Jobs to Be Done

Seeing products as something customers hire to make progress in a situation.

Also known as: jobs to be done, JTBD, jobs theory

Jobs to Be Done says customers don’t buy products — they hire them to make progress in a specific situation. People hire a drill for a hole, a hole for hanging a shelf, a shelf for an organized home. The job, not the product category, is the unit of competition: your rival is everything hired for the same job, including spreadsheets and interns.

job: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]"
e.g. "When month-end closes, I want reconciled books without chasing receipts, so I can report on time"

Framing work this way changes what you build: features serve the job’s struggling moments, onboarding targets the hiring moment, and churn analysis asks which competing “hire” won. It also explains why better products lose — the incumbent was hired for reliability and habit, not features.

The classic mistakes:

Jobs so broad they explain nothing. “Help teams collaborate” fits a thousand products. A good job names the situation, the struggle and the desired outcome specifically enough to design against.
Ignoring the firing moment. Every hire implies a fire — the old workaround abandoned. If you cannot name what gets fired, adoption has no trigger and the sale never closes.
Persona theater. Demographic personas (“Marketing Mary, 34”) without jobs attached decorate walls and decide nothing. Attach every persona to its jobs or drop the persona.
Assuming the job is static. Jobs evolve as situations change (remote work rewrote thousands). Re-interview around the job yearly; the product that stops matching the job starts churning silently.

Use it for: positioning (value proposition in job language converts better), onboarding (first run should complete the core job), and competitive analysis (list all hires for the job, not just direct rivals).