# Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) People don't buy products. They "hire" them to get a job done. That's the core idea behind Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), a framework popularized by [[Clayton Christensen]]. A "job" is the progress someone is trying to make in a specific situation. The classic example comes from Christensen's milkshake study. Customers didn't buy milkshakes in the morning because they suddenly craved one. They "hired" the milkshake to make a long and boring commute more bearable, while keeping one hand free. Look at it that way, and the milkshake isn't competing with other milkshakes at all. It competes with bananas, bagels and podcasts. Why should you care? - Jobs are stable, but solutions come and go. People needed to capture ideas before those evaporated long before note-taking apps existed, and that job will outlive every app on the market today. - The competition is not what you think it is. You compete with everything else people could "hire" for the job. Including doing nothing at all! - It explains why people switch. A new solution wins when it does the job better, assuming the switching costs feel acceptable. I use this lens well beyond product design. When I document my tools (e.g., my Obsidian plugins), I organize everything by job rather than by tool name. Tools get replaced. The jobs remain. Same for content: each piece I publish should do one clear job for the reader. ## References - Clayton Christensen et al., "Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done": https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done - Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck (book) ## Related - [[Clayton Christensen]] - [[User Experience (UX)]]