Your customers don't buy your product: they seek progress. Jobs to be Done, explained from the first sale

The milkshake nobody bought for its taste

Clayton Christensen often told the story of a fast-food chain that wanted to sell more milkshakes. They did what almost every company does: they asked customers what they would improve. More chocolate, thicker, cheaper. They applied every suggestion and sales didn't move.

Christensen's team changed the question. Instead of "how do we improve the product?", they asked "what job do people hire a milkshake for?". They stood in the store and watched. Half of the milkshakes were sold before eight in the morning, to people alone, who took them to the car. They weren't hungry: they had a long, boring commute ahead and wanted something that would last the whole trip, could be held with one hand and would keep them full until noon. Competing for that "job" were bananas, donuts and cereal bars, not other milkshakes.

In the afternoon the same product did a different job: a father buying one for his son to feel like a good dad. Same product, two different jobs, two different ways to sell it.

What Jobs to be Done is

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is the theory Christensen developed over two decades and set down in Competing Against Luck (2016): people don't buy products or services; they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance of their lives. That progress has three dimensions at once: functional (getting something done), emotional (how I want to feel) and social (how I want to be seen). It is the same lens that explains why leading companies fall to disruptors that looked irrelevant: they stop understanding what they are hired for.

Three ideas change everything once you take them seriously:

• The customer doesn't buy features; they seek progress. That's why improving the product according to customer opinion may not move a single sale.
• The circumstance matters more than the profile. The same customer hires different things at eight in the morning and at four in the afternoon. Segmenting by age or income doesn't explain why they buy.
• The competition is everything that gets the same job done. Including doing nothing at all.

Bob Moesta, who worked with Christensen on this theory, added another piece that is gold in sales: every purchase is a struggle between four forces. Two push toward change (what bothers me about my current situation and what attracts me to the new one) and two hold back (anxiety about the new and the habit of the current). If your communication only talks about how attractive your product is, you are working one of the four forces.

Coconut oil: when the company doesn't know what it's hired for

Spending thousands of dollars communicating a product, showing its features, benefits and uses, can be a grotesque waste of money if we don't understand the real "job" your segment hires it for. Imagine a coconut oil company that thinks its customers use the product for cooking, and communicates that. Then it finds out they were actually using it as a body moisturizer. How many things would that company have done differently had it known? The packaging, the shelf it sits on, the price it can charge, the partner it distributes through, the photo in the ad. Everything.

How to discover the job: observe and ask well

The job isn't found in a survey or a focus group. It's found in two places: in people's real behavior and in conversations designed to listen, not to sell.

Observe. Christensen didn't discover the milkshake's job by asking; he discovered it standing in the store at seven in the morning. Watching how people use your product (or the substitute they use today) in their real context reveals what nobody will tell you, because not even the customer knows it.

The problem interview. It is the central tool we work with at Scalabl, and it comes from the tradition of Steve Blank (customer discovery) and Rob Fitzpatrick (The Mom Test). Its rules are simple and hard to follow:

1. You talk about their life, not your idea. You don't present the product. If you do, the conversation turns into politeness.
2. You ask about the concrete past, not hypotheticals. "Would you use this?" is worth nothing. "When was the last time it happened to you? What did you do?" is worth everything.
3. You look for the moment the person tried to solve it. What they tried, what it cost them, what they gave up on. Moesta's four forces are right there in plain sight.
4. You listen between the lines. The real job is almost never the first answer. It shows up in the anecdote, in the passing complaint, in what the person does today to get by.

Ten conversations like these are worth more than a thousand form responses, and they cost nothing.

What changes in your business once you know the job

This is the point I care about most, because Jobs to be Done tends to stay in theory. Knowing your customer's job changes concrete decisions:

• What you sell. The product is designed around the progress, not the other way around. Sometimes you discover you sell something other than what you thought, like the coconut oil. And the same logic applies to the value proposition toward your suppliers and allies.
• How you communicate it. You talk about the circumstance and the progress ("for the long morning commute"), not the list of features. And you work all four forces, not just attraction.
• Who you compete against. You stop looking at the obvious competitors and look at the banana.
• How much you can charge. A body moisturizer and a cooking oil don't carry the same price, even if they are the same liquid.
• When you invest. This is my view and it runs against much of the ecosystem: you don't invest in product, brand or campaigns until you have validated the job with real customers. Validating is cheap; communicating something nobody hires is very expensive. And once the job is validated, the first sale comes sooner, and with it the possibility of funding the business with customers instead of investors.

The first sale isn't a commercial milestone: it's proof that you understood what you are hired for. From there the sales process proper begins.

Frequently asked questions

What does "Jobs to be Done" mean?
It is Clayton Christensen's theory that people don't buy products but "hire" them to make concrete progress in a circumstance of their lives. The "job" is that progress, with its functional, emotional and social dimensions. Christensen develops it in Competing Against Luck; the practical application is in Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice.

How is it different from customer segmentation?
Segmentation describes who the customer is (age, industry, income). Jobs to be Done explains why they buy and in what circumstance. Two people with identical profiles can hire the same product for different jobs, and one person hires different things depending on the moment.

How do I discover my customers' job without spending money?
By observing how they solve the problem today and running problem interviews: conversations with no pitch, about past and concrete situations, listening to what they tried and what it cost them. Ten well-run conversations are enough to find a pattern. What comes after finding it is the sales process (open class in Spanish: how sales work today).

What is a problem interview?
A structured conversation, taken from Steve Blank and from Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test, in which the product is not presented and only real past experiences are asked about. It is the tool with which a business is validated at Scalabl before investing.