Personas describe who a customer is. They don’t explain why a customer chooses one thing over another, which is the only question that actually matters when you’re deciding what to build next.
Jobs to Be Done is the discipline that answers that question properly, and it’s the foundation everything else in our innovation practice is built on.
The best model for uncovering the deep, causal drivers of customer choice and behaviour is to utilise exploratory research underpinned by Clayton Christensen’s Jobs To Be Done methodology.
We use Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) to understand the progress someone is trying to make in a specific circumstance, and the functional, social and emotional dimensions of getting there.
Understood properly, that reframes what you thought your competition was.
Perhaps you’re not competing with the other products in your category; instead, you’re competing with everything else a customer might hire to get the job done, including doing nothing at all.
A customer profile tells you who’s buying. It doesn’t tell you why, and why is the only thing that transfers reliably from one product decision to the next. When you understand the job, you understand the forces at play: what’s pushing someone away from what they use today, what’s pulling them toward something new, and what anxiety or inertia is holding them back regardless.
Get that map right, and you know which ideas are actually worth pursuing before you’ve spent a pound building any of them, and which objections you’ll need to design around rather than argue away.
We don’t treat Jobs to Be Done as a workshop exercise that produces a poster for the wall. We run it as a working method that carries through from research to what actually gets built.
We identify the job in question and the full set of alternatives currently being hired to do it, including the ones that don’t look like competitors on paper. This is primary research, not a desk exercise built on assumptions already in the room.
We map the push, pull, anxiety and inertia at play for the customer, so you understand not just what would attract them to something new, but what’s actually holding them where they are. Most innovation efforts only ever design for the first half of that equation.
We turn the research into a landscape of underserved dimensions of the job, ranked by how poorly they’re currently being met and how much that gap actually matters to the customer, so effort goes where it will move behaviour rather than where it’s easiest to build.
Ideation happens against the opportunity landscape, not in the abstract. Every idea has to answer a specific underserved dimension of the job, which means fewer ideas make it out of the room, and the ones that do have a reason to exist.
We test ideas against whether they’d actually get hired for the job, not against whether people say they like them in a focus group. Stated preference and actual choice are frequently different things, and the gap between them is where most product bets quietly fail.
Jobs To Be Done isn’t only used to decide what to build next; it plays a huge part in our Experience Design work.
We call this Causal CX, and it runs on exactly the same theory of choice: understand the job, then direct effort at the dimensions that actually move it, rather than the ones that are easiest to measure.
It’s the idea that customers don’t buy products, they hire them to make progress on something specific, and that understanding what that something is explains their choices far better than who they are demographically.
Personas group people by who they are. Jobs to Be Done groups them by what they’re trying to accomplish, which is a much more reliable predictor of what they’ll actually choose, because two very different people can be trying to do the exact same job.
The research methods overlap, but the difference is in what you’re listening for. Traditional research often surfaces what customers say they want. Job based research is aimed specifically at uncovering what’s actually driving a hiring or firing decision, which isn’t always the same thing customers will tell you directly.
Both. It’s just as useful for working out why an established product is losing ground to an alternative as it is for deciding what a new one should be. The method is the same either way: understand the job, understand the forces, and work out where the current offer is falling short of it.
No, but it changes what happens inside them. A workshop run against a clear opportunity landscape produces fewer, sharper ideas than one run against a blank whiteboard, because the constraint of the actual job does most of the filtering before anyone opens a marker.
Both frameworks come from the same intellectual tradition and Ulwick’s Outcome Driven Innovation is a serious, rigorous methodology. The difference is in what each treats as the unit of progress. Ulwick’s ODI focuses on the activities customers are trying to perform, and measures progress as doing those activities better or more efficiently.
Christensen’s view goes deeper – progress is about the functional, emotional and social dimensions of what customers are fundamentally trying to accomplish in their lives. That distinction matters because it opens up the possibility of a solution that replaces the current one entirely, not just a better version of it.
If your ambition is to improve what you have, either framework will serve you. If your ambition is to understand what customers would switch tom and build it, Christensen gets you there.
Causal CX is a consulting discipline that starts with the drivers of customer choice rather than the quality of customer experience. Grounded in Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done, it identifies the functional, emotional and social dimensions of what your customers are actually trying to accomplish, and refuses to redesign a single thing before that’s understood. Most CX programmes work backwards from the experience. That’s the problem we’re here to fix.
Conventional CX starts with the experience (mapping journeys, measuring satisfaction, fixing friction). Causal CX starts with the choice, establishing what actually causes customers to hire you, stay with you, or leave, before a single experience is redesigned. The difference is not methodology, it’s starting point.
Get in touch to talk through how Innovation through Jobs to Be Done could sharpen what your business chooses to build next.
Book a 30 minute conversation with our CEO Bim, who can give you an honest read on where you are, and what matters next.
