Jobs to be done: understand why customers really buy

Level

Foundational

Reading time

8 minutes

Updated

November 3, 2026

Sources

2 cited

Useful for

All business types

What jobs to be done means

People don't buy products for their own sake. They bring a product into their lives to make progress in a specific situation. That situation, and the progress they want, is the "job."

The idea is most closely associated with Clayton Christensen and his colleagues. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, Christensen and three coauthors started from a puzzle: companies have never known more about their customers, yet their innovation remains hit-or-miss.^[1] Their answer was to focus on understanding why customers make the choices they do.^[1]

The Clayton Christensen Institute describes a job as the progress someone is trying to make toward a goal in their particular circumstances. It uses the word "hire" for what people do with a product or service when a job comes up in their lives.^[2] It also says every job involves functional, social, and emotional forces.^[2]

Why it matters

Knowing the job changes three decisions.

• Who you compete with. Your real competition is anything a customer could hire for the same job, including doing nothing. That's often not another company in your category.
• What you build. A feature that doesn't help get the job done is cost without value, however clever it is.
• What you say. Customers respond to messages that describe their situation, because that's how they think about the purchase.

Demographics describe who a customer is, but they don't cause a purchase. A 35-year-old accountant and a 60-year-old retiree can hire the same product for the same job. The institute contrasts its approach with conventional marketing, which focuses on demographics or product attributes.^[2]

The parts of a job

You can describe any job with five parts. Here they are, using the umbrella:

Add one more line to your notes: what they hire today. Those are the alternatives you have to beat.

The situation does the most work. The institute points out that people hire for different jobs as their circumstances change.^[2] The person who grabs a $10 umbrella in a downpour might spend $70 on a sturdy one before a planned trip. Same person, different job.

A common way to write a job down is one sentence: "When [situation], I want to [progress], so I can [outcome]."

How to find the job

1. 01

   Talk to people who recently switched

   Interview customers who bought in the last few months, and people who recently left a competitor. Their memory of the decision is still fresh, and they can tell you what they did rather than what they imagine they'd do.

2. 02

   Rebuild the timeline of the decision

   Ask when they first thought about solving this, what was happening that day, what they tried first, and what finally made them act. Keep asking about real events and dates.

3. 03

   List everything they considered

   Include the options that don't look like competitors: a spreadsheet, a relative, a cheaper product, doing it themselves, or putting it off.

4. 04

   Find the frustration that triggered the switch

   Something about the old way stopped being acceptable. Write it down in their words, not yours.

5. 05

   Write job statements and look for repeats

   After eight to ten interviews, group similar statements. You're looking for two or three jobs that come up again and again.

6. 06

   Test decisions against the job

   For each feature, message, or price you're considering, ask: does this help the customer make the progress they want, in the situation where they want it?

Questions that work well in these interviews:

• "Take me back to the day you decided to look for something. What was going on?"
• "What were you using before? What was wrong with it?"
• "What else did you look at, and why didn't you choose it?"
• "What almost stopped you from buying?"
• "If we disappeared tomorrow, what would you do instead?"

How jobs differ by business type

What to do next

Schedule five interviews with recent customers or switchers this week. Our guide to customer discovery interviews covers how to find people and run the conversation, and the customer interview guide gives you a script to start from.

Once you've written your job statements, use them to sharpen your positioning, and to decide which group of customers to measure product-market fit with. If you're on the Validate Your Business Idea path, the alternatives you list here feed directly into the lesson on mapping what people use today.