Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product. You can think of it this way: users "hire" software to help get their job done.

Einstein said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” I bet he would have loved Jobs to Be Done because it’s all about understanding the problem you are solving for.

Alan Klement defines it this way:

JTBD theory was originally used to develop and design better products. But more recently companies, like Intercom (where Olivine co-founder, Raechel Lambert worked) and Basecamp, have begun to use it in their product marketing to refine their messaging to focus on what matters—solving their customers’ real problems.

People want their lives to be better. They have a vision of where they want to go. But there are obstacles in their path. Customers hire products to help them move forward—to make progress towards their vision of a better life.

A milkshake story for understanding JTBD

As an example, let’s look at the quintessential JTBD story about milkshakes. McDonald’s, global brand, wanted to increase its milkshake revenue. Its highly sophisticated marketing team had lots of demographic data that helped them build a profile for the company’s ideal milkshake customer (aka persona). McDonald’s brought in people who fit their ideal customer profile to ask for their advice on how to improve the milkshake product. Taking onboard its target customers’ advice, McDonald’s tried adding new flavors and toppings. They also brought in pricing experts (apparently they thought there could be some elasticity of demand).

But no matter what they tried McDonald’s didn’t sell more milkshakes.

That’s when they brought in Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School who suggested trying a different approach. He was an early proponent of the Jobs to Be Done theory of innovation and proposed that to sell more milkshakes, McDonald’s needed to understand the job the customer was hiring the milkshake to do.

The foundation of JTBD is this: there’s a job that arises in the lives of some people that causes them to hire a product to get the job done.

So Clayton’s team went to McDonald’s to take detailed notes for 18 hours to start understanding what job customers were hiring the milkshake for. What time were the milkshakes sold? Who was buying them? What else did they buy? Did they eat in or take out? It turned out that half of all milkshakes were purchased before 8:30 am and were ordered to go. If you’re like most people, you probably thought milkshakes were for dessert after burgers, and this is a surprising finding.

The next morning Clayton’s team posted outside McDonald’s and asked people who were leaving with their milkshakes why they came to McDonald’s to hire a milkshake so early in the morning. People didn’t know how to answer, so they asked it in a different way: “When you don’t come here to buy a milkshake, what do you do instead?”

The answers were quite amusing.

Sometimes they would eat a banana, but that was gone in 60 seconds and you were left with the peel. One guy admitted to eating a Snickers bar but felt so guilty he vowed never to do it again. Sometimes bagels were hired, but they are messy and people couldn’t really eat them with just one hand while they were driving.

Turns out all of these customers had the same job to do.

They wanted to not be bored during their long car commute. But they weren’t really hungry yet so they needed something to eat slowly that would last them through the morning.

The Snickers bar was guilt-laden and the bagel was too messy, but the milkshake! It took over twenty minutes to drink, fit perfectly in the cup holder, made no mess, and kept them full until lunch. Armed with the knowledge understanding buyer motivations, McDonald’s scrapped new flavors and toppings, and instead they decreased flavor choices. They made the formula thicker so it would last the length of the commute and made it faster and easier to buy a milkshake in the morning with a designated checkout register.

Milkshake sales increased 7x, which for a well established global company like McDonald’s is INSANE.

I’m certain they would have been thrilled with a 7% increase but instead they got 700%. And that’s because the market for the JTBD was the size of everyone who commutes to work by car. Customers who were buying McDonald’s milkshakes weren’t just choosing between a McDonald’s milkshake and a Burger King milkshake. They were choosing between bananas, bagels, donuts, and Snicker bars. When you understand the JTBD, you understand that your market and competition is a lot bigger than you thought.

Jobs remain constant, but people, products, and messages change

As you start learning about JTBD and define them for your own business, there are a few core principals to understand.

And the first one is that jobs remain constant, but people, products, and messages change. As we age, our demographics—age, income, location, interests, taste (aka persona)—will likely change. For the most part, jobs we want to do remain the same but how we solve those jobs and our taste in products will evolve.

JTBD: Getting humans from point A to point B

Let’s look at the age-old JTBD of getting from point A to point B. The job is always the same and the personas don’t matter, but the solutions evolve along with our interest in using them. In every era, it seems that there couldn’t possibly be any new ways of getting somewhere, but then somehow there always is.

Another great example of Jobs to Be Done remaining the same but the technology solutions changing is The Evolution of the Desk.

To summarize, here are the core principles of Jobs to be Done:

People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.
While Personas are effective at defining who your customers are, Jobs to be Done clarifies what your product is hired to do.
Job to be Done provides the functional steps toward the desired outcome, and how you know if the user has achieved their desired end goal.
Jobs are functional actions with social & emotional components.
Jobs have multiple, conflicting personas.
Jobs are stable over time.
Jobs are product and solution agnostic.

What is Jobs to Be Done and why does it matter?