Jobs to Be Done

The lens is most associated with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who illustrated it with the story of a fast-food chain discovering that customers were 'hiring' its milkshakes to make a dull morning commute more bearable — a job that had little to do with the drink's flavour.

People don't want your product — they want the job it does for them. The Jobs-to-Be-Done lens, from Christensen's work, says customers "hire" a product to make progress on a specific job in their life. Pages framed around features ("what it is") rather than the job ("what it does for you") force the visitor to do the translation, and many won't bother.

The shift is from what your product is to what progress the customer is trying to make. People don't buy a drill because they want a drill; they buy it because they want a hole — and really, because they want the shelf the hole is for. A page that describes the drill leaves the visitor to connect it to the shelf themselves.

Framing around the job also clarifies who you're really competing with. The milkshake competed not with other milkshakes but with bananas and boredom. Understanding the job — the actual progress sought — tells you what to emphasise and what the visitor is genuinely weighing.

Jobs to Be Done reframes what a customer is doing when they use a product. In this view, people don't buy products for their own sake — they 'hire' them to make progress on a specific job in their life. The job is the goal, the circumstance, and the desired outcome; the product is just one possible way to get it done.

Clayton Christensen's milkshake story is the canonical illustration: a chain studying who bought milkshakes in the morning found customers were hiring them for a long, dull commute — they wanted something filling, one-handed, and slow to finish. That job reframed everything, from the product to the competition (boredom and bananas, not other milkshakes).

For a web page, the lesson is to frame around the job, not the features. A page that catalogues what a product *is* forces the visitor to translate features into the progress they actually want; a page framed around the job does that translation for them. Visitors aren't shopping for capabilities — they're trying to work out whether their situation will be different. It connects to outcomes over output, benefit framing, and the value proposition.

Whether a page is framed around the customer's job rather than the product's features is largely an editorial and strategic judgement, and Kweri treats it as guidance. It can prompt the question — does this page describe what the product *is*, or the progress the visitor is trying to make? — and flag heavily feature-led copy. But knowing the actual job your customers are hiring you for requires understanding your audience, which a static review can't supply. So Kweri surfaces feature-led framing and prompts the jobs question, while the real insight comes from knowing your customers.

Identified by Clayton Christensen. Catalogued from Jobs to Be Done (Clayton Christensen).

A framework most associated with Clayton Christensen's work on innovation; there's no single canonical web source.