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When Coffee and Kale Compete · 8 of 11
When Coffee and Kale Compete
Entrepreneurship MEDIUM

Jobs-As-Progress vs. Jobs-As-Activities

When Coffee and Kale Compete Alan Klement
be-goals do-goals powers-hierarchy ulwick innovation-as-elimination

Key Principle

Two incompatible interpretations of Jobs to be Done emerged after Christensen loosely introduced the phrase in The Innovator's Solution (2003). They target different levels of human motivation and cannot be blended without contradiction.

Jobs-As-Progress (Christensen, Moesta, Klement) operates at the Be-goal level of Powers' motivational hierarchy. A job is the progress a consumer seeks from their actual self to a desired self. It is descriptive theory: it explains why consumers change purchasing behavior but does not prescribe a fixed methodology.

Jobs-As-Activities (Ulwick, Outcome Driven Innovation) operates at the Do-goal level. A job is a functional task decomposed via a Universal Job Map. Emotional and social dimensions are defined relative to the core functional job, making function primary and emotion secondary. Klement argues this is more accurately an ideology and typology than a causal theory (citing Bacharach 1989, Bhattacherjee 2012, Colquitt 2007). -- Ch. 16

The theoretical backbone is William Powers' hierarchy (1973; Carver 2001): Be goals (identity -- "be thoughtful") sit above Do goals (activity -- "prepare dinner"), which sit above Motor Control goals. Motivation flows downward, but fulfillment does not flow upward. Successfully executing a Do goal does not guarantee the Be goal is satisfied; a Be goal can be fulfilled with no activity at all. -- Ch. 16

Innovation as elimination, not improvement. Jobs-As-Progress reframes the design question: not "how do we improve this activity?" but "how do we remove the need for it entirely?" Activities are intermediate steps consumers would skip if they could. Technology's role is to collapse those steps. -- Ch. 16

Why This Matters

The distinction determines what you optimize. Teams using Jobs-As-Activities improve task performance -- faster, more predictable, higher output. Teams using Jobs-As-Progress ask whether the task should exist at all. When IKEA acquired TaskRabbit in 2017, it eliminated assembly -- the very activity its flat-pack model had previously optimized. Each innovation peels away another unwanted layer of doing. E-books eliminated the drill, the hole, and the bookshelf entirely. -- Ch. 16

Conflating the two produces strategic incoherence: teams simultaneously try to improve and eliminate the same activity. It also causes misidentified competition. Clarity.fm discovered its customers' Be goal was feeling motivated amid conflicting advice -- making conferences, books, consultants, and video chats all direct competitors despite sharing no features. An activity-level analysis would have missed every one of those competitors. -- Ch. 16

Good Examples

  1. Revson vs. McGinneva (Levitt 1983). Both ideas predate JTBD by decades. Revson's "In the factories we make cosmetics. In the drug stores we sell hope" captures progress/identity. McGinneva's "They don't want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes" captures activity/task. Levitt published them side by side; the JTBD field later split them into rival schools. -- Ch. 16

  2. Police patrol and the "feel safe" Be goal. Police begin patrolling a neighborhood and the Be goal ("feel safe") is fulfilled without the customer performing any activity. An activity-focused lens would miss this entirely because there is no task to decompose. -- Ch. 16

  3. Basecamp's four Be-goal discrepancies. Jason Fried identified four identity-level struggles as "the why before the why" driving Basecamp adoption. These were not task-execution problems but gaps between how customers saw their situation and how they wanted it to be. -- Ch. 16

Counterpoints

  1. Blending the two schools. Practitioners who mix Jobs-As-Progress and Jobs-As-Activities end up optimizing task performance when the customer's actual struggle is identity-level, or pursuing vague aspirational framing when the customer needs functional improvement. The schools are incompatible, not complementary. -- Ch. 16

  2. Treating Jobs-As-Activities as novel theory. The Universal Job Map structurally mirrors Norman's Seven Stages of Action (1988) and standard HCI task analysis. Ulwick's differentiator is a business strategy layer, not a new explanatory mechanism. Treating it as novel theory overestimates what it can explain -- it cannot account for why consumers switch categories or adopt functionally unrelated solutions. -- Ch. 16

  3. The functional/social/emotional trichotomy. The most cited JTBD categorization traces to a single unsupported line in Christensen (2003) with no evidence, no citation, and no elaboration. It became canonical through repetition alone (argumentum ad populum), yet entire consulting frameworks are built on it. -- Ch. 16

Key Quotes

"A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one but cannot because constraints are stopping her." — Alan Klement, Ch. 16

"no matter how well a Do or Motor Control goal is fulfilled, it's a failure if the higher Be goal is not satisfied. It also means that a Do goal doesn't have to be successfully executed to fulfill a Be goal." — Alan Klement, Ch. 16

"it is technologies that function, not our desires." — Alan Klement, Ch. 16

"The ultimate goal is to be great at making products that people will buy. The rest is just a means to that end." — Alan Klement, Ch. 16

Rules of Thumb

  • If you can state the job without referencing a specific activity, you are likely at the Be-goal level -- where Jobs-As-Progress operates.
  • Be goals are stable; Do goals are disposable. Multiple Do goals (cook, buy wine, write a poem) can serve the same Be goal ("be thoughtful"). Anchor strategy to the stable layer.
  • Ask "why?" one more time than feels comfortable. Norman's extension of Levitt: people don't want a drill, nor a hole, nor bookshelves -- they want bookshelves installed. Radical innovation comes from the next "why."
  • If your competitive analysis only includes products with similar features, you are working at the Do-goal level and missing cross-category competitors.
  • Fulfillment does not flow upward. Measuring task-execution success tells you nothing guaranteed about whether the customer's Be goal was satisfied.

Related References