Clay Christensen said, “When you’re trying to innovate, the customer is the wrong unit of analysis. Instead understand what it is the customer is trying to accomplish, what’s the job that the customer is trying to get done. The job always exists, even if there is no market of products yet.”

A job can be thought of as a set of tasks. These tasks are then grouped into jobs of user personas. With new technology, the tasks and personas change: certain user personas may become less relevant or eliminated, or their tasks and jobs may get automated. Still, the job—move stuff from point A to point B reliably and fast—continues to exist.

To put this into practice:

1. Interview customers and prospects: “get out of the building”. Do not do an internal brainstorm session. 
2. Ask the customer the “Do” question: What would it do for you (your business, your boss, your coworker)? This is a simple way to practice JTBD in uncovering the real problem. Look for  economic or tangible benefit as well as the emotional or intangible benefit. 
3. Express all this in customer’s point-of-view: their language, their verbatim. 

To get deeper after understanding the customer’s desired outcome i.e. the job, understand their struggling moments that prompted the purchase (or churn), the context and who else was involved, the push away from their current solution, the pull towards the new solution, any anxiety about switching from the familiar current solution to the uncertain new solution, the trade-offs they made.  

This is a more useful way to understand customer outcomes than hiring and firing of products for jobs. This can even overcome the issue of “faster horses vs horseless carriages” by identifying the real problem of reliable and fast (and clean) travel. 

PS: Check out more articles on building products. I write to pay it forward and to clarify my thinking.