Jobs to Be Done

Through my research on innovation for the past two decades, my colleagues and I have developed a theory about this approach to marketing and product development, which we call “the job to be done.” The insight behind this way of thinking is that what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.

For each job, ask these three questions and rate each on a scale of 1–5: • Is the job important to the customer? (1 = not important, 5 = very important) • Does the job occur relatively frequently? (1 = infrequently, 5 = very frequently) • Is the customer frustrated by the inability to get the job done with today’s solutions? (1 = frustrated, 5 = no