The Jobs to be Done framework, developed by Clayton Christensen and colleagues at Harvard Business School, reframes how designers and product teams understand user motivation. Instead of asking who the user is, it asks what job the user is hiring a product or service to do. This shift in perspective cuts through demographic thinking and gets to the functional, social, and emotional progress that users are genuinely trying to make. It has proven particularly powerful for identifying innovation opportunities that demographic segmentation consistently misses.
What It Is
A 'job to be done' is a specific outcome that a person is trying to achieve in a particular circumstance. It is expressed as a statement of the form: 'When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].' Jobs have three dimensions: functional (the practical task), emotional (how the person wants to feel), and social (how they want to be perceived). The framework argues that people do not buy products for their features, they hire products to make progress in their lives, and understanding that progress is the key to designing things that people genuinely value.
How to Run It
Conduct jobs-focused interviews that probe the circumstances, triggers, and desired outcomes behind product use. Ask about the moment a person first decided they needed to make a change, what they tried before, what they were hoping to achieve, and what got in the way. Avoid questions about product features and focus entirely on the progress the person was trying to make. Synthesise interview findings into a set of job statements that represent the core motivations of your user population. Use these statements to evaluate existing solutions, identify gaps, and guide ideation.
When to Use It
Jobs to be Done is most valuable during the research and framing phase of a project, particularly when the team is trying to understand motivation at a deeper level than surface preferences. It is especially powerful for innovation projects where the question is not how to improve an existing product but whether the product is solving the right problem in the first place. It also provides a strong foundation for positioning and messaging work, since job statements reveal the language users use to describe their own needs.
Tips for Success
Avoid conflating jobs with tasks or features. A task is a step in a process — a job is the underlying progress a person wants to make. The same job can be served by very different solutions across different times and contexts. Use the job statement as a filter during ideation: for every idea generated, ask explicitly whether and how it helps the user make the progress described in the job statement. This keeps ideation grounded in genuine user motivation rather than technological possibility.
