---
title: "Know Your Customers' \"Jobs to Be Done\""
type: source
tags: [jtbd, innovation, customer-insight, discovery, hbr]
authors: [Christensen, Clayton M.; Hall, Taddy; Dillon, Karen; Duncan, David S.]
year: 2016
venue: "Harvard Business Review 94(9), September 2016 (reprint R1609D)"
kind: article
raw_path: "raw/Task Analysis & JTBD/Christensen-etal-Jobs.pdf"
sources: []
key_claims:
  - "Customers don't buy products; they hire them to make progress on a job in a specific circumstance."
  - "Correlation-heavy demographic / psychographic segmentation explains who buys but not why — it misses the causal driver."
  - "A job is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance; the circumstance is more important than customer attributes, product attributes, new technologies, or trends."
  - "Jobs are complex and multifaceted: they combine functional, social, and emotional dimensions simultaneously."
  - "Good innovations solve problems that previously had only inadequate solutions — or no solution at all (nonconsumption is often the biggest opportunity)."
  - "Successful offerings do not just deliver the functional job; they also create experiences around purchase and use, and align the company's processes to the job."
  - "JTBD is complementary to disruption theory: disruption predicts competitive response; JTBD predicts the causal driver of customer choice."
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
---

# Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done" (Christensen, Hall, Dillon, Duncan 2016)

HBR article (Sept 2016, reprint R1609D) that popularised the **Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)** lens for a managerial audience. The authors are finalising the companion book *Competing Against Luck* (HarperBusiness, Oct 2016); the article summarises the theory and case pattern.

## Argument

Innovation has a dismal hit rate (McKinsey: 84% of executives call innovation critical; 94% are dissatisfied with their firm's performance). The root cause is not lack of data — firms now know more about customers than ever — but that customer data is **structured to show correlations, not causality**. "This customer looks like that one" does not explain why an individual, in a specific circumstance, reaches for a specific offering.

The authors propose reframing: customers **hire** products to make **progress** on a **job** that arises in a **circumstance**. Example: Christensen, age 64, size-16 shoes, drives a Honda minivan — none of those attributes predict when or why he buys the *New York Times*. The triggering circumstance (a flight, a basketball tournament) does.

## The Moesta condominium case (pp. 4–6)

Building company selling $120k–$200k condos to divorced single parents and downsizing retirees; heavy features and marketing failed. Moesta interviewed buyers and found the job was **"help me transition into a new life"**, not "buy a condo". The surprise constraint was the **dining-room table** — an emotionally freighted object that blocked the move. Re-designing the offer (dining-room space in units, moving services, two years' storage, sorting room) grew business 25% while the market fell 49%.

## Principles for defining a job (pp. 6–8)

1. **"Job" = progress a person seeks in a circumstance** — shorthand for what they really seek, not a simple task.
2. **Circumstance trumps customer characteristics, product attributes, new tech, trends.** Redefines competitive set (condo vs "staying put", not condo vs condo).
3. **Good innovations solve problems that had only inadequate solutions — or no solution.** Nonconsumption is fertile ground.
4. **Jobs are never purely functional.** Social and emotional forces matter: the condo buyers' anxiety about discarding belongings was the binding constraint.

## Identifying jobs — five prompts (p. 7 sidebar)

- Where do you see nonconsumption?
- What work-arounds have customers invented?
- What tasks do people want to avoid ("negative jobs")?
- What surprising uses exist for existing products?
- What are customers "firing" today?

## Designing offerings around jobs (pp. 8–9)

Nielsen 2012–2016 Breakthrough Innovation Report: of 20,000 new products, only 92 exceeded $50M in Y1 and sustained Y2 sales. What they share, per Nielsen coauthor Taddy Hall, is **nailing a poorly-performed, specific job** (International Delight Iced Coffee; Reese's Minis; Tidy Cats LightWeight; American Girl dolls).

## Creating customer experiences (pp. 8–10)

Identifying the job is step one. Successful innovators then design the **full experience** of purchase and use — e.g., American Girl dolls' stores, books, birthday-party venues, doll hospitals — and integrate those experiences across company functions.

## Aligning processes (p. 10, "Aligning processes" section — directly relevant to BPM)

> "The final piece of the puzzle is processes — how the company integrates across functions to support the job to be done. Processes are often hard to see, but they matter profoundly. As MIT's Edgar Schein has discussed, processes are a critical part of an organization's unspoken culture. They tell people inside the company 'This is what matters most to us.' Focusing processes on the job to be done provides clear guidance to everyone on the team. It's a simple but powerful way of making sure a company doesn't unintentionally abandon the insights that brought it success in the first place."

Case: **Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU)** online program. Charted the whole admissions-to-graduation process on a whiteboard ("It looked like a schematic from a nuclear submarine"), eliminated hurdles mismatched to the older online-learner's job, tightened follow-up SLAs (8.5 min call-back), redesigned ads around functional + emotional + social dimensions ("I did it for my mom"). Result: 34% CAGR, $535M revenue, NPS 9.6/10, ~50% graduation.

## B2B sidebar — Intercom (p. 9)

Des Traynor adopted JTBD in 2011 to resegment Intercom's product. Replaced personas (demographics, titles) with jobs; reorganised R&D into four teams around four distinct jobs (convert, engage, learn, support). Conversion rate rose; clients now "buy the piece that suits their initial job".

## Connections

- **BPM alignment** — the article explicitly calls out processes (Schein) as the final alignment piece. JTBD is an alternative discovery lens that starts from the customer's progress, not from the activities; see [[frameworks/jtbd]] and [[concepts/business-process]].
- **Interview technique** — Moesta's method (asking buyers to draw a timeline of how they got to the purchase) is a close cousin of event-based narrative interviewing used in BPM process discovery ([[methods/process-discovery-methods]], [[syntheses/interview-structuring-for-process-models]]). JTBD emphasises the **customer** as interviewee over the performer/owner lens typical in BPM.
- **Disruption theory** — JTBD complements [[entities/clayton-christensen]]'s disruption theory: disruption explains response; JTBD explains the causal driver of purchase.
- **Ulwick / ODI** — a parallel operationalisation; see [[concepts/outcome-driven-innovation]] and [[sources/2009-ulwick-what-is-odi]].
- **Christensen Institute** — the think-tank disseminating JTBD publicly; see [[sources/2025-christensen-institute-jtbd-theory]].

## Related

[[frameworks/jtbd]] · [[concepts/outcome-driven-innovation]] · [[entities/clayton-christensen]] · [[entities/tony-ulwick]] · [[methods/process-discovery-methods]] · [[syntheses/qualitative-discovery-method-selection-matrix]]