People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a situation. The frame that stops you building features nobody asked for.
10 min read · Level 2
People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a situation — and the situation, not the demographic, is what triggers the purchase. The frame matters because it reveals your actual competition: if the job is "get Friday evening back", then a spreadsheet, working late and simply tolerating it are all competing for the same hire. Feature comparisons never surface that, which is why they mislead.
Jobs To Be Done says that people 'hire' a product to make progress in a specific situation. The job is the progress they are trying to make — not the product category.
The format: when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].
Because it moves you off features and onto the circumstance, which is where buying decisions actually get made.
It also reveals your real competition. If the job is 'get Friday back', then a spreadsheet, an assistant, working late and simply accepting the mess are all competing for the same hire.
Product framing: 'We're building scheduling software for logistics.' This tells you to compare features with other scheduling software.
JTBD framing: 'When it's Friday afternoon and I still have next week's rota to build, I want to produce a workable rota quickly, so I can leave on time and not spend Sunday worrying about Monday.'
What this reveals:
None of that comes out of a feature comparison.
First-time founders often write jobs that are really feature requests: 'when I need to schedule, I want a scheduling tool'. That is circular and produces no insight.
A real job statement contains a situation with a time and a trigger, a motivation that could be satisfied several ways, and an outcome that is often emotional.
The second mistake: assuming there is one job. Different segments hire your product for different jobs, and that is usually the clearest signal about which segment to serve.
'Friday afternoon with a rota still to build' is more useful than 'ops manager, 35–50'. Situations trigger purchases.
If your product appears in the sentence, you have written a feature request.
'Not spend Sunday worrying' is often the real reason. Functional benefits get compared on price; emotional ones do not.
This is your real competitive set, and it usually includes doing nothing.
If several jobs emerge, pick the one where the alternatives are worst. That is your wedge.
After interviews, when writing positioning, and whenever the roadmap feels like a list of unrelated features.
Do not turn this into a formal methodology exercise with workshops and templates. One good job statement written from real interviews beats a deck of them invented in a room.
The best-known illustration of the frame is a fast-food chain investigating milkshake sales and finding a large share bought early in the morning by lone commuters — hired to make a long dull drive bearable, not as a dessert. The competition was bagels and bananas, not other milkshakes.
Find the situation your product is bought in. It usually reveals a competitive set that no feature comparison would have produced.
Job statements that stop at the functional outcome — "build the rota faster" — get compared on price. The ones that include the emotional outcome — "not spend Sunday worrying about Monday" — describe something a competitor cannot undercut, because it is not a specification.
Write the emotional outcome into the job explicitly. It is usually the real reason for the hire and the hardest thing to compete away.
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