JOBS-TO-BE-DONE is best defined as a perspective — a lens through which you can observe markets, customers, needs, competitors, and customer segments differently, and by doing so, make innovation far more predictable and profitable.

A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.

When you look at marketing and innovation through a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, everything looks different:

• The unit of analysis is no longer the customer or the product, it’s the core functional “job” the customer is trying to get done.
• Markets aren’t defined around products, they are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done.
• Customers aren’t buyers, they are job executors.
• Needs aren’t vague, latent and unknowable, they are the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done.
• Competitors aren’t companies that make products like yours, they are any solution being used to get the job done.
• Customer segments aren’t based on demographics or psychographics, they are based on how customers struggle differently to get a job done.

The core tenets of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory are summarized as follows:

1. People buy products and services to get a “job” done.
2. Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components.
3. A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time.
4. A Job-to-be-Done is solution agnostic.
5. Success comes from making the “job”, rather than the product or the customer, the unit of analysis.
6. A deep understanding of the customer’s “job” makes marketing more effective and innovation far more predictable.
7. People want products and services that wil help them get a job done better and/or more cheaply