Jobs to Be Done Theory — Christensen Institute

Canonical public-facing definition of JTBD maintained by the Christensen Institute, the think-tank founded by Clayton Christensen. The page is anonymously authored (no byline, no year), so it is treated here as institutional doctrine dated 2025 (access year).

Definition

"Jobs to Be Done is a lens that reveals the circumstances — or forces — that drive people and organisations toward and away from decisions."

The framing is deliberately cross-domain: the "executor" may be an individual consumer, an employee, a team, or an organisation.

Core concepts

Hiring metaphor — people "hire" products or services to accomplish jobs, and "fire" them when a better option appears.
Three dimensional forces — functional, social, emotional — always present simultaneously.
Circumstance drives choice — more than demographics, product attributes, trends.
Progress over features — "people pull products into their lives to make progress."

Methodology posture

JTBD research uncovers patterns and underlying circumstances across groups rather than taking individual self-reports at face value — it treats direct "why did you buy?" answers as unreliable and reconstructs the causal story via narrative interviewing.

Connections

Acts as the hub page on the public web that the frameworks/jtbd wiki page mirrors internally.
Short-form counterpart: sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-3-considerations infographic.
Long-form counterpart: sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done HBR article.
Operationalisation: sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi (Strategyn/ODI).

frameworks/jtbd · entities/clayton-christensen · sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done · sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-3-considerations