This post is a companion to my YouTube video with the same title
I bet everyone on your product team knows Jobs To Be Done, and no one actually uses it. For most, it’s a beautiful theory you admire at a conference and shelve when the real work starts.
I have watched countless teams hit the same walls:
- They “write the Jobs” after leadership has already picked the product. The Jobs just justify the bet. That’s strategy done backwards.
- They describe one Job of one segment and stop. They skip the Jobs around it: before, after, above and below. That’s where value and strategic moves come from.
- Their Jobs have no link to unit economics and company finance, so the VP overrides them with an opinion that talks money. Jobs HAVE TO be tied to money. That link is the core of product strategy.
- Their value hypotheses have no link to Jobs. Yet the Job Graph is THE ONLY source of value hypotheses.
Eight years ago I decided to rebuild JTBD from scratch and make it practical, so it could provide step-by-step algorithms for every business goal. I call it Advanced Jobs To Be Done (AJTBD). It’s a theory of creating and communicating value, changing customer behavior, positioning, and part of strategy.
Along the way I learned that JTBD alone can’t deliver those algorithms. It’s a necessary part of a larger methodology I call Next Move Theory which we will discover in future posts.
About 700 companies use Next Move Theory and AJTBD every day. I have 26 documented cases and about 100 undocumented. It works.
I’m very excited to share this. Let’s begin.
A Job is a goal your brain forms to meet a need
A Job, a goal and a task are the same thing.
A Job is an expected outcome with success criteria, plus the transition to it. At Point A, the person lives in a context, carries a Consideration Set and feels negative emotions. At Point B, they get the outcome, feel positive emotions and move their higher-level Jobs forward.
“Why is it real?” you might ask. “What if Jobs don’t exist?” Brilliant questions.
Well, theories of needs tell us that needs are the ultimate motivation. But needs live in the unconscious parts of the brain and psyche, so you can’t run an interview and learn them.
BUT.
The brain forms goals in order to satisfy its needs.
The genius authors of JTBD saw this unit of motivation and told us to work with it.
Goals = Jobs.
Job structure is an explanation of the goal in the brain and the process of achieving it
By the way, I personally dislike the term “Job.” It frustrates almost everyone who hears it for the first time. But it’s a legacy term everyone uses, so it is what it is.
Most teams validate Jobs after the strategy is already picked
Here is how “product work” with JTBD usually goes:
- Leadership picks the product and its strategy.
- A PM is asked to “write the Jobs for it.”
- The Jobs come back and justify the bet that was already made.
- The Jobs may even get validated in customer interviews. But there’s a catch, and we’ll get to it later in this section.
I believe this is the most important causal chain in a product. Of course, it’s a simplification: a real product also needs market structure, unit economics, assumptions, acquisition and a lot more.
The most important decision you can make in your product is to pick the right Jobs of the right segments. Most product failures start with weaker Jobs of less profitable segments.
The biological imperative of a product is to perform customer Jobs more efficiently, judged by the customers’ own expectations, and to profit from it.
If you truly believe this causal chain, you automatically get:
- Segmentation by similar Jobs. You can’t sell to a Job directly. You acquire customers, so you group them by the Jobs they share.
- Strategy as a choice: which Jobs of which segments we compete for, why we will win, with which resources, and so on.
- Value as performing Jobs more efficiently, judged by the customers’ own expectations.
- Core communication for your product: “you can get your Jobs done more efficiently than you expect.”
But this comes with a huge catch.
EVERY DECISION YOU MAKE AUTOMATICALLY PICKS JOB AND A SEGMENT.
Say you decide to interview churned users and fix their problems. You just chose a segment: “everyone who left.” Is it a good segment? Can you win it? Does it pay? Nobody asked, because nobody noticed a choice was made. In the interviews you collect Jobs, create value for them and invest company resources in it.
Fixing problems? What if it’s a small, non-target segment with unimportant Jobs and no budget?
And what if, over a year, you create value for different Jobs of different segments? Your opportunity cost is the value and knowledge you could have compounded around the best Jobs of the best segments.
We have to choose a strategy the right way:
- Define the business goal. (Next Move Theory answers how to do it.)
- Research the whole market: all segments and all Jobs. Map the segments and their Job Graphs.
- Look at every strategic move the map gives you, instead of the one idea someone had in the shower and fell in love with. Shortlist a few strategies built on the best Jobs of the best segments for your business goal.
- Choose the best strategy on a few factors: probability of success, potential outcome for the goal, opportunity cost and ROI. Unit economics is how you model the potential outcome and the ROI.
- De-risk it by testing the riskiest assumptions
Every strategic product decision comes down to one question. Which Jobs of which people will we compete for, why these and not others, and why will we win?
So what’s the catch in validating your own idea of the Job and the segment? The segments and Jobs you validate may be:
- ones that don’t exist at all;
- partly wrong;
- less profitable than others you never looked at;
- in the wrong market altogether.
JTBD has to have an algorithm how to create value
If everybody knows you have to fix problems, fixing them gives you no edge over the market. So what do we do?
A few years ago I realized I didn’t know how to create value. So I started digging.
I was lucky to read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s books and papers on how the brain manages its energy budget (allostasis). She puts forward a hypothesis about value: “I hypothesize that value is related to metabolic or energy regulation (i.e., body budgeting)” (Barrett’s note on value). From there I made an assumption. This is the core idea: product value is the energy efficiency of reaching goals (Jobs).
So value is how efficiently a person gets their Job done with your product: the outcome on their success criteria, set against what it costs them in money, time, effort and stress. You can raise the chance that the outcome happens, make the outcome bigger, or cut the cost.
And higher value means higher energy efficiency.
But this assumption was not actionable.
Value is born in the Job Graph
Help came from the second unit of analysis in AJTBD: the Job Graph.
Seven years ago I realized the Job Graph was important. I didn’t know why, but I felt it.
When I was working on an algorithm for creating value, I realized the Job Graph is the source of value creation.
When you apply the tendency of a brain to perform Jobs more and more efficiently to the Job Graph, you magically get ALL the value creation mechanics and most of the strategic ones.
Let’s look at a case from one of my students.
A PM at a large car-parts distributor in my home market, had to increase revenue per customer. But she didn’t know how, because customers had no problems to fix. She learned AJTBD, researched the market and found one segment she could create added value for. And the move was brilliant. In the Job Graph of a small auto-repair shop owner, the owner has to bring the customer in, diagnose the car and draw up a work plan. Only then do they buy parts.
She applied a powerful mechanic for exiting direct competition, “Move into the Previous Job.” She built a CRM for small repair shops where the owner can manage customers, record diagnostics and draw up work plans. The result: +5% revenue per customer and +$15M a year for the company.
This move was possible ONLY through the Job Graph.
And then the Job Graph gives you strategic moves.
The first and most powerful is Climb Up a Level. You take over the Job above yours, and the Jobs under it disappear for the customer. Rolls-Royce sells airlines engine flying hours instead of engines, so engine maintenance stops being the airline’s Job.
This is the strategic mechanic for innovative products. Uber did it by killing the Jobs of buying a car, learning to drive, driving and parking. OpenAI and Anthropic did it by killing zillions of Jobs. They deliver such high energy efficiency that your brain floods with dopamine and rewires itself to make sure WE WILL DO JOBS THIS CRAZY EFFICIENT WAY.
If you research this mechanic in detail, you’ll realize that climbing up a level is possible only by killing Jobs. Kill a Job is the value creation mechanic you’ll find at the core of almost every other mechanic. What’s the value of performing more Jobs with the same product? The Jobs of buying another product and switching between products are killed.
There are much more. You can take the Job right before yours or right after it, cut the waiting time between Jobs, do more of the customer's Jobs in one product, or tie your product to a different Big Job.. Right now I see 26 mechanics of value creation and 100+ mechanics total for value creation, strategic mechanics, creating your our channels, increasing conversion rates, renention rates and more.
What else you get from Advanced Jobs To Be Done
AJTBD gives you:
- a value creation algorithm;
- an algorithm for changing people’s behavior;
- an algorithm for creating demand and building awareness;
- an algorithm for qualitative and quantitative research;
- an algorithm for building disruptive products and selling new ones;
- strategies for differentiation and for getting out of direct competition;
- the basis for a product scaling algorithm.
And much more.
More is coming
This is the first post in a series about Next Move Theory, Advanced Jobs To Be Done, the Riskiest Assumptions Test, unit economics, the Theory of Constraints and much more.
On nextmovetheory.com you can find the free part of the methodology canon (about 25% of it), skills for your AI agent, and courses on Next Move Theory and AJTBD.