Section 1: An Introduction to Jobs Theory

<aside> 💼 After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?

</aside>

• When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done.
• Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time.
• What job did you hire that product to do?
• Why is innovation so hard to predict—and sustain? Because we haven’t been asking the right questions.
• How do successful companies know how to grow?
• It turns out that the milk shake does the job better than any of the competitors
• People hired milk shakes for two very different jobs during the day, in two very different circumstances.
• How often do you hear a success dismissed as simply the right product at the right time? We can do better than that.

<aside> 🛠️ At its heart, Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives: they do this to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise.

</aside>

• The Japanese experimented relentlessly to learn the cause of manufacturing defects.
• I’ve watched so many smart, capable managers wrestle with all kinds of innovation challenges and nagging questions, but seldom the most fundamental one: What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?
• There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.
• We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.
• The emphasis on the circumstance is not hair-splitting or simple semantics—it is fundamental to the Job to Be Done.
• Finally, a job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions, too.
• They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions.
• This is very different from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because it entails a much higher degree of specificity about what you’re solving for.
• These details are not arbitrary—they’re rich in context and meaning—and answering these questions enables you to fully flesh out the complexity of the job.