3 Critical Must-Knows About Jobs to Be Done (Christensen Institute, 2025)

One-page infographic (filename stamp 20253006) from the Christensen Institute distilling JTBD into three must-knows. Supporting artefact for frameworks/jtbd rather than a standalone theoretical source.

The three must-knows

1. A Job incorporates three key elements

Functional, social, and emotional forces all participate in a decision simultaneously.

Example — hiring a new home: the job "help me have a space large enough for my expanding family" has functional (space, size), social (family dynamics, neighbours), and emotional (caretaking, achievement) elements.

2. We hire for different jobs based on changing circumstances

Circumstances are subject to change.

Example — a school district initially hires a new technology to "remain compliant with state funding"; later, having observed best practice and teacher approval, it re-prioritises: "help me be an innovative leader among districts in my state." Same executor, different job, different success criteria.

3. JTBD is not asking why someone made their decision

Direct "why did you buy?" questions yield surface answers (e.g. flavour for a milkshake). JTBD methodology reveals the underlying circumstance common to a group ("help me relieve stress with an easy-to-hold snack") via structured narrative reconstruction, not direct questioning.

Connections

Summarises for practitioners the core claims developed in sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done — especially the functional/social/emotional triad (p. 6 of the HBR article) and the circumstance-over-characteristics principle.
The third must-know (don't just ask why) is methodologically significant for BPM discovery: it warns against the same sunny-day pitfall that methods/process-discovery-methods addresses with rainy-day questions, just at the customer-lens level instead of the performer-lens level.

frameworks/jtbd · sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done · sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory