Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

TL;DR

A framework that defines a product by the progress a customer is trying to make in their life, not by demographics or features.

Jobs to Be Done, popularized by Clayton Christensen, reframes product strategy around the underlying 'job' a customer is trying to get done. The classic example: people don't buy a quarter-inch drill; they hire it to make a quarter-inch hole — and might equally hire a hole-punching service or a stick-on shelf bracket.

Applied well, JTBD changes how teams pick competitors (anything that does the job, not just things in the same category), how they prioritize features (only those that advance the job), and how they segment users (by job context rather than industry).

Worked example

Clayton Christensen's milkshake study: McDonald's discovered 40% of milkshakes were bought by morning commuters whose 'job to be done' was 'keep me occupied and not-hungry during a 25-minute drive.' Reformulating the shake to last longer (thicker, with chunks) lifted morning sales 7×.

Common pitfalls

• Writing job statements that are really feature requests in disguise.
• Picking jobs so abstract they can't guide product decisions.
• Treating JTBD as a marketing exercise rather than a product strategy frame.

When this shows up in a pitch deck

Often surfaces on the Problem slide as a customer quote describing the job, and on the Competition slide where the comparison set is broader than the obvious category.

See Jobs to Be Done in context

Jobs to Be Done shows up most often in these scoring rubrics and investor profiles — jump straight to who cares about it and how to pitch them.

In VC frameworks

• Techstars — pitch deck framework

Related terms

• Customer Discovery — Structured interviews with potential customers to test whether the problem you assume exists is real and worth paying to solve.
• User Persona — A composite description of a typical user — role, goals, constraints, behaviors — used to align product, design, and go-to-market decisions.
• Ideal Customer Profile — A precise definition of the buying organization that gets the most value from your product and is the cheapest to acquire.
• North Star Metric — The single metric that best captures the core value the product delivers and the long-term success of the business.
• Product-Market Fit — The point at which a product satisfies a market well enough that demand pulls the company forward instead of the team pushing it.

Use this in your next pitch deck

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