Key Principle
Customers do not buy products; they "hire" them to make progress in specific circumstances. A job is "the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance" (Chapter 2). The cause of a purchase is never the customer's demographic profile or a product's feature list -- it is the circumstance that creates a struggle for progress. When the product resolves that struggle, the customer re-hires it; when it does not, they fire it.
"Correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation -- the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution" (Introduction). Innovation fails not from lack of investment but from organizing around correlations instead of causality. Circumstance -- who, when, where, while doing what -- is the variable that turns generic desire into actionable demand. "Needs are analogous to trends -- directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another" (Chapter 2).
Jobs are discovered, not created. "Jobs themselves are enduring and persistent, but the way we solve them can change dramatically over time" (Chapter 2). Sharing information across distances went from the Pony Express to email; teen communication without parental oversight went from passing notes to Snapchat. The job is the stable unit of analysis for long-term strategy. Products are ephemeral; jobs are durable.
Why This Matters
Companies spend enormous sums on R&D -- 1,000 public companies spent $680B in 2015 alone -- yet 94% of global executives remain unsatisfied with innovation performance (Introduction). The problem is structural: data organized around customer attributes and product features creates an illusion of analytical rigor. Stage-gates, six-sigma, and big data processes operationalize that illusion, causing companies to "get better and better at the wrong things" (Introduction). As Deming put it, "every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets" (Introduction). Innovation mediocrity is a design flaw, not an execution flaw.
Without the Jobs framework, companies ask "how can we make our product better?" instead of "what job did the customer hire this product to do?" The first question yields feature benchmarks against competitors. The second reveals the actual progress the customer needs -- which may have nothing to do with the product category as the company defines it. When you see competition through a jobs lens, "the competitive field is likely completely different from what you might have imagined" (Chapter 2). Netflix competes with wine. Facebook competes with cigarettes. If you define competition by product category, you optimize features against rivals. If you define it by job, you optimize the experience of progress against all alternatives -- including doing nothing.
Good Examples
The Milk Shake Dilemma (Chapter 2): The same person buys the same milk shake for two entirely different jobs. During the morning commute, the job is functional (filling breakfast), emotional (entertainment), and social (avoiding embarrassment of eating messily). At dinnertime with his son, the job is emotional (feeling like a good dad). One product, two completely different hiring criteria -- proving that circumstance, not the customer, drives the decision.
SNHU (Chapter 3): Adult online learners (average age 30, juggling work and family) were not choosing between colleges. They were choosing between SNHU and doing nothing. By designing for the nonconsumption job -- "convenience, customer service, credentials, and speedy completion times" -- SNHU grew from $32M to $535M revenue at 34% CAGR over six years. Critically, SNHU discovered it served two different jobs requiring physically separate organizations: 18-year-olds hiring for the coming-of-age experience and adults hiring for credentials and speed (Chapter 3).
QuickBooks (Chapter 3): "Half the functionality at twice the price" yet became the global leader. Small business owners' job was confidence that money was flowing efficiently, not accounting expertise. The real competition was spreadsheets, a shoebox of receipts, or hiring a bookkeeper -- not other accounting software. Intuit built $4B revenue and $25B market cap on this insight. This proves that functional superiority is not enough: if a competitor addresses the real job -- including its emotional and social dimensions -- it wins despite objective inferiority on product specs (Introduction).
Bob Moesta's Condos (Chapter 4): Demographics could not predict condo buyers. The real barrier was emotional anxiety about discarding a life's worth of meaning -- symbolized by the dining room table with its dings from birthdays and homework. The solution was to remove the anxiety: moving services, two years of storage, reducing customization choices from 30 pages to 3. Result: 25% growth in 2007 while the industry fell 49%. "I went in thinking we were in the business of new home construction. But I realized we were instead in the business of moving lives" (Chapter 4).
Counterpoints
The Segway (Chapter 2): Conceived around the need for "more efficient personal transportation" without specifying circumstance. "But whose need? When? Why? In what circumstances?" (Chapter 2). Without circumstance, the product answered a question nobody was asking in their actual life. Contrast with the milk shake: same product, same person, but the morning commute circumstance produces a completely different job than the dinnertime circumstance.
The Average Customer Fallacy (Introduction): The Air Force measured 4,000+ pilots on nearly a dozen body dimensions; zero pilots matched the average on all dimensions. Designing for the "average customer" is designing for nobody. Averages erase the circumstantial specificity where jobs live.
The Big Data Illusion (Introduction): Chris Anderson's claim that "correlation is enough" is the precise error the theory corrects. More data organized around the wrong unit of analysis produces more precise irrelevance. "All this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it" (Introduction). The Nielsen validation underscores the cost: out of 20,000+ new product launches tracked from 2012-2016, only 92 sold more than $50M in year one and sustained sales in year two. "Every single one of them nailed a poorly performed Job to Be Done" (Chapter 3).
Key Quotes
"Correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation -- the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution." -- Clayton Christensen, Introduction
"A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance." -- Clayton Christensen, Chapter 2
"We don't 'create' jobs, we discover them. Jobs themselves are enduring and persistent, but the way we solve them can change dramatically over time." -- Clayton Christensen, Chapter 2
"When you are solving a customer's job, your products essentially become services. What matters is not the bundle of product attributes you rope together, but the experiences you enable." -- Clayton Christensen, Chapter 3
Rules of Thumb
- Define your competitive set by the job, not the product category. "If you don't know what you're really competing with, how could you ever hope to create something that consumers will choose to hire over all other potential solutions?" (Chapter 2).
- If you cannot name the specific circumstance your customer is in, you do not yet have a job -- you have a need, which is "directionally useful, but totally insufficient" (Chapter 2).
- Every job has three integrated dimensions: functional, social, and emotional. "Consumers' social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires" (Chapter 2). Companies overwhelmingly design for function alone, which is where most innovations die.
- Your biggest competitor is often inaction -- people hiring nothing rather than something that does the job poorly (Chapter 3). "Consumers choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly" (Chapter 3).
- Look for compensating behaviors: when people invest time and ingenuity in workarounds, that is revealed evidence of an unmet job. "Whenever you see a compensating behavior, pay very close attention, because it's likely a clue that there is an innovation opportunity waiting to be seized" (Chapter 4).
- Negative jobs -- things people actively want to avoid -- are often the best innovation opportunities. CVS MinuteClinic (1,000+ locations) was built on the job of not wanting to see the doctor (Chapter 4).
Related References
- What Makes a Valid Job - What makes a valid job statement
- The Four Forces of Progress - Forces governing customer switching
- Five Methods for Discovering Jobs - How to discover jobs