(2025-04-16) Chin The Jobs To Be Done Framework to Understand Demand

Cedric Chin: The Jobs to be Done Framework (to Understand Demand): How and why the Jobs to be Done Framework can help you sell more, faster, and accelerate your understanding of demand.

The basic idea that we will exploit in this piece is this: let’s say that you’re decent at Sales Safari. Let’s say that you know:

• What pains your customers want to solve when they buy your product.
• (see list of other things)

We are left with the following questions:

• Where do potential customers (with these pains and worldviews) hang out?
• How do we reach them?
• How do we identify how likely they are to buy, and how do we increase the likelihood that they will buy?
• How do we speed up the buyer’s journey — that is, the urgency with which such customers will reach out and go through our sales process?

Sales Safari, you should realise by now, has nothing to say about these questions. Sales Safari is a demand identification framework. It tells you who to target, why they buy, and gives you a rough idea of how to find and attract them. The classical, marketing name for what Sales Safari allows you to do is ‘segmentation’.

The second set of questions, on the other hand, are related to how your best-fit customers buy.

A Brief, Non-Confusing Intro to the Jobs to be Done Framework

Every significant purchase decision goes through the same buyer’s journey. A buyer progresses along the stages on that journey when a trigger point occurs at each stage. If you can uncover these trigger points, you can create sales and marketing processes (or modify product features) to accelerate customers along the purchasing journey

there are two nit-picky details that I’ll need to cover.

First: there are actually two Jobs to be Done Frameworks. The phrase ‘Jobs to be Done’ or ‘JTBD’ tends to be attributed to legendary Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who popularised it in his 2003 book The Innovator’s Solution. Christensen passed away in 2020.

Two separate groups have laid claim to influencing Christensen’s ideas ever since:

• Jobs as Activities: a typology patented by Tony Ulwick and his licensees.
• Jobs as Progress: a theory promoted by Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek, and the ‘ReWired Group’.

I will not get into to the fight

I will only say that I am referring to the second theory — Jobs as Progress, as presented by Moesta, Spiek, and company. I will also say that I do not have a strong opinion on Ulwick’s theory, only that I do not find him useful (or believable) for the outcomes I desire. Moesta and Spiek’s ideas, on the other hand, I’ve already tested, and I can confirm that it works.

probably a good idea to familiarise yourself with the two very different approaches — so you don’t get confused. I recommend this comprehensive article by Alan Klement to that end (archive.is backup).

Second, there is a common folk-misunderstanding that we must tackle before we continue. That misunderstanding is that the JTBD framework is only about what ‘jobs’ your product does for the customer. Perhaps the misunderstanding persists because there is a very compelling story that Christensen tells about milkshakes.

As a result, people believe that the JTBD framework is merely about divining what job it is that your product really solves for the customer

But this interpretation of the framework is mistaken.

To be fair, this misperception is not entirely wrong — the JTBD framework as presented by Christensen and Moesta can (and in fact was) used for this purpose. But the framework is more than that

there are more levers you can use than just ‘modifying the product to better fit the job the customer “hired” the product to do.’

The Ideas That Make Up JTBD

• The timeline (aka buyer’s journey).
• The forces of progress (I think of these as the ‘four forces’, plus ‘the three sources of motivation’).
• The JTBD interview methodology (which we will demonstrate with a case).

The Timeline

A typical buyer’s journey goes something like this:

You have a first thought.

As a result of having that first thought, shortly afterwards you enter passive looking

At some point, a trigger event occurs and you enter active looking.

You are fairly certain that you’re going to buy this product … soon. Some day. But not today.

A trigger event occurs, and then you enter the deciding stage

which exact product am I going to buy?”

At the end of the deciding stage, you make a purchase.

After the purchasing stage, you start consuming the product. This product or service should satisfy the need you have when you had your first thought. If this is a recurring revenue product, the consuming and satisfaction you get here will determine if you renew.

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