Jobs to Be Done

Why do so many companies—despite hard work, big data, and brilliant teams—still struggle to innovate consistently? In Jobs to Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation, Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman, and David Farber argue that the problem isn’t creativity; it’s process. The book contends that innovation fails not because people lack ideas, but because organizations don’t understand the real problems customers are trying to solve. The authors build on Professor Clayton Christensen’s groundbreaking theory of Jobs to Be Done to create a clear, actionable roadmap for discovering, testing, and scaling ideas that truly meet customer needs.

Wunker and his coauthors argue that customers rarely buy products just to own them; they “hire” products to get specific jobs done in their lives. By focusing on those jobs—the tasks, goals, and emotional needs people are trying to fulfill—companies can stop guessing and start creating offerings that connect perfectly with customer motivations. The book provides a detailed methodology for innovators, blending psychological insight with practical strategy.

The Case for a New Roadmap

The authors begin with a critique of modern innovation practices. Too many brainstorming sessions, they write, are based on intuition or managerial whim. Companies collect huge amounts of customer data but fail to translate it into meaningful insights. The result? Over half of new products miss expectations and only one in 300 achieves breakthrough impact. The Jobs to Be Done method, they argue, provides a systematic way to reverse those odds by giving teams a structured process that connects research to design and design to strategy.

The heart of the book is the Jobs Roadmap—a repeatable process for developing innovations that consistently succeed. This roadmap has two major stages. In Part I, readers learn how to understand the customer’s world: identifying what jobs they want to accomplish, what obstacles stand in their way, and why success matters to them. In Part II, they learn to act: designing ideas, testing them quickly, and scaling solutions that create both customer and company value.

Why Customers Struggle to Articulate Their Needs

One of the authors’ most important points is that customers often cannot express their true needs. As the cliché goes, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” Customers think in terms of solutions they already know, not the underlying job they’re trying to get done—like “get from place to place faster.” That’s why the book emphasizes observation, conversation, and empathy over simple surveys. By uncovering the why behind the what, innovators can see hidden opportunities.

The authors demonstrate this by looking at real examples. Uber didn’t succeed just by offering cheaper rides; it solved emotional jobs like gaining control and certainty in urban travel. Snapchat took off not because of fancy filters but because it helped a generation share “real life” moments without judgment, satisfying the emotional job of authenticity. These examples expose how breakthrough innovation often comes from solving overlooked jobs at both functional and emotional levels.

The Promise of Repeatable Innovation

Too often, even successful companies can’t repeat their own successes. They treat innovation like catching lightning in a bottle. Jobs to Be Done aims to change that by turning creativity into a disciplined capability. The authors show how to translate messy real-world insights into structured maps—what they call a “Jobs Atlas”—that guide teams through understanding markets, defining objectives, and designing profitable solutions. The book’s combination of strategy, customer psychology, and experimentation makes innovation something reliable rather than random.

Why It Matters

With product lifecycles shorter than ever and customer expectations higher than before, businesses can’t rely on luck or instinct. Whether you lead a startup or a Fortune 500 company, understanding your customers’ jobs to be done is the key to long-term growth. Wunker, Wattman, and Farber present both a mindset and a set of tools for uncovering those jobs, prioritizing them, and designing around them. The result is a practical, people-first framework that replaces guesswork with insight—and flash-of-genius innovation with repeatable growth.

The first step in the Jobs Roadmap is deceptively simple: stop thinking about what people buy, and start asking why they buy it. Stephen Wunker introduces this shift through the story of his early smartphone work at Psion PLC in the 1990s. His team obsessed over features—maps, faxing, and calendars—yet it was Research in Motion’s simpler BlackBerry, which focused on a single job (staying connected through email), that won the market. The lesson: people hire products to do jobs, not to showcase features.

Functional and Emotional Jobs

Each customer’s decision involves two dimensions: functional jobs (the tangible tasks they want to accomplish) and emotional jobs (how they want to feel while doing it). For instance, Uber solved functional problems like payment friction but also emotional anxieties like uncertainty and loss of control. These emotional layers often determine why one solution triumphs over another. Ignoring them is like improving a hammer’s grip while forgetting that customers want to build something beautiful, not just drive nails.

Designing Around the Right Jobs

A great example comes from the education world. Brookwood School in Massachusetts initially marketed itself as a “community of exuberant learners.” But parents didn’t view finding a community as a job—they wanted a place where their children thrived as individuals. Reframing its message around that deeper job dramatically improved enrollment. Similarly, First Ipswich Bank realized that home buyers weren’t seeking mortgages—they were trying to move into old homes and needed financial flexibility for renovations. So it created a mortgage product with built-in renovation financing. The product succeeded because it matched the real job.

Focusing on Specific Contexts

Jobs vary by situation. The book’s “ice cream exercise” shows why context matters. Asking “How can we sell more ice cream?” yields generic answers like more flavors. By contrast, asking “Why did you eat ice cream last time?” reveals diverse jobs: celebrating, cooling off, exploring new experiences. Understanding those specific circumstances opens more creative paths for innovation. Successful ideas often focus on jobs that are both important and currently underserved—a “North Star” that guides design decisions.

From Features to Focus

Be wary of feature creep. The case of Beats by Dre headphones shows that emotional jobs—like expressing identity and status—can outweigh marginal gains in technical performance. As industry peers chased better sound, Beats captured hearts and wallets through lifestyle appeal. Companies that define themselves by jobs rather than products avoid these dead-end feature wars. In other words, focus on helping people get their job done better and you’ll future-proof your offerings.

Innovation begins not with brainstorming but with deep empathy. When you identify the real job someone wants done, you unlock the most reliable source of growth—helping them succeed in what matters most to them.

Even when two customers share the same job, what drives them—and what solutions they choose—can differ dramatically. Chapter 2 introduces job drivers: the underlying attitudes, background, and circumstances that make certain jobs more or less important. These drivers explain why customers prioritize differently and are a cornerstone of effective segmentation.

Three Types of Job Drivers

Wunker illustrates job drivers with “Stan,” a car shopper. His attitudes (wanting to display success) push him toward a Mercedes. His background (snowy New England hills) makes him need traction, leading to a Porsche Cayenne. His current circumstances (hauling lacrosse gear as a coach) steer him toward a Cadillac Escalade. Each factor reshapes the same core job—safe, reliable travel—into different product needs.

Job Drivers Redefine Segments

Most companies segment by demographics or surface behavior, which explains little about why customers act. Adding job drivers reveals genuine motivations. Planet Fitness, for example, focused on people intimidated by intense gyms. It satisfied emotional needs—comfort, belonging—and designed everything from pricing ($10 memberships) to culture (“Judgment Free Zone”) around that insight. The payoff: rapid growth and loyalty from an underserved segment.

Similarly, Best Buy discovered that suburban moms (“Jill”) and tech enthusiasts (“Buzz”) had distinct job drivers. Remodeling stores around those personas increased same-store sales by 9%. When you map job drivers with jobs, you see how context shapes behavior—and how to design differently for each cluster.

Translating Drivers Into Strategy

Understanding job drivers helps prioritize markets. In online education, for instance, a company discovered that adults seeking quick degrees weren’t just time-constrained—they were motivated by family pride, employer pressure, and flexible schedules. Those insights led to new pricing, structure, and messaging. This shows that segmentation by “why” beats segmentation by “who.”

Job drivers—attitudes, background, and circumstances—explain the deep logic behind customer choices. Understand those, and you’ll know not only who to serve but how to serve them better than anyone else.

After you know what customers are trying to do and why, the next task is to see how they currently attempt it—and where they struggle. Every inefficiency or frustration is an innovation opportunity. The authors show that identifying pain points requires seeing beyond the product to the broader process and the multiple stakeholders involved.

Look Beyond the Buyer

Pain points rarely belong to a single user. A grocery purchase, for example, involves multiple stakeholders: the shopper (price-sensitive), the cook (seeking ease), and the eater (focused on taste). A narrow focus on just one would mislead product design. Mapping the entire journey—from desire to purchase to use to disposal—reveals all relevant frustrations.

Complement or Replace Behavior

One of the hardest lessons is recognizing when to fit new solutions into existing behaviors versus asking customers to change. Kellogg’s Breakfast Mates failed because it required consumers to rethink how milk and cereal worked—warm or cold? Refrigerated or not?—and they refused. Similarly, development efforts in Afghanistan faltered when programs imposed new educational norms without local buy-in. Successful change, as later projects learned, demanded working with local attitudes rather than against them.

Pain Points as Innovation Gold

Every workaround is a beacon of opportunity. The man who glued a bump on his alarm clock button had just identified usable design insight. Kimberly-Clark noticed adults jamming toilet paper into underwear for incontinence. That pain led to Depend Silhouette products that reclaimed dignity for customers and profit for the brand. By quantifying which pain points matter most—through tools like conjoint analysis—companies can prioritize what to solve first.

Don’t chase what’s novel; fix what’s painful. Every complaint hides a market gap waiting for someone intuitive enough to notice and systematic enough to solve.

Value is meaningless unless you know how customers define success. A product’s “win” is not your internal sales target—it’s the customer’s sense that a job has been well done. In Chapter 4, Wunker and coauthors show how uncovering success criteria turns general insights into sharp design decisions.

The Customer’s Definition of a Win

Big Heart Pet Brands learned that cat owners weren’t just buying food; they were trying to elicit affection from their independent pets. Dry food fit convenience jobs but failed that emotional goal. Wet food did the opposite. By creating Meow Mix Tender Centers—crunchy outside, tender inside—the company reconciled functional and emotional success criteria. The dual texture changed feeding time from a chore to a moment of connection, turning empathy into $100 million in first-year sales.

Changing the Scorecard

Tesla’s Model S redefined what it meant to be the “best car.” Traditional measures—speed, safety—remained, but Tesla added new jobs: environmental responsibility and convenience. As a result, it achieved unprecedented Consumer Reports ratings. Likewise, Slack conquered business communication not by killing email but by blending speed, collaboration, and informality—the new definition of workplace success for its users.

Trade-offs Create Value

You can’t win on every attribute, so choose wisely. MSNBC’s strategy during the 2008 election—less expensive talent, more political commentary—sacrificed breadth for depth, delivering 20% audience growth with lower costs. The Colgate Wisp toothbrush did the same: it ignored plaque-fighting perfection to dominate the niche of on-the-go freshness. Successful innovation often involves proudly underperforming on dimensions your target customers don’t care about.

Customers define success emotionally as much as functionally. When you measure victory their way—not yours—you discover the features worth perfecting and the ones worth ignoring.

Even great ideas fail when they collide with human habits. Chapter 5 shows why understanding and removing obstacles is as important as designing the product itself. Innovation succeeds when you make it easier for people to act differently.

The Weight of Inertia

People cling to the familiar. The book compares urban Americans’ indifference to mopeds with their embrace of luxurious, comfortable cars. GenZe’s electric scooter broke through only after addressing both practical and emotional barriers: it added rainproof cargo space, tech appeal, and an eco-status message. The goal wasn’t just to sell scooters but to make choosing them feel natural, safe, and even fashionable.

Common Barriers to Adoption

The authors list six primary adoption obstacles: lack of knowledge, behavior change requirements, multiple decision makers, high cost, perceived risk, and unfamiliar categories. Each calls for different strategies—education, simplification, risk-sharing, or focused entry points. The IoT company en-Gauge succeeded by entering through fire-safety monitoring—a familiar job that built trust for larger industrial systems later.

Obstacles to Continued Use

Even after adoption, products fail if they create friction. Microsoft’s Vista alienated users with complexity; Segway lost its audience by solving no clear job. Meanwhile, Amazon gradually lowered e-commerce barriers for an entire industry—normalizing heavy-item shipping and online habits. The lesson: first-time users are expensive; repeat users build empires.

Don’t just design for desirability—design for adoptability. An idea is only as strong as your ability to remove every excuse customers might have not to use it.

Great insights are useless unless they translate into sustainable revenue. Chapter 6 tackles the commercial heart of innovation: connecting what customers value with how your business makes money. The key is to think in terms of jobs and value, not just products and price tags.

Sizing Opportunity Through Jobs

Market size changes when you redefine what market you’re in. Hershey discovered that adults consume 55% of candy and designed treats that helped them “reward themselves” without guilt—expanding the entire category. Similarly, Kimberly-Clark’s Golden Friends line in Korea targeted active seniors’ emotional jobs—feeling independent and dignified—transforming adult care products into lifestyle goods.

Value-Based Pricing

Traditional cost-plus or competitor pricing limits imagination. A value-based approach sets prices by how well you relieve pain or fulfill desire. Uber’s surge pricing reflects this: fares rise when the job—getting home safely and on time—becomes more valuable. The company monetizes urgency, not distance. By contrast, flat pricing would ignore context and emotion, leaving money (and customer understanding) on the table.

Building Profitable Models

Tasting Counter, a Boston restaurant, demonstrates how customer-focused design can double as a strong business model. It sells prepaid tasting menus that include tax and tip, eliminating payment awkwardness for diners and giving the restaurant guaranteed revenue and zero waste. By aligning economics with experience, both sides win. The authors’ five-step viability test ensures every new idea benefits both stakeholder groups: customers and company.

When you understand not just what customers will pay but why they’ll pay it, you stop competing on price and start competing on purpose.

Traditional strategy views competition through industry categories. A jobs-based lens widens that scope to everything that satisfies the same customer goal. In Chapter 7, the authors show how rethinking your competitive set reveals both threats and untapped markets.

Competing Beyond Product Categories

The Oreo cookie’s social media renaissance illustrates modern competition. Kraft’s CMO realized that at the checkout line Oreo wasn’t just fighting chips—it competed with smartphones for attention. By embracing digital media to “dunk in the dark,” Oreo inserted itself into that digital job: passing time and seeking delight. The move kept the brand relevant in a new competitive arena.

The Perils of Narrow Thinking

When companies define markets too narrowly, they invite disruption. Décor Aid, a startup interior-design firm, thrived by serving people never touched by the traditional high-cost industry—solving jobs around comfort and expression for ordinary homeowners. Meanwhile, Digital Equipment Corporation clung to its shrinking “$6,000 workstation” niche while customers shifted to cheaper PCs. Innovation blindness often begins with definitions, not strategy.

Finding Opportunities in Nonconsumption

True growth arises from nonconsumers—the people not yet in your market. Microsoft’s WebTV failed because infrastructure (fast Internet, large TVs) wasn’t ready; later, Apple and Google succeeded once those jobs could finally be done right. Great companies assess whether the “nonconsumption” around them reflects impossibility or latent opportunity.

Evaluating Your Right to Win

The Jobs lens enhances competitive analysis by asking three strategic questions: What jobs can we satisfy better than others? How flexible are we to adapt as markets evolve? And how might incumbents react? Companies like Nike answer these boldly—using customization (NIKEiD) to fight not just other sneakers but other means of self-expression like fashion or tattoos.

Your competition isn’t who you think—it’s anything your customer could hire to get the same job. Once you see the world through that lens, entire new industries open up.