The Theory That Explains Why Good Companies Fail
Successful companies are consistently, even when they’re doing everything “right.” They listen to customers, invest in R&D, and improve their products. And yet they still get blindsided. The problem? They’re measuring success by the wrong yardstick. Companies segment customers by demographics and product attributes: “35-year-old males who want faster processing speeds.” But these categories don’t predict actual buying behaviour. Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and Competing Against Luck, focused his research on innovation and disruption. Along with Bob Moesta and colleagues at The Re-Wired Group, he worked with a client in the fast food industry that wanted to sell more milkshakes. They’d done the traditional market research: improved the product based on customer feedback, tweaked the formula, played with pricing. Sales stayed flat.
So Christensen’s team tried something different. They stood in restaurants for 18 hours asking people: “What job were you hiring that milkshake to do?”
Christensen realized that customers don’t buy products, they “hire” them to make progress in specific circumstances.
This insight became “Jobs to Be Done” theory, and it emerged from one of the best consulting stories in business literature.
What this teaches us
Segmenting by occupation, age, gender, and other demographic variables won’t reveal the motivations behind purchase behaviour. Behavioural variables, like the circumstances of use and the job to be done, run deeper and provide better positioning guidance. Two people may. be buying the same thing for very different reasons. Don’t miss the nuance.
Identifying the true competition will include indirect competitors you might not have considered, as well as customer workarounds. Even non-consumption should be considered a form of competition—because the customer might simply choose to do nothing.
Take tax software, for example. Before products like TurboTax, many people either paid expensive accountants for simple returns or muddled through paper forms, confused and anxious. Others just didn’t file properly at all. TurboTax didn’t just compete with accountants: it activated non-consumers by lowering the barrier to entry and making the process approachable.
Why This Matters for Your Business
Successful companies march upmarket, adding features and improving performance along dimensions that matter to existing customers. It’s what business school teaches. It’s also what makes them vulnerable.
Jobs to Be Done keeps you from falling into this trap in three ways:
First, it reveals non-consumption. Your biggest opportunity might not be stealing customers from competitors—it’s serving people who’ve cobbled together inadequate workarounds. They’re doing the job badly or not at all because nothing serves them well.
Second, it prevents feature creep. You stop gold-plating your product with bells and whistles nobody wanted. That premium coffee grinder with seventeen settings? If the job is “make decent coffee before I’m fully awake,” those extra features are just friction.
Think about how remote controls went from simple channel changers to overly complex gadgets with dozens of rarely used buttons.
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Third, it predicts actual switching behaviour. Traditional market research asks, “Would you buy this?” JTBD asks, “What progress are you trying to make, and what are you currently using?”
The gap between those answers is where opportunity lives.
You’ll also uncover opportunities for invention and innovation. Those people using inadequate Band-Aids are ripe targets for game changers. Think about how the Swiffer redefined the category from “mop” to “quick, lightweight cleaning in small bursts without setup”, and how Uber changed the game from taxis to safe, reliable, transparent, on-demand personal mobility.
How to Find Your Customers’ Jobs (And Go Deeper Than You Think)
Stop asking what features they want. Start asking about the last time they used your product or service and what they were trying to accomplish. What else did they consider using? What would have happened if they couldn’t do this? How did they feel before, during, and after?
Pay attention to three dimensions: functional (what tangible outcome do they need?), emotional (how do they want to feel?), and social (how does this affect how others see them?).
But here’s the advanced move: don’t stop at the first answer. Use what marketers call “laddering” and what my colleagues and I just call the “5 whys”. Keep asking “why does that matter to you?” to climb from surface-level features to deeper truths.
A customer says they hired your accounting service to “file taxes correctly” (functional job). Fine. Now, ladder up:
Why does filing taxes matter? → “To avoid IRS problems.”
Why do IRS problems matter? → “There are financial and personal repercusssions”
Why does that matter? → “Because I’m terrified of jail and losing everything I’ve built.”
See what happened? You started with tax compliance and discovered the real job is peace of mind and protection of their life’s work. If you think about it, how could anyone really need to file their taxes. It’s more like we have to! That distinction change everything about how you market and deliver your service. You’re not selling tax prep. You’re selling freedom from anxiety.
The Mistakes Everyone Makes
Don’t confuse demographics with jobs. “Millennials” aren’t consuming your product just because they share a birth year. A 28-year-old buying a milkshake for their morning commute has more in common with a 52-year-old doing the same job than with another 28-year-old getting it to shut up their kid.
And don’t assume the job never changes. The pandemic radically shifted what people looked to restaurants to do. Suddenly the job became “help me feel normal” or “give me a break from cooking,” not “provide a place to gather.”
Forces of Progress
Going a bit deeper into the theory reveals the emotional and psychological dynamics that influence customers when deciding whether to adopt or abandon a product or service.
There is an interplay of motivations that explains why people switch to your product (or why they don’t, even when yours is objectively better). Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek (building on Christensen’s work) identified four forces at play in every purchase decision involving potential change.
The push of the current situation’s inadequacies, and the pull of the new product’s promise, are forces for change that move the customer toward the new choice. The fears and uncertainty about switching and comfort with the current way of doing things, even if it’s imperfect (“devil you know”), are the forces against change, leading the customer to stay put.
Change or progress happens when: Push + Pull > Anxiety + Habit
How to Put This to Work
Most marketers only focus on Pull (making their product attractive). But that’s just 1 of 4 forces. If you ignore the others, you’ll wonder why your “obviously superior” product isn’t selling.
Interview customers who to gain insight about each of the four forces. Don’t just ask why they bought yours or another solution. Go deeper. Use the “five why’s” and search for motivation stemming from each of the four forces.
Your promotional activity and positioning should be tailored based on the evidence you gather. Which forces are most favourable to you? Your promotional activity should amplify those. And don’t be afraid to agitate the problem. Show the cost of staying put, not just in money but time, stress, and missed opportunities.
You also need to design your offering around the forces that determine whether someone actually switches. Free trials reduce anxiety. Quick wins amplify pull before doubt creeps in. Comparison charts amplify push by making the status quo feel expensive.
The trickiest force is habit. People stick with terrible solutions because switching feels exhausting. This is why migration support matters. Import tools and data transfer don’t just reduce anxiety; they demolish the practical barriers that make habit so powerful. Smart businesses engineer their entire customer journey around these forces, not just their product features.
The Big Mistake
Most failed products have strong pull (great features) but ignore anxiety and habit. The iPhone succeeded partly because it reduced anxiety (intuitive enough that you didn’t need a manual) and habit (kept familiar concepts like “home button” and “apps”).
WeWork struggled because even though push was strong (people hate traditional offices) and pull was strong (cool spaces), anxiety was massive (long-term commitment, what if we outgrow it?) and habit was huge (commercial real estate is how things are done).
Your Assignment
This week, interview one customer. Not a survey. But an actual conversation. Ask about the last time they bought from you. Ask what they almost bought instead. Ask what would have happened if your business didn’t exist.
Then ladder up. Keep asking “why does that matter?” until you hit something that makes them pause. That’s usually where the real job lives.
You’ll learn more in that 20-minute conversation than from a thousand surveys about how they’d rate your “customer service” on a scale of 1 to 10.
Because once you understand the job you’re really being hired to do, everything else—your marketing, your product development, your pricing—suddenly gets a lot clearer.
If you liked this, you might like this related post about firing customers.
