Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework that defines customer needs not through demographic characteristics but through the task a customer wants to accomplish in a specific situation. The central premise: customers do not buy a product — they hire it to get a job done. This job can be functional (solving a task), emotional (feeling secure), or social (looking good) in nature.
The most famous example comes from Clayton Christensen: McDonald’s investigated why disproportionately many milkshakes were sold in the morning. The answer lay not in taste preferences but in the job: commuters needed something that made a boring car ride more bearable, left one hand free, and kept them full for a long time. The milkshake was thus not competing with other desserts but with bananas, bagels, and boredom. This understanding transforms the entire product development and positioning, because suddenly different competitors and different improvement levers become visible.
The framework was described in detail by Clayton Christensen in Competing Against Luck (2016). The decisive perspective shift: instead of asking who the customer is, one asks what the customer wants to achieve in which situation.
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