Customer & product
Jobs to be Done
A lens for understanding demand: customers hire products to make progress in a specific circumstance, and whether they switch is governed by four opposing forces. Study the job and the forces around it rather than the customer's attributes or the product's features.
Also known as JTBD, Jobs Theory, Four Forces of Progress. First set out by Clayton M. Christensen, Anthony W. Ulwick and Bob Moesta (contested) in 2003; the primary source is cited in full below.
Where this is contested
Provenance is genuinely contested. Christensen popularised Jobs Theory in The Innovator's Solution (2003) and the milkshake study; Ulwick traces his outcome-driven variant to 1991, briefed Christensen on it in 1999 and published 'Turn Customer Input into Innovation' in HBR in 2002; and Moesta co-developed the interview method and the Forces of Progress, whose labels vary slightly across the Moesta, Spiek and Klement tellings.
- Format
- Structural model
- Level
- Product · Business unit
- Best for
- Understand customers · Position against competitors
- Decision stage
- Diagnose · Explore options
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Time to apply
- Two to four weeks for a proper round of switch interviews; an afternoon to map the forces from stories you already hold.
Plate · The model
The components
Push of the situation
The frustration, friction or breakdown in the current situation that starts the search for something better. Without push there is no energy for change, however good the new solution looks.
Signals of strength
A triggering event recurs across interviews (a move, a failure, a deadline, a life change) · Phrases like 'I couldn't put up with it any longer' · Workarounds accumulating around the old solution · The struggle predates any awareness of your product
Pull of the new solution
The attraction of the new way: both the appeal of the specific solution and the imagined better life it promises. Pull is what marketing usually works on, often to the neglect of the other three forces.
Signals of strength
Interviewees describe an imagined future state, not a feature list · A specific capability is named unprompted as the deciding attraction · Recommendations or observed use by peers triggered active looking · The person can say what the product would let them stop doing
Anxiety of the new solution
The worries that surface once switching becomes real: will it work, what does it cost to learn, what if I choose badly, what will it say about me. Anxiety operates at the point of choice and again at first use, and it silently kills more purchases than competitors do.
Signals of strength
Abandoned carts, stalled trials, long gaps between active looking and buying · Questions about contracts, cancellation, hidden costs and data migration · Fear of looking foolish in front of colleagues or family · Reassurance-seeking: reviews read late at night, one more demo requested
Habit of the present
The comfortable inertia of the current way of doing things, including allegiance to existing solutions, sunk costs and identity. Habit explains why people tolerate bad situations for years and why superior products lose to incumbents.
Signals of strength
'We've always done it this way' offered without embarrassment · The current solution is free, familiar or bundled with something valued · Long tolerance of the struggle before any active looking began · Switching would require admitting a past decision was wrong
When it earns its keep
- You are designing or repositioning a product and need to know what customers actually hire it to do, which is often several steps removed from what it nominally does.
- Growth has stalled despite feature investment, and segmenting by demographics or firmographics is not explaining who buys and who does not.
- Customers keep defecting to alternatives outside your obvious category, and you suspect your real competitive set is wider than your market definition.
- You are about to write messaging or set pricing and want to anchor both in the causal moment of purchase rather than in attitudes surveyed out of context.
And when it doesn't
- You need statistically representative prioritisation of customer needs across a large market. Switch interviews are qualitative; Ulwick's outcome-driven variant or conjoint analysis serves that need better.
- The purchase is a pure commodity bought on price with no meaningful switching story to reconstruct. The forces will all read as price and the exercise adds little.
- You have no access to recent purchasers or switchers. Without real purchase stories the forces are speculation dressed as insight.
- The question is internal, about organisation or operations rather than demand. Jobs Theory analyses why customers buy, nothing else.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- Access to people who recently bought, switched or cancelled, ideally within the last 90 days while the story is still retrievable.
- Time for unhurried timeline interviews that reconstruct the whole purchase, from first thought to first use, rather than a survey of stated preferences.
- A working definition of the circumstance in which the struggle occurs, held separately from any description of who the customer is.
- An honest list of the alternatives customers actually weighed, including doing nothing and cobbled-together workarounds.
- Discipline to record what people did and said at each moment, not what they now believe about themselves.
- 1
Find recent switchers
Recruit people who recently moved from one solution to another, including from non-consumption. The theory's unit of analysis is the switching moment, because that is where the causes of demand are visible. Prospects who have never bought can only tell you their theories about themselves.
- 2
Reconstruct the timeline
Interview each switcher like a documentary maker: first thought, passive looking, active looking, the deciding event, the purchase, first use. Chase specifics. What was happening that day? Who else was in the room? Vague summaries signal a story not yet recovered.
- 3
Map the four forces
For each story, separate what pushed the person away from the old situation, what pulled them towards the new solution, what anxieties nearly stopped them, and what habits held them in place. Formulations vary: Moesta and Spiek speak of the push of the situation and the pull of the new idea, while Klement groups anxiety and habit together as the forces that block demand. The structure is the same; a switch happens when push and pull together outweigh anxiety and habit.
- 4
Define the job
From the pattern across interviews, state the progress being sought in its circumstance, with its functional, emotional and social dimensions. A good job statement is stable over time, solution-agnostic, and explains the odd competitors that keep appearing in the stories.
- 5
Act on the forces
Redesign the offer and the message against the diagram. Amplify pull by promising the progress, reduce anxiety with guarantees and small first steps, and take habit seriously as an engineering problem. Reducing the blocking forces is usually cheaper than adding more pull, and far cheaper than adding features.
Reading the result
A job statement describing the progress customers seek in a defined circumstance, a force diagram for the switching decision with evidence under each force, and a corrected competitive set that includes non-consumption and workarounds.
- The switch happens when push and pull together exceed anxiety and habit. If sales are stalling, look first at the blocking forces; most organisations over-invest in pull because it is the force they can see.
- The job defines your real competition. Whatever else gets hired for the same progress is a competitor, however unlike you it looks.
- Read the forces per circumstance, not per customer type. The same person hires differently in different circumstances, which is why demographic segments predict so little.
A worked example
A regional self-storage operator learns what its units are hired to do
A self-storage company with eight sites across the East Midlands has flat occupancy despite repeated first-three-months discounting. Before another price promotion, the commercial lead runs twelve timeline interviews with customers who took a unit in the past 90 days, reconstructing each rental from first thought to move-in day, then maps the four forces.
- Push of the situation
- The stories cluster around life events rather than storage needs: a house sale completing before the onward purchase, a bereavement, a separation, a landlord ending a tenancy. The push is 'my home has stopped working and my possessions are in the way of the next step'. Nobody woke up wanting storage; storage arrived as the answer to a disruption.
- Pull of the new solution
- What attracted people was rarely price. It was the promise of immediate breathing room: a unit available the same day, drive-up access, month-to-month terms, somewhere clean and dry. Several described the unit as 'getting my house back' or 'pressing pause' on decisions about belongings they could not yet face.
- Anxiety of the new solution
- The anxieties were specific: whether the headline price would jump after the promotional period, whether belongings would come out damp, how secure the site is at night, and whether they were signing into a notice period they did not understand. Two interviewees nearly abandoned the online checkout over compulsory insurance small print. One admitted worrying that needing storage 'meant I'd become a hoarder'.
- Habit of the present
- The incumbent alternatives were all free: the garage, the spare room, a parent's loft, a mate with a van. People had tolerated serious clutter for months or years. The firm's largest competitor was doing nothing, followed by a one-off house clearance. No interviewee compared it against another storage brand for long.
The read. The unit is hired to create space and calm during a stressful life transition, so the operator repositions around that job: a same-day move-in guarantee, plain pricing with a twelve-month price promise to disarm the rise anxiety, referral partnerships with estate agents and removal firms who meet the push moment first, and messaging built on 'press pause' rather than square footage. The discounting strategy was attacking pull, which was never the constraint. Anxiety and habit were, and both are cheaper to fix than the discounts were costing.
Pitfalls
- Writing job statements that are just the product category with a verb in front. 'Store my belongings' is what the product does; the job in the interviews was closer to 'clear the decks so I can get through this transition'.
- Asking customers what they want instead of reconstructing what they did. Stated preferences are theories; the timeline of an actual purchase is evidence.
- Keeping demographic segments and bolting jobs on top. If the circumstance defines demand, the segment is the circumstance, and averaging across circumstances destroys the signal.
- Capturing only the functional job and ignoring the emotional and social dimensions, which frequently decide the purchase even in business markets.
- Mixing the two schools without noticing. Ulwick's outcome statements and Moesta's switch narratives rest on different definitions of a job, and a team that blends the vocabularies usually executes neither method properly.
- Interviewing whoever is available rather than recent switchers. Memory of the forces decays fast, and long-tenured customers can no longer tell you why they moved.
What the critics say
There is no single Jobs to be Done method. The jobs-as-activities school (Ulwick's Outcome-Driven Innovation) and the jobs-as-progress school (Christensen, Moesta, Klement) define the core concept incompatibly, so two teams 'doing JTBD' may be doing quite different things and citing each other's success stories as evidence.
Klement, A. (2018) 'Know the Two Very Different Interpretations of Jobs to be Done', jtbd.info.
Critics argue the theory repackages long-standing demand-side marketing thought with limited new predictive power. Levitt was teaching that people want a quarter-inch hole rather than a quarter-inch drill decades earlier, and needs-based and means-end research traditions cover much of the same ground.
Levitt, T. (1969) The Marketing Mode: Pathways to Corporate Growth. New York: McGraw-Hill.
The published evidence base leans heavily on retrospective anecdotes, above all the milkshake study, and the theory is hard to falsify: a job can be defined at almost any level of abstraction, so a failed prediction can always be blamed on having chosen the wrong altitude rather than on the theory.
Sources and further reading
- Christensen, C. M. and Raynor, M. E. (2003) The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
- Christensen, C. M., Hall, T., Dillon, K. and Duncan, D. S. (2016) 'Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done', Harvard Business Review, 94(9), September 2016. ↗
- Ulwick, A. W. (2002) 'Turn Customer Input into Innovation', Harvard Business Review, 80(1), January 2002. ↗
- Moesta, B. with Engle, G. (2020) Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress. Lioncrest Publishing.