I learned innovation directly from Clayton Christensen. When I was one of five people on Gannett's Design Innovation Group, he ran trainings there, and that's where I learned it from him. So it's a little painful watching what jobs-to-be-done has turned into in a lot of product orgs: a sticky-note template.
When I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___. Fill in the blanks, call it research, move on.
That's not what he was teaching.
The core idea is simple and a bit unsettling. People hire products to make progress in a specific circumstance. And they fire them when something else does that job better, even when that something is in a totally different category.
Read that last part again, because it's the part the template drops. Take the hiring idea seriously and your competition grows to everything a person might hire instead, including doing nothing. The logos on your pitch deck are a small slice of it.
The milkshake, and what people skip
The milkshake story is the one everyone quotes. A fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. It asked customers what they wanted in a milkshake (thicker, sweeter, more flavors), changed the shake based on the answers, and didn't sell more shakes. So the researchers watched instead. A lot of the shakes went out early in the morning, to people who came in alone, bought only a shake and drove off. They had a long, boring commute. They needed something that would last the drive, fit in one hand and keep them full until lunch.
The punchline is famous. The morning milkshake's real competition was a banana, a bagel and boredom. Other milkshakes barely came into it.
What people skip is how they got there: watching who bought, when, whether they were alone, what they did next. Then asking what else they'd tried. Nobody got that answer from a survey about milkshake preferences. They got it by studying the situation the purchase happened in.
Here's the test I'd hold any jobs work to. If it never turns up a competitor you didn't expect, you probably didn't find the job.
Circumstance beats demographics
The thing to study is the situation.
"A 35-year-old marketing manager" describes a person. "Needs to show the board something credible by Thursday with half the data missing" describes a job. Personas tell you who. Circumstances tell you why, and why is where products win.
The same person can have completely different jobs depending on the moment. The commuter who hires a milkshake to survive the drive might buy another one at four in the afternoon for a kid in the back seat. Different job, different competitors, different idea of what good looks like. A persona folds those two moments into one profile. A job keeps them apart.
The promise and the receipt
My own best example came out of payments, and it's an emotional job, which is the kind the template misses most.
It started with credit-card work at PenFed and came with me to WhatsApp Payments at Meta. The line we used was: "Don't make me look foolish in front of the person I'm paying."
Think about what happens when you pay someone. Somebody promised to give you something: a product, a service, money back. You go to pay, and it doesn't go through. Now you're the one who can't hold up your end, standing in front of them. People hate that feeling. The moment you've committed to pay, before the payment has actually landed, is a very vulnerable one.
Cross-border remittance stretches that moment out. You've told your family the money is coming. Between sending it and it arriving, you're exposed. Will it work? Will it get there in time? What will they say? They're completely depending on you.
That gap between the promise and the receipt is a very specific feeling in fintech, and I think it's the one that matters most to people. They're more sensitive there than when they ask for credit. "Do I qualify?" stings. "Did my payment fail in front of them?" stings more. It isn't really understood until you dig into it.
Look at what that does to the competition. If the job is "move money from A to B," you're up against the other payment apps. If the job is "don't let me look foolish," you're also up against cash, a friend who'll front it, or just not offering to pay at all. A product can do the functional job perfectly and still get fired for failing the emotional one, and the customer usually can't tell you why.
Three ways teams get it wrong
They write jobs from inside the building. The template gets filled out in a conference room instead of from conversations about real switching moments. A job written by the team that built the product almost always describes the product's features in the customer's voice.
They stop at the functional job. Christensen was clear that jobs have social and emotional sides too. The promise-and-receipt job never shows up in a requirements doc, and it's the one people remember.
They use it once. Jobs work gets treated as a discovery ritual, run at the start of a project and then filed. It's a lens for portfolio and strategy decisions too: which of your products are doing which jobs, where two of yours are competing for the same hire, and which job nobody in the company is serving well.
Where the metaphor breaks
"Hire" is a useful word because it makes you think about the decision instead of the product. But nobody writes a job description before they buy something. Customers can't tell you the job directly, any more than the commuters could have said "I need something to make the drive less boring." You rebuild it from what they did, which is why the method is interviews about past behavior, not questions about future wants.
The firing is usually silent, too. An employee gets an exit conversation. A product just stops getting used. The moment someone switches is the richest information you'll ever have, and most companies never ask about it.
Try this
- Talk to five customers who recently started using your product, or recently stopped.
- Ask what they were doing before. Not which competitor: what they were doing. Spreadsheets, a person, nothing at all.
- Ask about the day they decided to change. What happened that week? What made the old way stop being good enough?
- Ask what nearly stopped them from switching. Worry, cost, effort, what someone else would think. That last one is often the emotional job.
- Write the job as a circumstance, in their words. Then list every competitor that showed up across the five, and circle the ones that weren't on your slide.
Where do you land?
