This book dives into making products people don’t just want but truly need. Instead of guessing what users will like, it’s about figuring out the “jobs” they’re hiring products to do. Nail those jobs, and you’ll have customers coming back for more.

Below is a set of theses from the book, divided into chapters by meaning.

On Innovation, Causality, User Progress and JTBD

Progress Theory. Customers don’t buy products or services. They hire them to make some progress in their lives or work. They have some job to do and they hire a product to solve the problem. The job is some progress that a person is trying to make in certain circumstances. It’s not always a problem.

The engine of innovation that makes companies great works by understanding causality, not guesswork. The theory of disruptive innovations won’t lead you to where to look for new opportunities. But the theory of Jobs to be Done does because it’s based on the causality of human behavior. And so it can predict behavior, not explain success.

Causality is the foundation, not the data. Despite huge amounts of data, if companies do not understand the reasons why users hire their products under certain conditions and choose other products under other conditions, this data is unlikely to help create innovation. The fact is that when analyzing data, without understanding causality, we are prone to assumptions, approximations, and extrapolations, and can misinterpret the data. A good example is that based on micro-assumptions, people in the 18th century misinterpreted the changing positions of celestial bodies, thinking that everything revolves around the Earth.

“What job are you hiring this product to do?” is the best question to ask a business. For example, you might buy a magazine to pass the time in a doctor’s office or because you are a sports fan and want to read sports news. But in one case or another, you have some job that you want to hire this magazine to do.

JTBD stories. Buyers won’t be able to tell you what they want, but they can describe their struggles well. They can be written in the format: “Because of this, we did that ...”

A job can only be defined and decided on in relation to specific circumstances. Therefore, a job is inextricably linked to the user’s context: where is he, what did he do before, what will he do after, what is he doing in the process, who is he with, what are the social, cultural, or political frameworks around him? It can also be a period of life: retirement, graduation from college, marriage, or the birth of a child. These circumstances are a fundamental part of the concept of a job.

About the importance of social and emotional. We often focus our efforts on the functional and practical side of a product. But emotions and the social side often outweigh functionality.

Needs, like values, are not a job. Needs are too general, they do not include circumstances and context. Our values are also too abstract.

It’s not who did what, but why that matters.

We do not create jobs. Jobs themselves are constant, but the ways to solve them change dramatically with the development of technology. For example, look at how our communication with each other has changed from spoken language to letters, telegraph, telephone, email, and messengers.

Job theory is not suitable when current products work perfectly. And also when solutions lie in the area of mathematical analysis, and not in the area of social, emotional, and functional needs.

About data

Substituting Excel tables for user understanding. A separate problem with data is that while there is no data, product managers tend to ask the question “Why does something happen the way it does” and look for an answer in user responses. But as soon as data appears, it becomes much easier to look at Excel tables than to talk to people. As a result, managers begin to manage numbers, especially in large companies, where managers may never even meet customers. If a company enters the stock market, then the numbers begin to manage the company. This makes the company vulnerable to those who think first and foremost about users.

The fundamental problem with data is that quantitative data is more credible than qualitative data. But is quantitative data objective? For example, many studies are based on data from companies’ financial statements. Is this objective?

Data is not a phenomenon. The main function of data is to explain a phenomenon. Considering quantitative data to be objective is wrong, if only because data does not exist initially. All data is collected by people. People decide how to organize it, how to present it, and how to extract information from it. And all this can easily introduce errors in interpretation.

The same managers can make a company great and lead it to destruction. The question is what approach is used in working with innovations. Unfortunately, the pressure that innovators are under often leads to decisions that please investors and rapid growth, and not users.

Businesses focus on data on how their product sells in different markets, to different audiences, and with what margins. However, all this data does not provide an idea of what kind of job the product does for users and how well.

About metrics

Causality leads to The Right Metrics. It’s tempting to think that we recognize patterns in data, but too often businesses feel comfortable with correlations rather than casualities. However, it’s the shift from guesswork and correlations to understanding the causal mechanism that changes everything about how we solve problems and prevents new ones from arising. A properly described job will lead to the right process that will generate the right data that answers the question: “How are we doing?”

The right metrics are user-oriented. Instead of focusing on internal business financial and production metrics, it is better to think about external customer-benefit metrics. Think about what is important to the user and formulate metrics from his side. Conversions and retentions are very simple clear and tempting, but you cannot confuse business efficiency with user effectiveness.

About Features

Features are not the main thing. By focusing on the parameters of the product, for example, its features, we think that we are improving the product. However, only by understanding for what job people hire the product and in what specific circumstances can we achieve an a-ha moment. These insights are fragile, they are more like stories than statistics. But through them, you understand the user, look at the world through his eyes.

About the feature race. If you ask users about features in a product, they can suggest hundreds of changes, which will lead to a false feature race. But you should ask not about features, but about experience, about deep problems or progress that the user needs in life.

About the company and the processes around work

When the product job is revealed, experiments are conducted and guides for developing the product or service are formed. And then the company culture is formed around JTBD. This leads to the fact that even if a competitor can copy the product, he will not be able to copy the processes that allow you to implement innovations.

Purpose Brand. This is a brand created to become a synonym for the job user. When you hear the names of such brands, you immediately understand what they were created for. Purpose brands provide remarkable clarity. A well-developed purpose brand will stop a consumer from even considering looking for another option. They want that product.

Process as a competitive advantage. Resources can be bought or sold. Products can be copied, but through integrated processes, companies create an ideal experience and competitive advantage. Processes are created from hundreds of small decisions and cannot be easily copied.

Structure companies around jobs. Companies can be built not around artificial departments or divisions but around users’ jobs. If you don’t focus on users’ jobs, the organization will sooner or later become bogged down in individual opinions and politics.

The company’s mission is usually vague and does not help in making daily decisions. But a clear job spec helps. It helps both high-level managers and each employee understand what to do.

Amazon’s Press Release Framework. Innovation at Amazon often starts with a mockup of a “press release” that is presented to the team that will work on it. The press release contains all the details, user experience, and processes.

About competition

When a customer decides which product to hire for a job, they have something like a resume in their head for your product and for any other competitor. Moreover, people can hire the same product for different jobs in different circumstances.

The product does not define the customer’s job. The product solves it. As a rule, jobs, especially widespread ones, can be solved in different ways. If you concentrate on your product and not on solving the user’s job, sooner or later you can lose the initiative, because someone else will solve the problem better, perhaps in a completely different area and with different tools.

Competitive landscape. By studying jobs in detail, you can understand that competition often goes beyond the usual understanding. For example, products from different categories, such as Facebook and cigarettes, can compete with each other in certain circumstances. For example, Netflix competes with everything that helps people relax, and Uber competes with the subway, the bus, or calling a friend. So if you don’t know what and who you are competing with, how can you know that you are better than other alternatives and create something innovative regularly?

Competition with inaction. Some companies can compete not only with other companies or activities but also with nothing. Because the status quo is also a strong competitor because you can always choose to do nothing.

Companies become vulnerable to disruptors when they start spreading themselves thin and creating many products for different users. Because a disruptor focuses on a small number of jobs and does them well.

Ways to detect jobs

• Take jobs in your own life
• Find jobs uncovered by-products. People often don’t hire a product for a job
• Where a problem is so upsetting and frustrating that they try to solve it themselves.
• Negative jobs. Where people don’t want to do something
• When products aren’t used for their intended purpose
• The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives—those are what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions.

About people and their behavior

Negative feedback. If the product does not satisfy the user’s work, it’s not so bad. The problem is that there is always a risk of being forever entrenched in a person’s mind as an unsuitable product, or even getting negative feedback and ruining their reputation. Research confirms that 95% of people read reviews, and for 86%, reviews are the main factor in making a purchase decision.

People sometimes speak and act in direct opposition. If you ask people if they consider it important to take care of nature, everyone will answer positively.

To hire something, a person will most likely have to fire something. What to fire and why this should happen are important questions.

Forces of change. When a person switches to a new solution, two pairs of opposing forces fight. The first pair is the fight against the problem and the attractiveness of the new solution. The second pair is the habit of the existing solution and the anxiety to try something new.

About theories

Good theories lead to insights. You can produce insights if you have a set of good theories. A good theory is the best way to work with problems because it is like a universal key that allows you to solve a variety of problems by formulating questions correctly. Good theories are not meant to teach us what to think. Rather, they teach us how to think.