jobs-to-be-done
jobs-to-be-done
Clayton Christensen's Jobs-to-Be-Done lens: customers do not buy products, they hire a solution to make progress in a struggling moment. It catches the trap of profiling the customer instead of understanding the job in a circumstance, which is solution-agnostic and the same whether a drill, a hook, or a handyman does it. People don't want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole, and really the progress the hole enables.
The three dimensions of a job (functional, emotional, social), the circumstance, desired outcomes as measurable outcome statements, competing solutions including nonconsumption, the four forces of progress, the job-story format, and the opportunity-scoring formula live in references/jtbd.md. Load that file before analyzing.
When to use
The user wants to shape or reposition a product around what customers are actually trying to accomplish, decide what to build, or understand why customers switch from one solution to another. The unit of analysis is the job and its desired outcomes, not the company and not a feature list. This skill finds the job, the outcomes, and where current solutions fall short; value-proposition-canvas then maps a specific offering onto a job already understood, so run this first when the job itself is unclear and reach for value-proposition-canvas when the user already knows the job. Pairs with design-thinking (empathize and define), lean-startup, and kano-model.
Language
Conduct the session and write the report in the language the user is writing in. The reference file is English; keep the framework keyed to it regardless of the output language.
Inputs
- SUBJECT (required): the product, service, or category whose job is in question, and the customer it serves. If the customer or the product is vague, narrow it with one or two questions before starting.
- CIRCUMSTANCE (optional): the struggling moment or trigger the user already has in mind, the segment, market, or geography, and the decision the analysis should inform (what to build, how to position, why churn is happening). This focuses the job; it does not replace Stage 1.