What drives consumers to purchase and use certain products and services over others?
In the online course Disruptive Strategy, former Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen explores this question.
Despite billions spent on innovation each year, most new products fail. “Somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all new products launched into the market don’t succeed financially,” Christensen says in Disruptive Strategy. “The reason is they don’t target a job that people are trying to get done.”
This insight forms the foundation of Christensen’s jobs to be done theory, which asserts that customers don’t simply buy a product or service—they “hire” it to do a “job.”
As defined by Christensen in the course, “A ‘job to be done’ is a problem or opportunity that somebody is trying to solve. We call it a ‘job’ because it needs to be done, and we hire people or products to get jobs done.”
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What Is the Jobs to Be Done Theory?
The jobs to be done framework (sometimes abbreviated JTBD) helps businesses understand how and why customers make buying decisions.
Emerging ventures can use it to discover what potential customers value and use that information to differentiate themselves from industry incumbents. Established companies can utilize the framework to better understand their market position and identify new opportunities or threats.
The jobs to be done framework explains why some products succeed or fail by focusing on customer motivations. Identifying new or emerging customer jobs to be done is also a key part of Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory.
“If we understand the job the customer is trying to do and develop a product that nails the job perfectly, then the probability that your innovation will be successful is improved in dramatic ways,” Christensen says in Disruptive Strategy.
Similarly, companies that develop offerings centered on jobs rather than customer attributes and buying behaviors are better equipped to avoid disruption.
“If you frame your business in terms of products you’re trying to sell, life comes and goes, and you get supplanted by other products and technologies,” Christensen explains in Disruptive Strategy. “But if you deliver something that does the job well, it opens up opportunities to use new technologies as they emerge. What your business is about is doing the job better and better, and that clarity doesn’t diminish over time because of the stability of the jobs to be done.”
What Are Jobs to Be Done?
In Disruptive Strategy, a job to be done is defined as a “circumstances-based description of understanding your customers’ desires, competitive set, anxieties, habits, and timeline of purchase.”
Using Christensen’s framework, you can identify jobs to be done by completing the following statements related to outstanding tasks in your life:
- “Help me…”
- “Help me avoid…”
- “I need to…”
In Disruptive Strategy, Christensen uses a milkshake to exemplify how a product can satisfy a job to be done. A fast-food chain finds that most of its milkshakes are sold before 8:30 a.m., and those customers don’t order any other menu items. For milkshake customers, the product meets a specific need: It helps them avoid getting hungry or bored during their commutes. The milkshakes take a long time to drink and can easily be held while driving, making them effective for that job.
In an interview with HBR IdeaCast, Christensen shares how understanding commuters’ job to be done can improve how the chain produces and sells milkshakes:
- One approach is to provide customers with a prepaid card that allows them to check out quickly and avoid waiting in line
- Another is to make milkshakes with a thicker consistency, so it takes customers longer to drink them
By taking these actions, the restaurant chain can ensure its customers feel sated and get to work on time.
Types of Customer Jobs
When an organization sets out to identify the jobs a customer might hire its product to do, the focus is often on a functional problem. For example, a customer might hire a protein bar to perform the job of curbing their hunger.
Although functional jobs to be done are important to understand, they’re not the only type. There are also social and emotional jobs, which are harder to measure in quantitative terms, but reflect the feeling one gets from owning or using a product or service.
Returning to the protein bar example: What other jobs might a customer hire that product to perform beyond satiating hunger?
If the customer purchases the protein bar because they’re trying to lose weight, that might be considered an emotional job to be done. If they buy it because they’re heavily involved in the bodybuilding community and the brand carries prestige, that might be considered a social job to be done.
By understanding customers’ needs, the protein bar manufacturer can establish a customer profile and marketing strategy around each discrete job.
Identifying Jobs to Be Done
If you’re seeking to identify your customers’ jobs to be done, there are several steps you can take, including:
- Reflect on your own experiences: Remember that you’re also a customer. By reflecting on your behaviors and experiences, you can identify patterns in your decision-making that apply to your company’s broader customer base.
- Observe others’ behaviors: After gaining initial insights, observe those around you. Seek to validate and build on your initial personal observations.
- Conduct customer interviews: Do you have an active customer base? Interviewing current, former, and prospective users can unlock critical insights.
5 Jobs to Be Done Examples
1. Zoom: Connecting Remote Workers
The number of professionals working remotely has grown exponentially over the past decade. This trend was accelerated due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced organizations to quickly adapt to remote work at scale. Organizations turned to digital tools to stay connected, and videoconferencing software Zoom emerged as one of the most widely used collaboration platforms.
In this case, the job to be done is helping remote workers manage and engage with colleagues without in-person interaction, and Zoom has proven effective. The company experienced a 354 percent increase in customer growth following the COVID-19 pandemic and remains a staple for many professionals today.
As hybrid and remote work models become a long-term reality, the need for seamless virtual connections isn’t going away. Tools like Zoom continue to evolve, with ongoing improvements to security, integrations, and user experience to better support how modern teams work.
2. PayPal: Providing a Secure Way to Make Online Payments
PayPal is another company that’s experienced significant growth as people increasingly use digital payment methods.
For consumers who need to securely and easily pay online, PayPal’s offerings meet this need. In addition to a large merchant network, PayPal provides customers with convenient payment options, such as its One Touch checkout tool.
According to CEO Dan Schulman in a Motley Fool article, PayPal also invokes a feeling of “trust and security” among its customers, which speaks to the emotional dimension of jobs described in Christensen’s theory.
3. DoorDash: Delivering Food Quickly and Conveniently
DoorDash offers customers a convenient way to order food without leaving their home or making a phone call, and receive it via contactless delivery. It’s the largest platform of its kind in the U.S. and has partnerships with over 310,000 restaurants.
As the desire for convenience and contactless delivery has continued to rise, the company has broadened its services to allow customers to shop from convenience stores, pharmacies, and retailers from one centralized app.
The platform gained popularity as consumers hired it to fulfill the job of satiating their hunger without leaving the house. Now, DoorDash’s market dominance puts it in a prime spot to continue helping people get food and items delivered to their door safely and conveniently.
4. Nike: Serving Runners’ Needs
Nike is one of the best-selling athletic apparel and footwear companies worldwide, but its rise to the upper echelons began with a product geared toward a specific job that needed to be done.
In the mid-1960s, track and field coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman sought to engineer a shoe that enabled runners to run faster and lighter with less risk of injury. He conceived of a design with a soft sponge midsole through the ball and heel of the foot, intended to absorb road shock and reduce leg fatigue.
This idea resulted in the Cortez, which became a staple in Nike’s footwear lineup and was dubbed the “most popular long-distance training shoe in the U.S.” by Runner’s World magazine in the early 1970s.
Since the Cortez’s success, Nike has continued to develop products that help athletes of all levels run with greater efficiency and support. Nike debuted its legendary Waffle Trainer in 1974, which provided runners with traction and cushioning that performed well on various surfaces.
More recently, the company integrated carbon plates into shoes like the Zoom Vaporfly 4% and ZoomX Vaporfly Next%—a move that dramatically improves race performance. In October 2019, Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge broke the two-hour marathon barrier wearing a carbon-plated prototype from the brand’s Alphafly series.
As runners continue to seek footwear to meet their training needs, Nike is well-positioned to deliver.
5. Netflix: A Different Job Entirely
As explored in Disruptive Strategy, Netflix is a great example of a company that leveraged jobs to be done to disrupt an entire industry.
In the early 2000s, Blockbuster was the dominant player in home video rental with over 5,000 stores across the U.S. Customers hired Blockbuster to perform a simple job: to be the convenient stop to pick up the latest releases for movie night. The experience was built around impulse, availability, and new hits on the shelf.
Netflix, by contrast, was hired for a fundamentally different job. DVD-by-mail customers weren’t planning a spontaneous movie night. They were looking for a better way to discover and watch films that matched their personal tastes, on their schedule. Rather than a transactional, single-night rental, Netflix functioned more like a personalized catalog that offered customers no late fees, deadlines, or trips to the store.
These different jobs produced radically different business models. Blockbuster invested in real estate, shelf space, and stocking new releases, while Netflix invested in logistics, personalization, and customer data. Netflix succeeded because it started by identifying an underserved customer need and built a business model around fulfilling it. That’s exactly what the jobs to be done framework is designed to do.
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