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People do not buy products. They hire them to do a job. That shift in framing — from 'what are we selling' to 'what job is the customer trying to get done' — is one of the most powerful reframes in business strategy. It almost always reveals a market that is different, and larger, than the one you thought you were in.

Where the Framework Comes From

Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) theory was developed primarily by Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who also gave us Disruption Theory. His research on innovation repeatedly found that conventional market segmentation — age, income, geography, demographics — was a poor predictor of what people actually bought and why. The better predictor was the situation the person was in and the problem they were trying to solve.

The clearest illustration is the milkshake study, conducted by Christensen and colleagues at a fast food chain. The chain wanted to increase milkshake sales. Conventional analysis — surveying customers about taste preferences, thickness, flavor — produced improvements that did not move sales. Then a researcher changed the question.

Instead of asking 'what do customers want from a milkshake?' he watched what customers actually bought and when. He stood in the restaurant in the morning and observed.

Almost half of milkshake sales happened in the early morning. The customers were commuters. They had a long, boring drive ahead of them. They hired the milkshake not because it was the best-tasting drink on the menu — but because it was thick enough to last the commute, it fit in a cup holder, and it held off hunger until lunch. The milkshake was competing not with other milkshakes, but with bananas, bagels, and boredom.

Understanding the job — rather than the product category — completely changed what improvements would actually matter.

The customer is not buying a milkshake. They are hiring it to make a boring commute tolerable.

The Three Dimensions of a Job

Every job a customer is trying to get done has three dimensions that must all be understood:

Functional Job

The practical, rational task they are trying to complete. Get from A to B. Store this data. Communicate this information. This is the obvious, surface-level job. It is the one most companies design for — and the one most competitors are already addressing.

Emotional Job

How they want to feel during or after the job is done. Confident. Organised. In control. Respected. Not embarrassed. The emotional job is often more powerful than the functional one in determining which solution a customer chooses — because people rarely decide with pure logic.

Grab is a functional transportation service. But the emotional job for many users in Bangkok or Jakarta is 'arrive somewhere without the anxiety of navigating unfamiliar streets or negotiating with a driver.' The emotional resolution is the real product.

Social Job

How they want to be perceived by others as a result of using this product or completing this task. Look competent. Appear successful. Signal values. The social job is particularly powerful in Southeast Asian markets, where communal perception plays a significant role in purchasing decisions.

Mapping the Three Dimensions

• Functional: What task is the customer literally trying to complete?
• Emotional: How do they want to feel while doing it, or after it is done?
• Social: How do they want to appear to others — colleagues, family, community — as a result?

JTBD in the Thai and ASEAN Context

JTBD theory was developed in the American market, but the framework is even more powerful in ASEAN because the emotional and social dimensions of jobs are often more visible and explicit here than in Western markets.

Food as Social Currency

In Thailand, the job that food delivery apps are hired to do is often not convenience. For many users — especially younger Bangkokians — posting food on social media is part of the consumption act itself. The job includes the social signal. A delivery app that can promise aesthetically photographable food, or that carries status-adjacent restaurants, is hiring itself out for a different job than one that simply delivers calories quickly.

Education and Status Signaling

International education programs in Thailand and Vietnam are often hired to do a social job — signal family ambition and status — as much as a functional one. The parent hiring an international program is not purely buying better English or a more rigorous curriculum. They are also buying the right to say their child studies at that program. Selling only to the functional job ('better learning outcomes') often misses the more powerful driver.

Financial Products and Face

Financial products in ASEAN frequently struggle because they are designed for the functional job (efficient capital allocation) without considering the social job (maintaining face, avoiding the perception of financial stress). Insurance products fail to penetrate because buying insurance acknowledges vulnerability. The product that solves the social job of 'confident financial planning' rather than 'preparing for disaster' is a fundamentally different product — even if the underlying financial mechanism is identical.

How to Find the Real Job

The job does not surface easily. Customers will describe the functional job when asked directly — that is the safe, rational answer. Finding the emotional and social dimensions requires the deeper interview techniques described in the Interview Masterclass article.

Specific techniques that surface the real job:

• Ask about switching: 'Tell me about the last time you changed from one solution to another. What triggered the switch?' The trigger is often the moment the old solution failed to complete the real job.
• Ask about workarounds: 'What do you do today when this doesn't work the way you want?' Workarounds reveal the job being done inefficiently — and the value of doing it better.
• Ask about the moment of decision: 'When you were choosing, what else were you considering?' The competing options reveal what job category you are actually in.
• Observe, don't just ask: Watch people in the environment where the job arises. What are they doing with their hands? What are they looking at? What do they do right before and right after?

Competing Products Are Not What You Think

One of the most disorienting implications of JTBD is that your real competitors may not be the companies you put in your competitive analysis.

If commuters hire milkshakes to make boring drives tolerable, the competition is not other milkshake brands — it is bananas, coffee, podcasts, and audiobooks.

If workers hire spreadsheets to feel organised and in control, the competition is not just other spreadsheet tools — it is the whiteboard, the physical notebook, and doing nothing.

In ASEAN, one of the most common examples: ride-hailing apps initially competed not with each other but with the decision to not go somewhere at all. The friction of hailing a motorcycle taxi or baht bus was so high that many trips simply did not happen. The job was 'get somewhere without the stress of figuring out how' — and the previous solution was 'don't go.'

When you define your competition correctly — based on the job, not the product category — your positioning becomes much sharper.

Your real competition is whatever the customer is doing today instead of using you.

Writing a JTBD Statement

A well-formed JTBD statement has three components: the situation, the motivation, and the expected outcome. The canonical format is:

When [situation], I want to [motivation], so that [expected outcome].

Examples:

• When I am commuting to work in the morning and need something to eat but do not want to stop the car, I want something that lasts the whole drive and keeps me full until lunch, so that I can arrive on time without hunger slowing me down.
• When I am preparing for a business meeting with a new client in a country I have not visited, I want to understand quickly how business relationships work there, so that I do not accidentally offend anyone or appear unprepared.
• When my team finishes a late-night project and we want to decompress together but everyone is too tired to go out, I want food that arrives fast and still feels like a treat, so that the end of a hard day feels like a celebration rather than just more work.

Notice that each statement describes a real situation, not a persona. JTBD does not say 'the busy professional.' It says 'when I am in this specific circumstance.' The specificity is the point.

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✎  A Note for GVP Students

• Your JTBD exercise in Block C asks you to identify the job your customer is hiring a solution to do. Start with the functional job, then push yourself to describe the emotional and social dimensions.
• The most common mistake is writing a JTBD statement that is really just a feature description. 'I want an app that tracks my sleep' is not a job. 'When I am trying to perform better at work and feel like I am falling short, I want to understand why my energy is inconsistent, so that I can make one change that actually helps' — that is a job.
• In your customer interviews, listen for the moment right before they reached for the current solution. That moment — the trigger — tells you what job they were in. That is your JTBD.
• The Christensen milkshake study is a useful teaching reference: the restaurant was optimising for the wrong thing because it was asking 'how do we make better milkshakes' rather than 'what job is the customer in?' Ask yourself the same question about your venture.

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