---
title: Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
type: framework
tags: [jtbd, innovation, customer-insight, discovery, alternative-lens]
sources:
  - "[[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]]"
  - "[[sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi]]"
  - "[[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory]]"
  - "[[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-3-considerations]]"
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

**A lens for discovery that replaces "what does the user do?" with "what progress is the customer trying to make, in what circumstance?"** Originated informally at HBS (Theodore Levitt's 1960 "people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole"), developed quantitatively by **Anthony Ulwick / Strategyn** as Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) in the mid-1990s, and popularised by **Clayton Christensen** (HBS, Christensen Institute) from the early 2000s onward.

## Core proposition

> Customers "hire" a product or service to do a **job** — to make **progress** in a specific **circumstance**. All jobs have **functional**, **social**, and **emotional** dimensions simultaneously. ([[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]]; [[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory]])

A job is not a task; it is the progress being sought. The **circumstance** (not customer demographics, product attributes, or trends) is the dominant predictor of choice ([[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]], p. 6).

## Two strands

| Strand | Lead | Flavour | Canonical artefact |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Christensen / Institute** | [[entities/clayton-christensen]], Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan | Narrative, story-based, emotional-dimension-rich | *Competing Against Luck* (2016); [[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]] |
| **Ulwick / Strategyn (ODI)** | [[entities/tony-ulwick]] | Quantitative, metric-based, deterministic | *What Customers Want* (2005); [[sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi]]; [[concepts/outcome-driven-innovation]] |

The two strands agree on the job-as-unit-of-analysis but diverge in method: Christensen extracts jobs from buyer timelines (Moesta condo case), Ulwick extracts **50–150 desired-outcome statements per job** with strict syntax and scores them via the **Opportunity Algorithm**.

## Key constructs

- **Job** — the progress a customer is trying to make in a circumstance.
- **Functional / social / emotional dimensions** — all three are present in every job ([[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-3-considerations]]).
- **Hiring / firing** — customers hire a solution when it advances the job, fire it for a better one.
- **Circumstance** — the dominant context variable; supersedes persona.
- **Job executor** — the person/role doing the job (not necessarily the buyer).
- **Job map** — Ulwick's 8-step universal structure (Define → Locate → Prepare → Confirm → Execute → Monitor → Modify → Conclude). See [[concepts/outcome-driven-innovation]].
- **Desired outcome** — a customer-defined metric with strict syntax [direction × unit-of-measure × object × clarifier].
- **Opportunity algorithm** — `Opportunity = Importance + max(Importance − Satisfaction, 0)`.
- **Consumption chain jobs** — 12 peripheral jobs around the core (Purchase · Receive · Install · Set Up · Learn to Use · Interface · Transport · Store · Maintain · Upgrade · Replace · Dispose).
- **Nonconsumption** — the job is present but no adequate solution exists; typically the biggest opportunity.

## Method shape (five-prompt identification, from the HBR article)

1. Where is there **nonconsumption**?
2. What **work-arounds** have customers invented?
3. What tasks do people want to **avoid** ("negative jobs")?
4. What **surprising uses** exist for existing products?
5. What are customers **"firing"** today?

Narrative interviews: reconstruct the **timeline** of how the buyer got here, probe the **struggling moment** (Bob Moesta) where conflicting forces of progress vs. inertia/anxiety resolved into a purchase.

## Relation to BPM discovery — when JTBD competes with and when it complements

JTBD is an **alternative lens** for process and product discovery. BPM's dominant lens is the **performer / process-owner lens** ([[methods/process-discovery-methods]], [[syntheses/interview-structuring-for-process-models]]): who does what, with what inputs, to produce what output? JTBD's lens is the **customer lens**: what progress is the customer trying to make, regardless of whose activities produce it?

### Where JTBD competes with HTA / performer-lens interviewing

- **Unit of analysis.** HTA ([[concepts/hierarchical-task-analysis]]) decomposes a performer's goal into sub-goals and operations; JTBD decomposes the **customer's** job into steps and desired outcomes. If the analyst anchors on the performer, they will never see that condo-buyers are in the *moving-lives* business, not the *condo-selection* business ([[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]]).
- **Who is the interviewee.** Dumas's stakeholder taxonomy (§6.3.1 — see [[syntheses/interview-structuring-for-process-models]] §1.1) lists the customer as *one* of five categories; JTBD makes the customer the **primary** interviewee and treats performers as instrumental.
- **Sunny-day risk.** BPM warns against interviewee defaulting to the normal path. JTBD warns against interviewees rationalising purchase reasons; the countermeasure is **timeline reconstruction**, not rainy-day questions.

### Where JTBD complements BPM

- **Ulwick's Job Map is literally a process** — "all functional jobs are processes and can be analysed as such" ([[sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi]], p. 10). The universal 8-step job map is structurally a process map, just from the customer's side of the counter. This makes ODI and BPM directly composable: map the customer's job (outside-in) alongside the company's process (inside-out), and look at the seams.
- **Process alignment is the JTBD closer.** [[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]] p. 10 ("Aligning Processes") argues that once the job is known, the company must redesign its internal processes to support it — SNHU's online-learning case is a whiteboard process-redesign story. This is BPM redesign, scoped by a customer job.
- **Stakeholder-lens question packs** ([[entities/alec-sharp]]) already distinguish customer / performer / owner lenses in BPM interviewing. JTBD is a deeper methodology for the **customer** lens when the process's outcome is customer-facing.
- **Scope framing.** Ulwick's 12 **consumption chain jobs** (Purchase → Dispose) form a customer-side lifecycle comparable to Sharp's TRAC end-to-end scope ([[sources/2014-sharp-using-scope-models]]).

### When to choose JTBD as the primary discovery lens

| Choose JTBD when… | Choose performer-lens BPM when… |
|---|---|
| Deliverable is a product/service concept or redesign | Deliverable is an as-is process model |
| Unit of value creation is the **customer's** outcome | Unit of value creation is operational efficiency / throughput |
| Market has high **nonconsumption** or heavy work-arounds | Process is well-defined, repetitive, internally scoped |
| Emotional/social forces are suspected to drive choice | Purely internal / back-office process |
| Innovation opportunity search | Compliance, redesign, or automation of an existing process |

In practice, on customer-facing process redesigns the two are complementary: **JTBD in inception** (what job, what outcomes, which unmet) → **BPM in execution** (as-is process, gaps against the job, to-be design, automation).

## Cross-references inside this wiki

- [[concepts/outcome-driven-innovation]] — Ulwick's operationalisation.
- [[concepts/business-process]] — BPM definition; Ulwick's claim "all functional jobs are processes" is an important bridge.
- [[methods/process-discovery-methods]] — the performer-lens counterpart.
- [[syntheses/qualitative-discovery-method-selection-matrix]] — JTBD could be added as a sixth method row (customer-lens).
- [[syntheses/interview-structuring-for-process-models]] — customer-lens questioning is under-developed here; JTBD's timeline/struggling-moment technique is the missing fourth pack.
- [[concepts/hierarchical-task-analysis]] — goal-decomposition counterpart from the performer side.
- [[entities/clayton-christensen]] · [[entities/tony-ulwick]]

## Open questions

- Are there BPM case studies that explicitly use JTBD as the inception lens before to-be redesign? (SNHU is the closest; see [[sources/2016-christensen-jobs-to-be-done]].)
- Does Ulwick's Opportunity Algorithm transfer to prioritising process-improvement opportunities (importance × satisfaction on activity pain points)? Plausible but unverified.
- How does JTBD relate to **service-dominant logic** (Vargo & Lusch) and **service blueprinting**? Not covered by current sources.