What I have learned more recently is that Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, as he defined it in The Innovator’s Solution, didn’t sit well with Moesta, Pedi and Palmer, as it was not in full alignment with their thinking. According to Alan Klement, they were upset that Clay had misunderstood their theory and meshed it with the tenets upon which the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) process was built (jobs are stable, the job is the unit of analysis, the core job is functional, etc.).

The way they saw it, their Milkshake Marketing concept was meant to be used to help a marketing team try to sell more of a product that already exists by “aligning it with the real reasons customers are buying them” (according to Pedi and Palmer). It was not meant to be applied to innovation.

In The Innovator’s Solution, however, Clay Christensen touted Jobs-to-be-Done Theory as a way to make product innovation more predictable, and he cited Strategyn’s work and ODI as evidence of how it had successfully been put into practice.

9 Jobs-to-be-Done Theory tenets:

People buy products and services to get a “job” done.
Jobs are functional, with emotional and social components.
A Job-to-be-Done is stable over time.
A Job-to-be-Done is solution agnostic.
Success comes from making the “job”, rather than the product or the customer, the unit of analysis.
A deep understanding of the customer’s “job” makes marketing more effective and innovation far more predictable.
People want products and services that will help them get a job done better and/or more cheaply
People seek out products and services that enable them to get the entire job done on a single platform
Innovation becomes predictable when “needs” are defined as the metrics customers use to measure success when getting the job done