--- title: "What Is Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)? PM Guide" description: "Jobs to Be Done is a theory that customers hire products to make progress on a job, not because of demographics. Here is the definition and a real example." canonical_url: "https://builderscamp.com/guides/glossary/jobs-to-be-done" date_published: "2026-09-16" date_modified: "2026-09-16" author: "Andre Albuquerque" publisher: "Builders Camp" guide_class: "glossary" --- # What Is Jobs to Be Done **TL;DR:** Jobs to Be Done is a theory that customers do not buy products because of demographics or features; they hire a product to make progress on a specific job in a specific circumstance. The core insight, attributed to Clayton Christensen, is that people hire products the same way they hire a contractor. ## What does Jobs to Be Done mean? Jobs to Be Done, often abbreviated JTBD, is a theory built around one idea: customers are not buying products, they are hiring them to get a specific job done. Per the Christensen Institute, the theory reveals the functional, social, and emotional forces that push a person toward or away from a decision, in contrast to conventional marketing's focus on demographics or product attributes. A job to be done is a problem or opportunity someone is trying to solve, and people hire products the same way they hire a contractor or a lawyer, based on whether the product actually makes progress on that job in their specific circumstance, not on how the product is categorized. ## Why Jobs to Be Done matters for product managers Builders Camp's Product MBA certification quiz asks students directly for the core concept of Jobs to Be Done, and the correct answer is that customers hire products to get specific jobs done, focused on context and outcome rather than brand loyalty or a features list. That framing changes how a PM reads customer research: instead of asking what feature a customer wants, a JTBD interview asks what the customer was trying to accomplish right before they went looking for a solution, which surfaces competitors a features-based question would never reveal, including doing nothing at all. That wider view of the competition is often the more useful finding, since the real alternative a customer is weighing may not be another product in the same category at all. ## Jobs to Be Done example A team assumes customers buy their meal-kit service because they want to cook more, but JTBD interviews reveal a different job entirely: many customers are hiring the service to avoid the anxiety of a wasted grocery trip after a long day, not to develop as a cook. That distinction changes the roadmap, prioritizing fast, low-effort recipes over advanced techniques. Builders Camp's own material on [how to run customer interviews](https://builderscamp.com/guides/other/how-to-run-customer-interviews) treats this exact shift, asking about circumstance and progress instead of preference, as the difference between research that changes a roadmap and research that just confirms what the team already believed. A roadmap built on the wasted-trip job looks different from one built on the develop-as-a-cook job, even though both started from the same product. ## How Builders Camp teaches Jobs to Be Done Product Manager Foundations, a 2 week bootcamp with 4 live sessions and 7 microlessons taught by Andre Albuquerque, tests the Jobs to Be Done concept directly in its certification quiz as part of its market and customer discovery module. [Voice of the Customer](https://builderscamp.com/bootcamps/voice-of-the-customer) extends the same thinking into ongoing feedback programs rather than one-off interviews. See the [Product Manager Foundations bootcamp](https://builderscamp.com/bootcamps/product-foundations) for the full syllabus. ## Frequently asked questions ### Who developed the Jobs to Be Done theory? Clayton Christensen, working with Bob Moesta, developed and popularized the theory, building on earlier work by Tony Ulwick, and it is closely associated with Christensen's later writing on innovation and customer behavior. ### How is a job different from a feature request? A feature request describes a specific solution a customer imagined; a job describes the underlying progress the customer is trying to make, which can often be satisfied by several different solutions, including ones the customer never thought to ask for. ### What does it mean that a job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions? The functional dimension is the practical task itself, the social dimension is how the choice makes the customer look to others, and the emotional dimension is how the customer wants to feel while getting the job done; all three shape which product actually gets hired. ### How is JTBD research different from demographic segmentation? Demographic segmentation groups customers by traits like age or income; JTBD groups them by the job they are trying to accomplish, which often cuts across demographic lines entirely and surfaces very different competitors. ### Can a product be fired the way it is hired? Yes, and JTBD treats a customer switching away from a product as just as informative as a customer choosing it, since the switch usually reveals the job the previous product stopped doing well enough. ### How does JTBD change how a PM writes a product vision? A vision grounded in JTBD describes the progress a customer will make, not a feature set, which keeps the vision stable even as the specific solutions used to deliver that progress change over time. ## Sources - [Christensen Institute: Jobs to Be Done Theory](https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/) ## How this guide was made Researched from Builders Camp's bootcamp, track and masterclass material and the sources listed on this page, drafted with AI, and fact-checked against every source cited.