The Job Your Customer Is Hiring for

The 'Jobs to be Done' framework is a powerful tool for innovation that shifts focus from demographics to customer motivation. This lesson teaches you to stop focusing on what your product is and start understanding the 'job' a customer is 'hiring' it to do. Learn how to uncover deep customer needs, improve product development, and create marketing that truly resonates by asking not 'who is the customer?' but 'what progress are they trying to make?'.

The Anatomy of a Milkshake

Let’s begin with a mystery. A fast-food chain wants to sell more milkshakes. They do what any sensible company would do: they study their customer. They assemble focus groups, they analyze demographic data, they identify their target milkshake buyer. They ask these customers, “How can we make this milkshake better for you?” The feedback is clear and consistent. Make it chocolatier. Make it cheaper. Make it thicker, or maybe thinner. The company’s food scientists get to work, reformulating the product based on this direct feedback. They launch the new, “improved” milkshakes. And… nothing happens. Sales are flat. The project is a failure. Why? The company did everything right, according to the old rules. They listened to their customers. They improved their product. Yet the result was indifference. This is the exact puzzle that the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his colleagues were asked to solve. What they uncovered would change the way we think about products, innovation, and the fundamental motivations of the people we call customers. The answer wasn't in the milkshake's ingredients; it was in the job the milkshake was being hired to do.

A Long and Boring Drive to Work

Christensen’s team took a different approach. Instead of asking customers what they wanted in a milkshake, they asked a deeper, stranger question: What job did you hire that milkshake to do? They didn't conduct focus groups. They stood in a restaurant for 18 hours and simply observed. A pattern quickly emerged. A surprising number of milkshakes were sold before 8:30 in the morning. The buyers were almost always alone. They never drank the milkshake in the store. They got in their car and drove away with it. The researchers went out and talked to these morning commuters. They asked them about their journey. “Tell me about your commute,” they’d say. “What’s that like for you?” The story was always the same: it’s long, it’s tedious, it’s boring. They weren't particularly hungry yet, but they knew they would be by 10 a.m. They needed something to make the drive more interesting and to stave off mid-morning hunger. This was the job: “Help me stay engaged during my boring commute and keep me full until lunch.” When you look at the world through this lens, the milkshake’s true competitors come into focus. It wasn’t another restaurant’s milkshake. It was a banana—but that was gone in a minute and didn’t solve the boredom. It was a donut—but that was messy, leaving crumbs and sticky glaze on the steering wheel. It was a bagel—but trying to spread cream cheese while navigating traffic is a recipe for disaster. Suddenly, the humble milkshake looks like a genius solution. It’s thick, so it takes a long time to drink through a thin straw, giving the driver something to do for 20 minutes. It’s tidy. It fits in a cup holder. It’s substantial enough to quiet a rumbling stomach. It did the job better than any of its competitors. The fast-food chain wasn't in the milkshake business. It was in the business of making commutes more bearable. Understanding this changed everything. To improve the product, you don’t make it chocolatier. You make it *thicker* so it lasts longer. You add tiny bits of fruit to create moments of discovery and interrupt the monotony. You move the dispenser in front of the counter and create a self-service kiosk with a prepaid card, so commuters can get in and out fast. You solve for the *job*, not the product.

How to Become a Job Detective

So how do you find the job? You can't just ask people. As the milkshake story shows, customers are often poor at articulating their deeper needs and tend to suggest superficial improvements to existing solutions. Instead, you have to become a detective. You have to investigate the story behind the purchase. The most powerful tool for this is the Jobs to be Done interview. The goal isn't to get feedback on your product; it's to reconstruct the chain of events that led to someone "hiring" it. You want to talk to people who have recently made a purchase or switched from one solution to another. Their memory of the struggle is fresh. You start by building a timeline. Ask them: “Take me back to the day you decided you needed something to solve this problem. Where were you? What was happening?” You're looking for the initial spark, the first thought that "maybe there's a better way." Listen for two key forces at play: the "push of the situation" and the "pull of the new solution." * **The Push:** What was so frustrating about their old way of doing things that it pushed them to seek something new? This is where the energy for change comes from. * **The Pull:** What was it about your solution that pulled them toward it? What progress did they envision it helping them make? At the same time, you listen for the counter-forces: the "habits of the present" that create inertia, and the "anxieties about the new solution" that cause hesitation. Was it too expensive? Would it be hard to learn? You're essentially making a documentary about a decision. Your questions should be specific and chronological: * "What solutions did you try before this one?" * "What was the moment you realized the old way wasn't working anymore?" * "When you were looking for an answer, what else did you consider?" * "Describe the conversation you had with your partner or team about making this purchase." By piecing together this story, you move past the sterile, feature-level analysis and into the rich, emotional, and contextual world where real decisions happen. You stop seeing your product as an object and start seeing it as a service that helps someone make progress.

The Job Your Customer Is Hiring for

The Anatomy of a Milkshake

The Job Your Customer Is Hiring for

The Anatomy of a Milkshake

A Long and Boring Drive to Work

The Progress You're Trying to Make

How to Become a Job Detective

Beyond the Milkshake