Jobs to be done: what it means, B2B examples and an interview guide

Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a way of explaining why people buy. Customers "hire" a product to make progress in a particular situation and "fire" it when it does that job badly. Instead of studying buyers' demographics or your product's features, you study the situation and the struggle that led to a purchase. In practice, you learn the job by interviewing people who recently switched to, or away from, a way of doing something.

Where the idea comes from

Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan summarized the theory in the Harvard Business Review article Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done" (September 2016). Its summary argues that product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data; that when we buy a product we "hire" it to do a job, and "fire" it if it does the job poorly; that jobs have social and emotional dimensions as well as functional ones; and that the circumstances in which customers try to get a job done matter more than buyer characteristics.

The Christensen Institute describes JTBD as a lens on the circumstances, or forces, that drive people and organizations toward and away from decisions, and a job as the progress someone is trying to make toward a goal in particular circumstances. It says JTBD research uncovers the story behind a decision instead of asking people why they made it. Its best-known example is a fast-food restaurant that found morning customers were hiring milkshakes to satisfy hunger, make a drive more interesting and eat easily in the car, so the competition was bananas and bagels rather than other milkshakes.

Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek say they created the switch interview, the interview method used below, and developed the four forces model that goes with it (jobstobedone.org).

What a job looks like in a B2B purchase

A job is written from the customer's side, in their situation, without naming your product. The examples below are hypothetical.

Situation	Job	What gets hired today
A veterinary clinic runs out of a vaccine in a busy week	Help me know what we have before a vet needs it, without counting shelves every Friday	A spreadsheet and the practice manager's memory
A controller finds a cost overrun after a job has closed	Help me see which jobs are going over while I can still act	Weekly exports and a pivot table
A new VP of sales inherits a messy pipeline weeks before a board meeting	Help me show the board a forecast I can defend	An analyst's weekend and a slide deck

Each job carries more than a function. The VP needs a working forecast and also wants to look credible at a first board meeting. That social and emotional side often decides between two tools that do the same thing.

The third column matters too. The competition for a job includes spreadsheets, extra staff hours and doing nothing, as well as other software. Competitor analysis covers researching those alternatives.

The four forces that decide a switch

Moesta and Spiek's four forces model says a customer switches only when push and pull outweigh anxiety and habit:

Push of the situation: the frustration that makes the current way unacceptable.
Pull of the new solution: the better situation the customer can picture.
Anxiety of the new solution: worry that the new option will not work, or that they will look foolish.
Habit of the present: comfort with the current way, even when it is bad.

They argue that most teams work on pull and neglect anxiety and habit. In the veterinary example, a clinic might like the idea of automatic stock counts (pull) and still stay put because nobody wants to re-enter every product code (habit) or because a wrong count could leave a vet short of a drug mid-surgery (anxiety).

A switch interview guide

The switch interview reconstructs one real decision as a timeline. Moesta and Spiek's guide recommends recruiting people who switched in the last 30 to 90 days, including people who almost switched and did not; planning 45 to 90 minutes; and expecting patterns to start appearing within 5 to 8 interviews for a given job. Their timeline runs from first thought through passive looking, a first event, active looking and a second event to the decision, purchase and use.

A guide for the veterinary example:

Set the scene. "I'd like to reconstruct exactly what happened, like a documentary. The small details help."
Find the first thought. "When did you first think the way you tracked stock had to change? What was going on before that?" Moesta and Spiek say people usually report a moment later than the real first thought, so keep asking what came before.
Passive looking. "Before you went looking, did you notice other ways of doing this? Where?"
The first event. "What happened that made you decide to actually do something?"
Active looking. "What did you look at? What did you rule out, and why?"
The second event. "What made you decide then, rather than next quarter?"
Anxiety and habit. "What almost stopped you? What did you worry would go wrong?"
After the purchase. "What was the first week like? What surprised you?"

Keep asking "and then what happened?" and write down their exact words. Moesta and Spiek advise against feeding customers your vocabulary; a phrase like "I was sick of counting on Fridays" is more useful than your label for it.

Turn interviews into a job statement

After five or more interviews, lay the timelines side by side and look for the same push, the same kind of first event and the same worries. Write the job in the customer's terms: "When [situation], help me [progress], so I can [outcome], without [what I fear]." Then compare it with what your product and marketing actually say. How to analyze customer interviews covers comparing notes across a round.

JTBD works alongside other tools. A buyer persona describes who takes part in a purchase; the job describes what they are trying to get done and why they switched when they did. A customer journey map then shows how they move through your sales and onboarding.

Your next step

List people who switched to your product, to a competitor or to a workaround in the last three months, and book five switch interviews. If the recent switchers you need are outside your network, Instant Expert can find people who match a description such as "practice managers at veterinary clinics who changed how they track inventory this year." You review who it finds, it sends your invitations, and you pay for each call that gets booked. The directory page for operations professionals in veterinary services shows the kinds of people you could reach.