product
Importance:

Jobs to Be Done

Also known as: JTBD, jobs to be done, jobs-to-be-done

The idea that customers don't buy products, they hire them to make progress on a job — so you design for the job, not the demographic.

Jobs to Be Done

Jobs to be done reframes a product as something people “hire” to make progress in a specific situation. The classic line — nobody wants a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole — is a discipline for staring past features at the underlying job.

It keeps me honest about what we’re really competing with, which is often a spreadsheet or a workaround, not another app. Get the job right and the feature set mostly designs itself; get it wrong and no amount of polish saves it.