process & strategy
Jobs to be done
What is jobs to be done?
Jobs to be done is the idea that people don't want your product, they want the progress it gives them - they "hire" it to do a job. Focus on the job, not the feature or the demographic, and you design for what people are actually trying to achieve.
Also known as: jobs-to-be-done, JTBD, job to be done
Prefer to watch?
Watch the recap 0:32
The demo
People ask for products; what they want is progress. Flip the cards from what each person asked for to the job they are really trying to get done.
- "A faster horse." Get where I'm going sooner, with less effort.
- "I need a drill." A hole in the wall - really, that shelf up and the room sorted.
- "Add a messaging feature." Feel close to the people I'm apart from.
- "A gym membership." Become the kind of person who's fit and feels good.
The surface request. Each one names a thing - and a thing is rarely what anyone actually wants.
What this demo shows (text version)
Four surface requests, each paired with the deeper job behind it: "a faster horse" is really "get where I'm going sooner"; "I need a drill" is "a hole in the wall, and the shelf up"; "add a messaging feature" is "feel close to people I'm apart from"; "a gym membership" is "become someone who's fit".
Designing for the stated request keeps you inside the customer's first idea of a solution. Designing for the job - the progress they want to make - opens up answers they never asked for and sometimes never imagined, and stops you building features that serve no real job at all.
People don't want your product, they want the progress it gives them - they "hire" it to do a job. Design for the underlying job rather than the feature or the demographic, and answers open up that a list of feature requests would never have surfaced.
"A faster horse" became "get there sooner"; "a drill" became "a hole in the wall". Once you see the job behind the request, the solution space opens up - and you stop building features nobody actually hired you for.
The classic framing: people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole - and really they want the shelf up, the room tidy, the sense of being on top of things. Climbing that ladder of "why" is how a feature request becomes a problem worth solving, sometimes in a way the customer never pictured.
It cuts against persona work built on demographics. Two people of the same age and income can hire the same product for completely different jobs; two very different people can hire it for the same one. The job is a more reliable design unit than the profile.