Chapter 1: History of JTBD

The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework is built on a simple idea, customers don't buy products; they "hire" them to make progress in their lives. While this concept was formalized in the late 20th century, its intellectual roots stretch back much further than most practitioners realize.

The Prehistory of an Idea

Long before JTBD had a name, in 1954, Peter Drucker published The Practice of Management, a landmark work that emphasized customer focus and the importance of understanding what value customers actually derive from products rather than what companies think they are selling. [1]

Then came the quote that would be used in all JTBD literature. In 1960, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt published his seminal article "Marketing Myopia" in the Harvard Business Review, arguing that businesses need to shift their focus from producing and selling goods to understanding and meeting customer needs.[2, 3] Levitt used to tell his students, "People don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" This captured the essence of JTBD before the term existed, establishing the foundation that the customer's desired outcome is the true object of their desire.

But elegant aphorisms don't ship products. It would take an engineer's professional disappointment to turn this insight into a rigorous, repeatable methodology.

The Genesis of a Theory: From Engineering Failure to a Formal Process

The practical history of Jobs to be Done begins with Tony Ulwick. In 1983, Ulwick was an engineer on the IBM PCjr team, building what many expected to become the definitive home computer. The Wall Street Journal had other ideas, declaring it a flop the day after launch. The failure cost IBM over a billion dollars.

That high-profile failure helped shape Ulwick's career. By 1990, he had developed a key insight: instead of studying products, study the underlying process customers are trying to complete. He applied Six Sigma and process control thinking to innovation itself, creating a methodology that could identify exactly where customer needs were going unmet.

Ulwick left IBM in 1991 to found The Total Quality Group, now known as Strategyn. His approach, originally called CD-MAP, evolved into Outcome-Driven Innovation.

The methodology's first real test came in 1992 with Cordis Corporation, a medical device company struggling with its angioplasty balloon line. Ulwick's team focused on understanding what cardiologists were actually trying to accomplish when treating blocked arteries, then identified which outcomes mattered most but remained poorly served. Within two years, Cordis went from minimal market share to over 20% and eventually brought the first coronary stent to market. [4]

Around 1999, the company became Strategyn and the process became Outcome-Driven Innovation. In 2000, Ulwick had the distinct pleasure of introducing ODI and his research and segmentation techniques to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in a series of meetings in Cambridge.

One of the highlights of Ulwick's career came in 2002, when Harvard Business Review published an article he wrote called "Turn Customer Input into Innovation," which described ODI and its successful application at Cordis. [5]

The Theorist Enters the Picture

Christensen immediately recognized the JTBD as the missing "demand-side" explanation for why customers choose to adopt new solutions. In his 2003 book The Innovator's Solution, co-authored with Michael Raynor, Christensen referenced Ulwick's work and used phrases like "circumstances-based categorization." [6] But the full "Jobs to be Done" terminology wouldn't become mainstream until later.

The iconic milkshake story first appeared publicly in an April 2007 MIT Sloan Management Review article titled "Finding the Right Job for Your Product," co-authored by Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell, and Denise Nitterhouse. When a fast-food restaurant resolved to improve sales of its milkshake, its marketers first defined the market segment by product and then segmented it further by profiling the customer most likely to buy a milkshake. The consequent improvements to the product had no impact on sales. [7]

A new researcher spent a day in a restaurant documenting when each milkshake was bought. He was surprised to find that 40% of all milkshakes were purchased in the early morning. These early-morning customers almost always were alone, they did not buy anything else and they consumed the milkshakes in their cars. When the researcher returned to interview these morning customers and essentially asked what job they were hiring the milkshake to do, most of them bought their shakes for similar reasons: They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting. They wanted to consume something that would stave off hunger until noon. [7]

This illustrated that the customer's circumstance, not their demographic, is the key to understanding their motivation.

The Great Divide: Two Schools of JTBD Thought

Christensen's popularization of the idea also led to a philosophical split, resulting in two distinct schools of thought that persist today. Understanding this divide is important context to how different practitioners and philosophies go about applying JTBD.

Jobs-as-Activities (The Ulwick School): This school defines a "job" as a functional task or activity a person is trying to accomplish. The focus is on the process of getting the job done. Innovation comes from identifying the metrics customers use to measure success (the "desired outcomes") and helping them execute the job better: faster, more predictably, and with greater efficiency. This approach is highly analytical and quantitative, treating innovation like an engineering discipline. ODI is its primary methodology.

"The Customer-Centered Innovation Map" by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick appeared in the May 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.[8] The article introduced job mapping, a methodology that helps companies analyze the biggest drawbacks of the products and services customers currently use and discover opportunities for innovation. It involves breaking down the task the customer wants to accomplish into eight universal steps. This framework serves as a bridge that many practitioners use regardless of which school they lean toward philosophically.

Jobs-as-Progress (The Christensen/Moesta School): This school defines a "job" as the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. It's not about the task itself, but about resolving a struggle and transitioning to a better state. The focus here is on the why behind a customer's decision to change. This perspective explicitly includes the powerful emotional and social dimensions of a decision. Its research methods are qualitative and narrative-based.

Bob Moesta is the president and CEO of the Re-Wired Group, and one of the core figures in the Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology. Moesta and his team developed frameworks including "The Forces of Progress," which examines the push of the current situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety of the new, and the habit force that causes people to resist change.[9] If the push and pull are not greater than the anxiety and habit, people will never switch. The Re-Wired Group formalized switch interviews, a method of interviewing people who have recently made a purchase to understand how they actually overcame the forces that might have prevented them from switching.

Bob Moesta pioneered the Jobs-to-be-Done framework in the mid-90s, alongside Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. JTBD is a research process that helps uncover a customer's motivation for buying a product, the "job" the product is "hired" to complete.

The Purist: Alan Klement and the Rejection of "Tasks"

While Moesta and Christensen focused on the "Switch," author Alan Klement took the Jobs-as-Progress philosophy a step further, becoming the vocal critic of the activity-based approach. In his book When Coffee and Kale Compete (2016), Klement argued that viewing a Job as a process or a workflow is a fundamental error, essentially forcing "Task Analysis" into a JTBD wrapper. [19]

Klement defines a Job strictly as the desire for self-betterment: "A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her." [18]

For Klement, a Job has no functional steps. The "Job" is not to "drill a hole" (an activity); the Job is the emotional struggle to feel proud of one's home. He argues that activities change constantly as technology evolves, but the human desire for progress is the only constant. This perspective created considerable friction in the JTBD community, drawing a hard line between those who view JTBD as an engineering discipline (Ulwick) and those who view it as a psychological investigation (Klement/Moesta). [20]

JTBD Reaches the Mainstream

In 2016, Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan released Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.[10] After years of research, the authors came to one important conclusion: the long-held maxim that the crux of innovation is knowing more and more about the customer is wrong. Customers don't simply buy products or services; they hire them to do a job. This book finally brought "Jobs to be Done" into mainstream management literature, though it draws almost entirely from the Jobs-as-Progress school and focuses less on Ulwick's ODI methodology.

The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world's most popular companies including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, Twitter (now X), and Chobani yogurt.

The Spread of JTBD in Tech and Startups

Corporate adoption followed a predictable pattern. Early adopters from the late 1990s through 2005 were mostly B2B and industrial companies like Cordis, Bosch, and Microsoft. Between 2007 and 2012, B2C and tech companies began adopting the framework.

The explosion came after 2015, particularly in startup and Lean circles. Des Traynor, co-founder at Intercom, helped shine a spotlight on Jobs to be Done when it wasn't yet popular in the tech startup scene. The interviews and content Intercom produced became some of their most popular material. Intercom's book Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done combined ReWired's foundational concepts alongside fresh thoughts from Intercom employees and affiliates, largely reformatting their popular blog posts into an accessible ebook format. [11]

Another influence in the rise of JTBD in the startup scene is thanks to Ash Maurya, founder of LeanStack and creator of the Lean Business Model Canvas. Ash popularized the operationalization of the "Jobs-as-Progress" philosophy specifically for achieving Need-Solution Fit. [12, 13]

While Moesta and Christensen provided the theoretical foundation for the "Forces of Progress" (Push, Pull, Inertia, Friction), Maurya focused on "simplifying complexity" to make these concepts usable for agile teams. He translated the abstract interplay of forces into a visual "Hill-Climbing" metaphor. In this model, the customer is visualized at the bottom of a hill, needing enough "Push" and "Pull" to overcome the gravity of "Inertia" and "Friction" to reach the top. [12]

Maurya initially captured these insights in the Customer Forces Canvas. However, realizing that static canvases often "collapsed the timeline" and lost the nuance of the customer's journey, he evolved the methodology to focus on narrative structure. Drawing inspiration from Pixar’s storytelling rules, Maurya introduced the Customer Forces Story, a "Mad-lib" style framework. This 3-act structure (Inciting Incident → Progressive Complication → Resolution) provides strict guardrails that help teams effectively translate interview notes into a coherent "Global Story" of the customer’s journey, greatly increasing the success rate of capturing actionable insights. [12]

This Book's Focus

While both schools of thought offer value, this book will focus primarily on the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) approach.

I chose this focus not because it is the simplest path, but because it is the most complex. Having spent years applying this methodology within a global strategic insights team, I have seen firsthand that ODI is not a "quick fix." In fact, compared to the refreshing, intuitive immediacy of the Moesta, Klements, and Maurya approaches, which are excellent for uncovering the narrative why, ODI can feel dauntingly mechanical.

ODI’s structured, approach is often a double-edged sword. Some are drawn to it as a "silver bullet," hoping its complexity guarantees success. Others are repelled by that same complexity, fearing it will bog down their teams in bureaucracy and data.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and that is what we will explore. We are going to peel back the layers of ODI, acknowledging both the clarity it provides and the friction it can create. My goal is to take the complexity that I have seen teams struggle with and break it down into a navigable, step-by-step process.

We will not ignore the other schools—the emotional "push and pull" of the Jobs-as-Progress school provides context that data alone cannot. However, by understanding the most complex approach to JTBD, you will be able to choose whichever implementation you see fit for your own efforts.

In the next chapter, we'll begin our deep dive into the five core steps of the ODI process, looking at exactly how to make this engine work for you.

There is no single right approach to JTBD. It all depends on the level of resolution your team needs. Think of the Jobs-as-Progress (Moesta/Klement) approach as a Telescope. It allows you to see the big picture: the market forces, the emotional trajectory of the customer, and the "why" behind the switch. It is perfect for positioning, marketing strategy, and understanding demand. Think of the Jobs-as-Activities (Ulwick/ODI) approach as a Microscope. It allows you to zoom in on the specific workflow to see the cracks, the friction, and the inefficiencies invisible to the naked eye. It is perfect for product roadmapping, feature prioritization, and engineering specifications. You do not have to choose between a telescope and a microscope. A good researcher uses both or other research methods.

Key Takeaways

• The intellectual foundation of JTBD predates its formal name by decades. Motivation researchers in the 1940s and 1950s, management thinkers like Peter Drucker, and marketing pioneers like Theodore Levitt were all circling the same insight: customers buy outcomes, not products.
• Tony Ulwick transformed this insight into a rigorous methodology. His experience with the IBM PCjr failure in 1983, combined with exposure to TQM and Six Sigma process thinking, led him to develop what would become Outcome-Driven Innovation. The 1992 Cordis Corporation project provided the first major proof point, with market share jumping from 1% to over 20% by mid-1993.
• Clayton Christensen popularized the "Jobs to be Done" terminology but did not invent the underlying concept. He repeatedly credited Ulwick with originating the functional job framework, while his own contribution was adding emotional and social dimensions. The famous milkshake study appeared in a 2007 MIT Sloan Management Review article.
• Two distinct schools of thought—and occasionally conflict—exist today. The Jobs-as-Activities school (Ulwick) treats innovation as an engineering discipline, focusing on functional steps and metrics. The Jobs-as-Progress school (Christensen/Moesta) focuses on the emotional "switch" and self-betterment. Author Alan Klement further polarized this divide by arguing that "Jobs have no functional steps," strictly defining a Job as the desire to change one's life situation.
• There is no single "right" approach; it depends on the question you need to answer. The Progress school helps answer why a customer buys (ideal for Marketing & Sales), while the Activities school answers what to build to satisfy them (ideal for Product & R&D).
• JTBD adoption has followed a pattern from industrial B2B to mainstream SaaS. Early adopters in the late 1990s and early 2000s were companies like Cordis, Bosch, and Microsoft. The framework reached mainstream startup culture after 2015, driven largely by content from companies like Intercom and practitioners in the Lean Startup movement.

Sources Used

[1] Drucker, P. F. (2006). The Practice of Management. HarperBusiness. Retrieved From https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Management-Peter-F-Drucker/dp/0060878975

[2] Levitt, T. (1960). Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved From https://seekscholar.com/sites/default/files/Myopia.pdf

[3] Levitt, T. (2004). Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review, July–August issue. Retrieved From https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia

[4] Ulwick, T. (n.d.). The Birth of Predictable Innovation. Strategyn. Retrieved from https://strategyn.com/predictable-innovation-business-growth-strategy/

[5] Ulwick, A. W. (2002). Turn Customer Input into Innovation. Harvard Business Review, January issue. https://hbr.org/2002/01/turn-customer-input-into-innovation

[6] Christensen, C. M., & Raynor, M. E. (2013). The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Harvard Business Review Press. Retrieved From https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=15473

[7] Christensen, C. M., Anthony, S. D., Berstell, G., & Nitterhouse, D. (2007). Finding the Right Job For Your Product. MIT Sloan Management Review, April 1. Retrieved From https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/finding-the-right-job-for-your-product/

[8] Bettencourt, L. A., & Ulwick, A. W. (2008). The Customer-Centered Innovation Map. Harvard Business Review, May issue. Retrieved From https://hbr.org/2008/05/the-customer-centered-innovation-map

[9] Bob Moesta. (n.d.). What Is the Jobs To Be Done Framework?. Playbooks. Retrieved From https://therewiredgroup.com/learn/complete-guide-jobs-to-be-done/

[10] Christensen, C. M., Dillon, K., Hall, T., & Duncan, D. S. (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. HarperBusiness. Retrieved From https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493055294&sr=1-1&keywords=competing+against+luck

[11] Moesta, B., & Traynor, D. (2016). Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done. The Re-Wired Group. (Published May 12, 2016). Retrieved From https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/podcast-bob-moesta-on-jobs-to-be-done/#:~:text=%C3%97,%2Dsell%2Dmy%2Dinfo.

[12] Maurya, A. (n.d.). The Backstory Behind Customer Forces Stories. Retrieved From https://www.leanfoundry.com/articles/the-backstory-behind-customer-forces-stories

[17] Maurya, A. (2019). What Is a Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD). Retrieved From https://medium.com/lean-stack/what-is-a-job-to-be-done-jtbd-21304ce7441b

[18] Jain, R. (2021). Martech’s Magicians: Microns, Micronbox and µniverse. Published November 18–29, 2021. Retrieved from https://rajeshjain.com/martechs-magicians-microns-micronbox-and-%C2%B5niverse/

[19] Klement, A. (2018). When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy. Paperback, March 21, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/When-Coffee-Kale-Compete-products/dp/1534873066

[20] Klement, A. (2018). Know the Two — Very — Different Interpretations of Jobs to Be Done. 19-minute read, January 15, 2018. Retrieved from https://jtbd.info/know-the-two-very-different-interpretations-of-jobs-to-be-done-5a18b748bd89