. This roadmap presents a systematic approach to customer-centered innovation that makes success repeatable rather than accidental. By understanding what jobs customers are trying to get done, what obstacles they face, and what success looks like through their eyes, organizations can develop solutions that truly resonate. The framework moves beyond superficial market research to uncover the functional and emotional dimensions of customer needs, providing a structured methodology that transforms customer insights into breakthrough innovations while minimizing the risks inherent in new product development.

Chapter 1: Understanding Jobs That Drive Customer Behavior

Jobs to be Done represents a fundamental shift in how we understand customer motivation. Rather than focusing on what customers are currently buying, this approach examines what customers are trying to accomplish—their "jobs." These jobs exist independently from current solutions and represent the progress that customers are seeking to make in particular circumstances. As Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously observed, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." Jobs can be both functional and emotional in nature. Functional jobs involve practical tasks that customers need to accomplish, while emotional jobs relate to how customers want to feel or be perceived by others. For example, when purchasing a vehicle, a customer may have the functional job of transporting family members safely, but also the emotional job of expressing personal style or status. Successful innovations address both dimensions, recognizing that emotional elements often provide critical differentiation as competitors catch up on functional features. The framework helps businesses avoid the common pitfall of adding unnecessary features that sound impressive in marketing materials but don't address important customer jobs. Consider the contrast between early smartphones that attempted to include every possible feature versus the more focused approach of products like the original BlackBerry, which excelled at the critical job of mobile email communication. By identifying and prioritizing the most important jobs, companies can create solutions that customers truly value rather than bloated products that try to be everything to everyone. Jobs thinking also expands the competitive landscape beyond traditional industry boundaries. Snapchat, for instance, succeeded despite lacking many features of established social media platforms because it fulfilled specific emotional jobs for its target users—allowing them to share authentic moments without the pressure of creating perfect, permanent content. By understanding that they were competing not just against other social media apps but against all the ways people seek authentic connection, Snapchat created a distinctly valuable offering. Applications of this approach can be found across industries. First Ipswich Bank in Massachusetts recognized that homebuyers of historic properties weren't just seeking a mortgage transaction—they were trying to move into and renovate an old home. This insight led to the creation of unique mortgage products that allow customers to add renovation expenses to their initial loan amount, addressing a key pain point in the customer's journey. Such Jobs-based thinking enables companies to solve problems that customers may not even articulate explicitly.

Chapter 2: Identifying Key Job Drivers and Contexts

While jobs define what customers are trying to accomplish, job drivers explain why certain jobs become more important for specific customers in particular contexts. These drivers fall into three key categories: attitudes (personality traits and social factors), background (long-term context like geography or education), and circumstances (immediate factors like seasonal needs or special events). Understanding these drivers helps explain why customers with similar jobs often make different purchasing decisions. Consider a car buyer who prioritizes safety, reliability, and comfort. These jobs alone don't explain why one person chooses a Toyota Camry while another selects a Cadillac Escalade. Job drivers provide this crucial context: perhaps the Escalade buyer has an MBA from a prestigious school (attitude), lives in New England where winters are harsh (background), and coaches a youth sports team requiring cargo space (circumstance). These factors cause certain jobs to rise in importance—like displaying success, handling snow, and transporting equipment—leading to different purchasing decisions. Job drivers provide the foundation for meaningful customer segmentation that goes beyond demographic characteristics. Traditional segmentation approaches based solely on age, income, or purchasing behavior provide limited insight into why customers make decisions. A credit card company, for instance, might segment customers as "high spenders" without recognizing that this group includes diverse customer types—business travelers, affluent consumers, and small business owners—each with distinct job drivers requiring different value propositions. The combination of jobs and job drivers creates naturally occurring customer segments with similar needs and behaviors. Planet Fitness, one of America's fastest-growing gym franchises, has built its business model around the job drivers of its target segment: casual exercisers who are younger, budget-conscious (circumstances), and uncomfortable with traditional fitness environments (attitudes). Their "Judgement Free Zone" messaging, $10 monthly fees, and focus on basic exercise equipment directly address these drivers, creating a distinctive offering in a crowded market. Understanding these nuanced contexts allows businesses to design targeted solutions rather than one-size-fits-all offerings. By recognizing how specific job drivers influence which jobs rise to the top for different customer segments, companies can create products that deeply resonate with their target audience, even if they intentionally ignore the needs of other potential customers. This approach enables focused innovation that creates genuine differentiation in the marketplace.

Chapter 3: Mapping Current Approaches and Pain Points

To create meaningful innovation, organizations must understand not just what jobs customers are trying to accomplish, but how they currently approach those jobs and where they experience frustration. This requires identifying all stakeholders involved in the process (not just the purchaser), mapping their current behaviors, and pinpointing pain points—areas where customers experience inefficiency, confusion, or dissatisfaction. The purchaser is rarely the only stakeholder who matters. In the grocery industry, for example, at least three distinct stakeholders influence food purchases: the person buying the product, the person preparing the meal, and the person eating the food. Each has different priorities—the shopper may focus on price, the cook on ease of preparation, and the diner on taste. Understanding all stakeholders' perspectives is essential for creating solutions that work throughout the entire usage process. Creating a detailed process map—a step-by-step visualization of the customer journey—helps identify these stakeholders and their roles. Current approaches, even when inefficient, represent powerful habits that are difficult to change. Consider Kellogg's Breakfast Mates, which combined cereal, milk, and a spoon in one package. While addressing the pain point of rushed mornings, the product required customers to dramatically change their breakfast routine—pouring room-temperature milk over cereal or refrigerating cereal—neither of which aligned with established behaviors. The product quickly failed. Similarly, international development efforts in Afghanistan struggled when they built girls' schools without adequately involving community elders and addressing cultural norms, resulting in empty classrooms. Pain points represent significant innovation opportunities when properly identified. Some pain points are obvious and easily articulated by customers, while others are so commonplace that customers have developed workarounds without consciously recognizing the issue. A medical technology company discovered this when they monitored surgeons' heart rates during procedures—identifying stress points that the surgeons themselves hadn't mentioned during interviews because they had accepted them as inevitable parts of surgery. When designing solutions, organizations must decide whether to complement or replace existing behaviors. Kimberly-Clark's Depend Silhouette and Real Fit Briefs succeeded by understanding that adults suffering from incontinence were using uncomfortable workarounds like toilet paper or frequent clothing changes. The company designed products that alleviated these pain points while addressing underlying emotional needs around dignity and discretion. By focusing on real pain points for specific customer types rather than assumed frustrations, Kimberly-Clark captured substantial market share from adults who had previously delayed purchasing incontinence products.

Chapter 4: Defining Success Criteria and Overcoming Obstacles

Success criteria translate abstract jobs into specific parameters that determine whether a solution effectively satisfies customer needs. Unlike business metrics that focus on sales figures or market share, success criteria define success from the customer's perspective—articulating how customers will evaluate whether a job has been accomplished successfully in a particular context. Success criteria can vary dramatically based on context and customer type. When designing a smartphone, for example, understanding that corporate buyers need devices that can be mastered quickly by new employees and easily retrieve conversation threads about specific tasks provides specific design parameters beyond simply "easy to use." For Tesla's Model S, success criteria expanded beyond traditional automotive benchmarks like handling and safety to include new dimensions relevant to electric vehicles, such as recharging times and environmental impact. Organizations can identify opportunities by understanding what customers want more of, what they want less of, and where they seek balance. Slack, the workplace messaging app, recognized that workers wanted more informal communication and easier file sharing, less email clutter, and a balance between documentation and interaction. Unlike failed attempts to replace email entirely, Slack complemented existing workflows while excelling at specific jobs related to internal communication, rapidly growing to a multi-billion dollar valuation. The path to innovation is also blocked by obstacles that prevent customers from adopting or continuing to use new solutions. Obstacles to adoption include lack of awareness, required behavior changes, high costs, high risk, unfamiliarity with the product category, and the involvement of multiple decision makers. Obstacles to continued use include limited supporting infrastructure, pain points created during use, lack of differentiation, and poor targeting. Electric vehicles, for instance, face adoption obstacles related to charging infrastructure, while complex electronic devices are returned at high rates when customers find them frustrating to use. Companies can overcome these obstacles through strategic approaches. GenZe, attempting to introduce electric scooters to the U.S. market, has addressed multiple obstacles by designing bikes with cargo units for groceries and personal items, creating tech-heavy interfaces that appeal to younger consumers, and introducing special driving modes for beginners. They recognize that even superior products require intentional strategies to overcome customer inertia and the natural tendency to maintain the status quo.

Chapter 5: Building a Business Model Around Customer Jobs

Converting customer insights into sustainable business value requires understanding market size, pricing strategy, and business model design. The Jobs framework helps organizations more accurately size markets by looking beyond current purchasing patterns to identify untapped opportunities, determine how expensive solutions can be, and create business models that capture value while delivering on customer needs. Market sizing based on Jobs thinking often reveals larger opportunities than traditional product-based estimates. Hershey, for instance, discovered through customer research that adults—not children—consume 55% of all candy sold. This insight led to new products addressing adults' emotional jobs around guilt-free indulgence, such as Brookside's fruit-infused dark chocolate. By focusing on underserved jobs rather than existing product categories, Hershey expanded the overall candy market while regaining market leadership from competitor Mars. Pricing strategy becomes more sophisticated when viewed through a Jobs lens. While established markets often rely on competitor-based pricing, Jobs thinking enables value-based pricing that reflects how well a solution satisfies important customer jobs. Uber's range of service levels (from UberPOOL to UberLUX) and surge pricing model exemplify this approach—charging more when certain jobs become more important (like preserving expensive shoes in bad weather or arriving on time during peak hours). This strategy both maximizes revenue and reinforces brand positioning as more than just a taxi alternative. The Jobs framework also helps develop sustainable business models that create value for both customers and the company. Boston-based restaurant Tasting Counter illustrates this approach. By selling advance tickets that include the meal, tax, and tip, the restaurant satisfies customer jobs related to enjoying food without worrying about costs during the experience. Simultaneously, this model benefits the business by providing predictable demand, reducing waste, and improving cash flow through advance payment. The alignment between customer jobs and business operations creates mutual value. Kimberly-Clark's Golden Friends brand in South Korea demonstrates how Jobs thinking can open entirely new markets. Their research identified unique jobs and drivers among active seniors, leading to a product portfolio beyond traditional incontinence products to include comfortable shoes and walking aids. By understanding the broader context of seniors' lives—their desire for security when traveling alone, staying active, and maintaining happiness after children leave home—Kimberly-Clark created a brand with expanding growth potential in an aging population.

Chapter 6: Generating and Testing Jobs-Based Solutions

Translating customer insights into viable innovations requires a structured ideation process and systematic testing. Traditional brainstorming often produces incremental ideas from a few vocal participants, anchored around early suggestions. A Jobs-based approach transforms this process, using specific prompts derived from the Jobs Atlas to stimulate more creative thinking while establishing clear parameters for what constitutes a viable solution. Effective ideation begins with preparation and context. Before generating ideas, teams should clarify the strategic objectives, define boundaries of what will be considered, and review key customer insights from the Jobs Atlas. Participants should have time for individual reflection before group discussion, reducing the risk of "anchoring" around initial ideas. Small, diverse teams can then build on these initial concepts, developing them into more robust solutions that explicitly connect to identified customer jobs and pain points. When vetting ideas, the Jobs Atlas provides a comprehensive framework for assessment. Teams should evaluate whether solutions address important jobs for specific customer segments, fit with established behaviors or offer compelling reasons to change, overcome obstacles to adoption and use, create value for both customers and the business, and differentiate from competitive alternatives. This structured evaluation helps prevent the common pitfall of falling in love with ideas before thoroughly assessing their viability. Testing is essential for refining solutions and reducing risk. Smart experiments can address key uncertainties early and inexpensively. When Kohl's considered opening stores an hour later to reduce operating costs, executives designed a controlled experiment with 100 stores to test whether the change would significantly impact sales. The results showed negligible sales impact, validating a change that substantially reduced costs. Well-designed experiments test clear hypotheses with appropriate controls and reliable metrics. Customer feedback should be incorporated throughout the development process. Concept testing helps gauge interest, but requires creating a compelling story that puts customers "in the moment" rather than asking hypothetical questions. Food and beverage executive Christine Dahm notes that consumer feedback is most valuable when concepts are presented as stories that recreate the emotional states in which purchasing decisions occur. Simple techniques like tracking website visits from unique links or using buy-now buttons that lead to "coming soon" pages can provide quantitative data on potential adoption rates. Prototyping enables continuous refinement based on customer reactions. Even rough, unfinished prototypes can generate valuable feedback about what customers like, dislike, and question about a concept. Companies can also involve customers in co-creation activities, such as having them design packaging or allocate limited "budgets" among potential features, revealing priorities more accurately than direct questioning. This iterative process ensures that final solutions truly resonate with customer needs.

Chapter 7: Institutionalizing Jobs Thinking in Your Organization

For sustained innovation success, Jobs thinking must become embedded within organizational culture and processes rather than applied to isolated projects. This requires developing capabilities that make customer-centered innovation repeatable and consistent across teams, functions, and geographies. Building innovation capabilities starts with understanding current practices and organizational context. Key questions include how innovation is currently working (or not working), what cultural factors might affect adoption of new methodologies, and how the program will support strategic objectives. The answers shape program design, including training approaches, organizational structure, leadership involvement, and success metrics. Without this customization, even the best methodologies may fail to take root. Leadership support is crucial for institutionalizing Jobs thinking. When technology company Cognizant implemented a Jobs-based innovation program, they invited senior executives including the CIO to participate in the initial workshop. Seeing teams create immediate client benefits, these leaders became powerful champions for the initiative. Their visible support encouraged broader adoption and ensured resources for ongoing implementation. Middle managers also play vital roles by providing time for training, recognizing application of Jobs thinking in everyday work, and modeling customer-centric behaviors. Creating a community of practitioners sustains momentum beyond initial training. Cognizant established learning teams that persisted after workshops, providing forums for collaboration, shared learning, and mutual support. These communities counteract the typical enthusiasm drop-off that occurs when individuals return to daily work without connections to others using similar approaches. They also help maintain consistency in how methodologies are applied across different parts of the organization. A staged approach to capability building creates both immediate impact and long-term transformation. Cognizant's program focused on delivering value to current clients while simultaneously developing internal expertise. Project teams applied Jobs thinking to actual client challenges during workshops, creating immediate business benefits. Simultaneously, the company identified individuals passionate about the methodology and developed them as internal experts who could support broader adoption. This dual focus on immediate application and capability development accelerated both results and cultural change. The program's impact extended beyond customer-facing roles to internal operations, as employees applied Jobs thinking to improve cross-team communication, hiring processes, employee transit options, and sales protocols. By 2015, Cognizant was recognized as one of the world's 100 most innovative companies by Forbes—demonstrating how institutionalizing Jobs thinking can transform both customer solutions and organizational effectiveness.

Summary

The Jobs to be Done framework transforms innovation from an unpredictable art into a systematic science by focusing on what customers are fundamentally trying to accomplish rather than what they currently buy. By understanding the functional and emotional dimensions of customer jobs, the contexts that make certain jobs important, current approaches and pain points, success criteria, obstacles to adoption, value creation opportunities, and competitive alternatives, organizations can consistently develop solutions that genuinely resonate with customers. This approach represents a profound shift in how we think about markets and innovation. Rather than competing on incremental features or responding to superficial trends, organizations can create lasting differentiation by addressing fundamental human needs in superior ways. The Jobs Roadmap provides not just a method for individual projects but a framework for building innovation capabilities that make success repeatable. In a world where product life cycles continue to shrink and customer expectations continually rise, this customer-centered approach to innovation offers a sustainable path to growth and competitive advantage.

About Author

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Stephen Wunker

STEPHEN WUNKER was a long-time colleague of innovation thought leader Clayton Christensen, led development of one of the first smartphones, and now runs New Markets Advisors. He has written for publications including Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and The Financial Times.

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