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Introduction
When we talk about a product or service, we often think about satisfying a user or customer through the quality of its performance. Manufacturers and solution providers invest significant effort in adding features and capabilities that they believe will enhance the product or service and, ultimately, create value for the customer. Features and offerings are designed to address Basic Needs, defined by the Kano model, with the underlying thought that no potential “Delighters” should be left behind before the product reaches the end user.
However, management theories have evolved to emphasize that customer interests matter more than the offering itself. Understanding the customer before designing the solution has become increasingly important. Discovery workshops, market research, customer interviews, journey mapping, persona development, competitive analysis, usability testing, and user interaction statistics have become common starting points for improving customer satisfaction.
Yet, even with these techniques in place, many products and services still fail to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
At this point, management thinkers began to recognize that conventional models did not always reveal the full picture of customer needs. Understanding the customer requires looking beyond the most visible requirements and exploring the deeper motivations, circumstances, and outcomes that shape their decisions. It is much like searching for buried treasure: the first discovery may be valuable, but continued exploration can uncover insights that are even more meaningful.
This is where the Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework, commonly abbreviated as JTBD, becomes relevant. Popularized through the work of Clayton Christensen, Tony Ulwick, and other management thinkers, the JTBD framework has emerged as a useful approach to understanding customers more deeply and evaluating the needs and objectives they seek to address through a product or service.
Let us explore what this framework means, how it can help address the underlying reasons why even well-designed products and services may fail to deliver the expected value, and how its principles shape Experion’s approach to creating more outcome-focused solutions for its customers.
Jobs-to-be-Done Framework (JTBD) Defined
JTBD is a framework for evaluating and understanding the fundamental need that a customer is trying to address through a product or service. It can be viewed as going beyond the conventional finish line of understanding customer requirements and exploring the real objective behind those requirements.
Understanding the purpose that motivates a customer to buy a product or use a service provides deeper insight into the objective behind the requirement. This, in turn, helps the provider address the underlying need more effectively and design a solution around what the customer is ultimately trying to accomplish.
The Classic Example of a Restaurant Chain
The well-known example used to explain the JTBD Framework is the milkshake example, popularized through the work of Clayton Christensen. A few years ago, a fast-food restaurant chain was trying to improve the sales of its milkshakes. The company explored multiple solutions, including increasing the size of the milkshake, introducing additional flavors, and creating meal combinations that could make the shakes more appealing to children. However, these efforts did not produce the expected improvement in sales.
Clayton Christensen and his team were brought in to help address the business challenge. They visited the restaurant to observe how it operated and made an interesting discovery: a significant proportion of milkshakes were purchased by adults rather than children, and many of these purchases happened during the early hours of the day. Customers often bought only the milkshake and then drove away rather than dining at the restaurant.
The key observations made by Christensen and his team were interesting because they differed from the assumptions underlying the restaurant’s existing approach:
- The restaurant targeted children as its primary consumers, but sales data suggested that adults consumed a significant proportion of its milkshakes.
- Many milkshake buyers did not dine at the restaurant, indicating that the milkshake was serving a purpose beyond conventional dining or meal consumption.
The team then interviewed some of the adult consumers to understand why a milkshake purchased early in the morning was valuable to them. In other words, they were trying to explore the additional “job” that the milkshake was performing beyond the role of conventional food.
These consumers explained that they wanted something that would keep them satisfied until their next break and could also be consumed with one hand while driving with the other. The milkshake helped them save time, stay full, and conveniently commute to work at the same time.
This example clearly illustrates the JTBD Framework. The milkshake was performing an additional job that conventional alternatives such as bananas, donuts, and other breakfast options did not address in the same way. The example demonstrates that a product or service can create value when it performs a job that customers are trying to accomplish in a way that meaningfully addresses their circumstances and needs.
What Does JTBD Say?
The JTBD Framework explains that people choose products or services because they want to accomplish a particular job. Solution providers therefore need to reevaluate their understanding of customer requirements through this lens. Focusing only on the stated or primary requirements may not always result in the most effective solution for users.
Customizing offerings around the core objectives and requirements of a target segment can be more effective than trying to adopt an agnostic, one-size-fits-all approach. When a solution helps users accomplish a job, whether simple or complex, they recognize value in it. This can increase adoption of the solution and, consequently, contribute to growth in the customer base.
The example of the restaurant chain clearly illustrates that its initial attempts to understand its customers did not fully address the underlying need. Efforts to create a better or more appealing product did not result in the expected improvement in sales. This can be viewed as a customer-understanding problem leading to a solution-design problem.
When the restaurant began to understand and address the job that consumers were trying to get done, the opportunity became clearer. Bringing a JTBD perspective provides a deeper understanding of what customers are trying to accomplish with a product or service and enables providers to shape their solutions around those objectives.
Principles That Define JTBD
Understanding individuals or teams is inherently contextual and can evolve significantly depending on the situation and circumstances. However, several core principles underpin the JTBD Framework:
- Customer-centricity: This is the core mindset surrounding the framework. Start by understanding the customer’s situation, needs, motivations, and desired progress rather than starting with the offering itself.
- Jobs matter, not Products: Develop a deeper understanding of the job the customer is trying to accomplish through a solution rather than focusing primarily on which product feature might excite the customer.
- Solution-agnostic: Any offering that can solve the problem and help accomplish the job can potentially compete for the customer’s choice—even if it comes from an entirely different product or service category.
- Hire and Fire: Customers “hire” a product or service to accomplish a job they need to get done and can “fire” it when an alternative performs that job better or provides greater value.
- Desired Measurable Outcomes: Define what “good” looks like from the customer’s perspective. This could include speed, effort, convenience, satisfaction, confidence, reliability, and other measurable outcomes.
- Context-dependent, Product-independent: The job can depend heavily on the customer’s context and may vary as that context changes. However, the underlying job is independent of any specific product, service, offering, or its characteristics.
Experion Story – From JTBD Theory to Practice
The principles of the Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework provide a useful perspective on how technology companies can understand and respond to customer needs. At Experion, with an established operating model and experience in IT services and AI-enabled product engineering, we place strong emphasis on understanding customer requirements, the context in which they arise, and the underlying objectives before shaping a solution.
We do not view customer requirements simply as a list of features, technologies, or deliverables. Instead, we apply the underlying principles of JTBD to understand the broader problem the customer is trying to solve. This means looking beyond “What does the customer want us to build?” and asking more fundamental questions:
- What is the customer trying to accomplish?
- What situation are they dealing with?
- What outcomes matter most?
- What friction exists in achieving those outcomes?
- What alternatives are they currently using?
Mapping Experion ARC to the JTBD Framework
Experion’s AI Studio and operating model, ARC, closely aligns with JTBD thinking by identifying the outcomes stakeholders seek, understanding the process constraints that hinder those outcomes, and systematically discovering, validating, and scaling AI opportunities that deliver measurable value against the intended job.
Moreover, ARC Rethink, the AI opportunity discovery and evaluation engine within the ARC model, leverages the core principles of the JTBD Framework by uncovering the business outcomes users are trying to achieve, mapping current processes around those jobs, identifying friction, and prioritizing AI interventions that can measurably improve how the job gets done.
Experion’s customer-centric perspective has helped us move from being primarily solution-led to becoming more outcome-led. It creates a stronger understanding of the customer’s context, enables teams to identify unmet needs, and opens opportunities to rethink how technology can create value. In practice, JTBD becomes less of a theoretical framework and more of a way of thinking—one that keeps the customer’s desired progress at the center of product, service, and solution decisions.
Conclusion
The Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework helps organizations move beyond stated requirements and understand the deeper progress customers are trying to achieve. By focusing on context, motivations, friction, alternatives, and measurable outcomes, JTBD enables teams to design products and services that are more relevant, differentiated, and valuable to the people using them.
For Experion, this perspective reinforces an outcome-led approach to product engineering and AI transformation. Through ARC and ARC Rethink, JTBD principles can be translated into a practical method for discovering opportunities, validating priorities, and shaping interventions around the jobs that matter most. The result is technology that does not merely deliver features but helps customers achieve meaningful and measurable progress.
