I struggled with innovation for many years. I finally made progress when I focused on two things: The desire every customer has to improve themselves and their life-situations. How customers imagine their lives being better when they have the right solution.

People have Jobs; things don’t. It doesn’t make sense to ask, “What Job is your product doing?” or say, “The Job of the phone is…” or “The Job of the watch is…” Phones, watches, and dry-cleaning services don’t have Jobs. They are examples of solutions for Job.

Demand isn’t spontaneously generated. No one wakes up in the morning and suddenly thinks, Today, I’m going to buy a new car. Some combination of events always comes together to generate that demand. We call those forces push and pull.

The desire every customer has to improve themselves and their life-situations. How customers imagine their lives being better when they have the right solution.

When I interview potential customers, I look for evidence of a struggle. I’m looking for an energy to tap into. That’s how I know a struggling moment exists and that there’s an opportunity to create something. If a group of people is not struggling—if I can’t feel that energy—then there’s probably no opportunity there.

There is no demand—and therefore no JTBD—unless push and pull work together. A powerful step in understanding customer motivation is to study and appreciate the interdependencies between push and pull. They need each other. I might be attracted to the idea of owning an electric car from Tesla, but I won’t buy one unless I need a car. I have no

Competition is defined in the minds of customers, and they use progress as their criterion.

Innovators must understand what the customer does and doesn’t know. We must abandon the idea that customers have a laundry list of “needs.” Instead, we should see customers as having only one need: to make progress within the systems they belong to. Any

Marketing communications should focus on what a product does for (and to) the customer, not on what it is. A Snickers satisfies hunger – i.e., what it does. It is chocolate and nougat combined with whole peanuts.