When a fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes, they tried everything. New flavors. Different prices. Better marketing. Nothing worked. Then researchers asked a different question: “What job are people hiring a milkshake to do?”
The answer revolutionized how we think about product development.
The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework examines why customers “hire” products to make progress in specific situations. Instead of categorizing users by demographics or asking what features they want, JTBD uncovers what customers are actually trying to accomplish.
Developed by Tony Ulwick and popularized by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School, this framework has helped companies transform struggling products into market leaders.
This guide explains how JTBD works, demonstrates the research techniques that reveal customer jobs, and shows how product teams use these insights to build products that solve real problems. You’ll learn why half of all milkshakes are sold before 9 AM, what that teaches us about customer needs, and how to apply these lessons to your own products.
The Milkshake That Changed Everything
Clayton Christensen’s famous milkshake study illustrates why traditional product development falls short. A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. They conducted focus groups, analyzed customer demographics, and tested new flavors based on preferences. Sales barely moved.
JTBD researchers took a different approach. They started by simply observing who bought milkshakes and when. The surprise: Half of all milkshakes were sold before 9 AM to solo commuters.
This pattern demanded investigation. The researchers returned to interview these morning customers, asking not about flavor preferences but about their morning routines. What emerged was unexpected: customers weren’t buying a milkshake. They were hiring it to do three jobs during their commute: provide entertainment for a boring drive, allow one-handed consumption while driving, and prevent mid-morning hunger.
The competition wasn’t other milkshakes or even other drinks. Customers revealed they’d tried bananas, which disappeared too quickly to last the commute. Bagels required two hands and created a mess while driving. Snickers bars did the job but came with guilt about eating candy for breakfast. Most often, they chose to eat nothing at all, arriving at work hungry by 10 AM.
Understanding the real job changed everything. The chain made their shakes thicker so they’d last the entire commute. They moved dispensers to the front of the store for faster morning purchases. They didn’t change the flavor at all. Sales increased dramatically because they finally solved the right problem.
This story demonstrates the core principle of Jobs to Be Done: customers don’t buy products, they hire them to make progress in specific situations. The milkshake wasn’t competing with other milkshakes. It was competing with boredom, hunger, and the constraints of driving.
Understanding the Jobs Framework
The milkshake study reveals a fundamental truth: customers don’t care about your product. They care about making progress in their lives. The Jobs to Be Done framework builds on this insight, providing a systematic way to discover and address the progress customers seek.
Core Concepts That Define JTBD
Customers “hire” and “fire” products. Just as you’d hire a contractor to remodel your kitchen, customers hire products to get specific jobs done. If the product doesn’t perform, it gets fired. This hiring metaphor emphasizes that customers actively choose solutions for specific purposes, not passive consumption.
Jobs remain stable; solutions change. The job of “taking notes in meetings” has existed for centuries. We’ve hired human scribes, stenographers, pen and paper, laptops, and now AI transcription. The job persists while solutions evolve. This stability makes jobs a reliable foundation for strategy.
Jobs are solution-agnostic. Customers don’t care how the job gets done, only that it does. Morning commuters don’t specifically want milkshakes; they want to arrive at work full and entertained. Understanding this opens your thinking to unexpected competitive threats and opportunities.
The job, not the customer or product, is the unit of analysis. Traditional thinking segments by customer type or product category. JTBD focuses on the job itself. A millionaire and a student might hire the same product for the same job. One person might hire different products for the same job at different times.
Circumstances create jobs. Jobs arise from specific situations, not customer characteristics. An executive needs to “look prepared in an unexpected video call” not because they’re an executive, but because they’re working from home when the boss calls. The circumstances trigger the job.
These concepts come to life when you see how every job customers try to complete involves three dimensions:
Every Job Has Three Dimensions
Functional Progress: The practical task
- “Enable me to join video calls from any device”
- “Help me transfer money internationally”
- “Let me track project status in real-time”
Emotional Progress: The feeling sought
- “Feel confident I won’t miss important moments”
- “Reduce anxiety about payment security”
- “Feel in control of my team’s workflow”
Social Progress: The desired perception
- “Appear professional despite working from home”
- “Look financially sophisticated to partners”
- “Be seen as an organized leader”
For example, let’s say Zoom conquered video conferencing by addressing all three dimensions. Functionally, it could work reliably across devices. Emotionally, it might reduce meeting anxiety with simple interfaces. Socially, it could help people appear professional with virtual backgrounds. Competitors focusing only on technical features would miss why people actually choose one platform over another.
How to Uncover Real Customer Jobs
Finding genuine customer jobs requires specific research techniques. You can’t simply ask “What features do you want?” because customers will rationalize answers that sound logical but miss their true motivations.
Bob Moesta, who co-developed JTBD with Clayton Christensen, discovered this through thousands of customer interviews. In one recorded session with Chris Spiek from Re-Wired Group, they interviewed a man who made an impulse mattress purchase at Costco after sleeping poorly for 18 months.
The surface story seemed simple: bad mattress, back pain, bought new mattress. But deeper investigation revealed the real job. The trigger wasn’t physical discomfort but a friend’s comment: “You’re too old to still be sleeping on a hand-me-down mattress.” The job wasn’t “get better sleep.” It was “stop feeling like I’m failing at basic adulting.” This emotional job had remained unaddressed for 18 months until social pressure made it urgent.
This illustrates why JTBD interviews focus on actual switching moments. As Alan Klement, author of “When Coffee and Kale Compete,” explains: “People don’t buy when they should. They buy when they can no longer tolerate the struggle.”
Finding the Right People to Interview
The best insights come from customers who recently changed their behavior:
New customers (last 90 days) – Their switching story is fresh. They remember the specific moments and emotions that drove their decision.
Recent churners – They’ll give you unvarnished truth about where your product failed to do the job they hired it for.
Almost-churners who stayed – These customers reveal the minimum bar for job completion and what barely keeps them.
Upgraders or downgraders – Their changing needs show how job priorities evolve over time.
The Four Forces That Drive Every Decision
Moesta’s research revealed that every purchase decision involves four competing forces:
Push of the Current Situation: The frustration with how things are now “My back hurts” → “I feel like a failure as an adult”
Pull of the New Solution: The vision of a better future “No more pain” → “I’ll have my life together”
Anxiety of Change: The fear of making the wrong choice “What if I pick the wrong mattress?” → “What if I waste money like always?”
Habit of the Present: The comfort of the status quo “I’ve managed this long” → “At least I know what to expect”
Understanding these forces shapes your interview approach. You’re not just collecting feature requests. You’re uncovering the emotional journey that leads to change.
Interview Questions That Reveal Hidden Jobs
Start with the story, not the solution:
“Take me back to when you first started looking for something new…” This opens the narrative without leading them to talk about features.
For the Trigger Moment:
- “What happened that day that was different?”
- “Had that happened before? Why was this time different?”
- “Who else was involved? What did they say or do?”
For Understanding Competition:
- “What else did you consider, including doing nothing?”
- “What workarounds were you using before?”
- “What was the hardest part about comparing options?”
For the Decision Point:
- “What finally tipped you over the edge?”
- “What anxieties did you have to overcome?”
- “What convinced you this was the right choice?”
For Validation:
- “What’s different now versus before?”
- “What surprised you most?”
- “What would you tell someone in your old situation?”
These questions work because they focus on specific moments and emotions rather than opinions and preferences. They reveal not just what customers did, but why they finally acted after potentially years of struggling with the same problem.
JTBD Transformation in Action: Microsoft’s Pivot
Microsoft faced a serious issue with its Software Assurance program. Customers weren’t seeing the clear value, and the program was underperforming. Despite being positioned as a way to keep software updated, renewal rates continued dropping.
Instead of simply adding more features or cutting prices, Microsoft implemented the JTBD framework to understand what progress IT managers were actually trying to make.
Through JTBD research, Microsoft discovered that customers weren’t just looking for software updates. They were trying to:
- Optimize their IT budgets across multiple years
- Manage technology risk in their organizations
- Reduce business disruptions from unexpected changes
This insight revealed that Software Assurance was solving the wrong problem. IT managers didn’t need better access to updates. They needed help with strategic planning and risk management.
By understanding these deeper jobs, Microsoft redesigned the program to directly address these critical needs. The shift from focusing on software updates to enabling IT planning transformed how customers viewed and used Software Assurance.
This transformation illustrates a crucial principle: understanding jobs is only the beginning. The real challenge is translating those insights into product decisions that create measurable value. Here’s how to bridge that gap.
Building Products Around Jobs
The Microsoft transformation illustrates a crucial point: understanding jobs is only valuable if you can translate those insights into product changes. Here’s how to move from job discovery to product decisions that actually matter.
Start with What You Already Have
Most product teams don’t have the luxury of building from scratch. You have existing features, some serving clear jobs, others existing for historical reasons. Your first step is mapping reality.
Take your feature list and ask: “What job does this help customers complete?” Be honest. Many features won’t have clear answers. That’s your opportunity map.
For example, imagine a company like Intuit applying this process to QuickBooks. They might discover that most small business owners aren’t hiring it for “accounting” but rather to “feel confident I won’t get in trouble with the IRS.” This kind of insight would shift product strategy from adding more accounting features to building confidence through guided workflows and audit protection.
From Insights to Roadmap
Once you understand which jobs matter most to your customers, prioritization becomes clearer. Instead of debating features, you evaluate opportunities:
Job Importance: How critical is this job to your target customers? A job that happens daily outweighs one that happens quarterly.
Current Satisfaction: How well do existing solutions (yours and competitors’) serve this job? Low satisfaction with high importance equals opportunity.
Willingness to Pay: What would customers pay to complete this job better? This reveals which improvements drive revenue.
Making Jobs Concrete: A Real Example
Let’s explore how this might apply to a project management tool. Traditional feature planning might focus on “users want Gantt charts” or “customers request budget tracking.”
But imagine conducting JTBD research that reveals a different insight. Through interviews, you might discover the real job: “Help me look prepared and in control during stakeholder meetings.”
This would change everything. The job isn’t about project management, it’s about career management. The emotional component (confidence) and social component (professional image) matter as much as the functional component (tracking work).
Your product response would shift accordingly:
- Instead of just Gantt charts, you’d build one-click executive dashboards
- Rather than raw budget data, you’d create professional PDF reports
- Beyond static views, you’d add real-time mobile updates for last-minute meeting prep
- You might even consider a “presentation mode” that hides internal notes
The success metrics would shift focus. Rather than tracking feature adoption in isolation, you’d connect usage patterns to business outcomes. If users who regularly generate one-click dashboards have higher retention rates and expand their accounts, you’ve likely found a feature that serves an important job.
The key is recognizing that job completion often happens outside your product. You can’t directly measure whether someone “looked prepared” in their meeting. But you can observe patterns: Do users come back before similar time periods? Do they explore more advanced features over time? Do they recommend your product to colleagues?
These behavioral patterns, combined with periodic customer interviews about their success stories, give you a fuller picture than feature metrics alone.
The Power of Saying No
Understanding jobs gives you permission to ignore feature requests that don’t serve important jobs. When customers ask for features, map them to jobs. If the job isn’t important enough or frequent enough, you have a clear rationale for declining.
This prevents the feature creep that kills focused products. Every feature that doesn’t serve a clear job makes it harder for customers to complete the jobs that matter.
The milkshake story demonstrates this perfectly. Customers might have asked for more flavors, but the job had nothing to do with taste. Adding flavors would have complicated the product without serving the job better. Making it thicker and moving dispensers to the front solved the actual job.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Even teams committed to JTBD fall into predictable traps. Understanding these patterns helps you spot them in your own work.
The Activity Trap
The most common mistake is confusing what customers do with why they do it. “Users want to generate reports” sounds like a job, but it’s just an activity. The real job might be “demonstrate progress to stakeholders” or “cover myself if something goes wrong.”
This confusion leads to feature improvements that miss the point. You might build a faster report generator when customers actually need a way to look prepared in meetings. Always dig deeper: Why does this activity matter? What progress does it enable?
The Functional Fixation
Product teams love functional jobs because they’re concrete and measurable. But stopping there leaves massive opportunities for competitors.
Consider how a product like Slack might succeed in team communication. Functionally, it enables team messaging—hundreds of tools do that. But what if Slack understood the complete job:
- Functional: Keep everyone aligned without constant meetings
- Emotional: Feel connected to remote teammates, not isolated
- Social: Appear responsive and engaged to colleagues
A competitor with superior functional features might still lose if they miss these emotional and social dimensions. Playful elements like custom emojis and status indicators aren’t frivolous—they could serve crucial emotional and social jobs that drive adoption.
Remember the mattress story? Eighteen months of back pain wasn’t enough to drive action. It took social pressure (“too old for a hand-me-down mattress”) to trigger the purchase. Missing these dimensions means missing what actually drives customer behavior.
The Solution-First Trap
Perhaps the most dangerous pitfall is working backward from your existing features to find jobs that justify them. If your discovered jobs perfectly align with your current feature set, you’re likely retrofitting the framework rather than genuinely discovering customer needs.
Real jobs often reveal uncomfortable truths. They show that features you’ve invested in don’t serve important jobs. They suggest opportunities in areas where you have no capabilities. They point to competitors you didn’t know existed.
The Consumption Assumption
Many teams assume their competition is other products in their category. But often the biggest competitor is “nothing.” Understanding why people choose non-consumption reveals massive opportunities.
Before Uber, people often chose to stay home rather than deal with parking downtown or expensive, unreliable taxis. The job wasn’t “get a taxi” but “enjoy a night out without transportation stress.” By solving the complete job, including the anxiety of finding a ride home, Uber unlocked consumption that didn’t previously exist.
Moving Beyond Pitfalls
These aren’t just rookie mistakes. Even experienced teams fall into these traps when pressure mounts to ship features or when organizational inertia pulls toward traditional thinking.
The antidote is constant return to actual customer stories. When you find yourself debating features in the abstract, go back to specific moments when real customers struggled and made choices. Their stories will guide you better than any framework.
Implementing JTBD in Your Organization
Transforming how your organization thinks about customers doesn’t happen overnight. The shift from feature-focused to job-focused thinking challenges established processes, metrics, and power structures. Here’s how to make it stick.
Start Where the Pain Is Greatest
Don’t begin with a company-wide JTBD rollout. Instead, find a specific problem that traditional approaches haven’t solved. Look for features with mysteriously low adoption despite positive user tests, customer segments with unexplained high churn, or new markets where your standard playbook isn’t working.
These pain points create urgency and openness to new approaches. When traditional methods have clearly failed, teams become more receptive to understanding what jobs customers are actually trying to complete.
Make Jobs Visible in Daily Work
JTBD can’t live in strategy documents. It needs to show up where decisions get made.
Transform Your User Stories: Replace “As a user, I want…” with job stories: “When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].” This forces teams to think about context and progress, not just features.
In Support Conversations: Add a required field: “What were you trying to accomplish?” Train support teams to probe beyond “feature doesn’t work” to understand the job the customer couldn’t complete. This turns every support ticket into potential job discovery.
In Product Reviews: Instead of asking “How many people used this feature?” ask “Which job does this feature serve, and how well?” Features without clear jobs become candidates for removal, preventing feature creep.
Create a Common Language
The biggest implementation challenge isn’t process but vocabulary. When engineers think in features, designers think in users, and executives think in markets, job discussions become translation exercises.
Solve this by documenting and sharing real customer jobs throughout the organization. When teams share a clear picture of the job, alignment happens naturally. Engineers understand why certain edge cases matter. Designers know which emotions to optimize for. Marketing writes copy that resonates with real struggles.
Navigate the Resistance
You’ll face predictable pushback:
“We already know our customers.” Point to the milkshake study. Traditional research said customers wanted better flavors. JTBD revealed morning commuters hiring milkshakes for their commute.
“This will slow us down.” Microsoft accelerated development by stopping work on features that didn’t serve real jobs. Understanding jobs prevents wasted effort.
“Our customers can’t articulate jobs.” That’s why JTBD uses specific interview techniques focusing on past behavior and switching moments, not opinions about future features.
Build Momentum Through Small Wins
The key is starting small and letting success create demand. Pick one team or feature area. Run 5-10 customer interviews using JTBD techniques. Apply the insights to a specific product decision. Measure the results.
When one team’s job-focused feature succeeds while traditional features struggle, others take notice. Share the story internally. Include real customer quotes and measurable outcomes. Let the results speak louder than any process mandate.
The JTBD Mindset Shift
The power of Jobs to Be Done isn’t in following a process. It’s in fundamentally changing how you see your product.
You stop asking “What features should we build?” and start asking “What progress do customers need?”
You stop categorizing by demographics and start organizing by situations.
You stop measuring feature usage and start tracking job completion.
Once you see products as hired solutions for customer jobs, every decision clarifies. You know why customers switch, why they stay, and why they recommend. Most importantly, you know what to build next.
The question isn’t whether your customers have jobs to be done. They do. The question is whether you’ll discover them before your competitors.
For product managers looking to apply product thinking and learn more about JTBS, our Building Innovative Product Workshop or Business Model Canvas Workshop provide practical guidance on aligning customer jobs with product development.
Essential JTBD Resources:
Foundational Books:
- “Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice” by Tony Ulwick
- “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” by Clayton Christensen
- “When Coffee and Kale Compete” by Alan Klement
Additional Sources: