Jobs-to-Be-Done
Clayton Christensen / Bob Moesta · 2007
"Christensen argues customers don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific struggling moment — so segmentation by job, not by persona, predicts when a product will actually be pulled into use."
Christensen's milkshake study flipped briefs: McDonald's wasn't competing with Burger King for breakfast; the morning milkshake was hired to make a boring commute feel less boring and to last until lunch.
A job has a functional dimension, an emotional one, and a social one, plus a pushing situation and a pull of a new way. Interviewing the struggle — when did you first look, what did you hire before, what almost stopped you — reveals causality in a way demographics can't. Products that win nail the job's progress, not the persona's attributes, which is why personas predict attitude but jobs predict behavior.
Why does Christensen argue segmentation by job outperforms segmentation by persona?
Read more about the topic
The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done (HBR, 2016)Christensen, Hall, Dillon & Duncan / HBR
Conway's Law
"Conway observed that the structure of any system you design will be a copy of the communication structure of the organization that built it — so you cannot cleanly separate product architecture from org architecture."