User Experience and Jobs To be Done

In the field of UX, we’re all pretty familiar with the concept of behavioural personas, but not everyone is aware of the parallels between this and Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs To Be Done” theory which became famous in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He explains it quite nicely in this Press Publish interview:

Here I am. I have characteristics that slot me into demographic segments. I just turned 60. I’m 6 feet 8. We just sent our youngest daughter off to Columbia. I have all kinds of characteristics.

But none of these characteristics or attributes have yet caused me to go out and, say, buy the New York Times today. There might be a correlation between particular characteristics and the propensity that I will by the New York Times – but they don’t cause me to buy it.

What causes us to buy something is that a job arises that we need to get done, and we buy or hire a product and pull it into our lives to get that job done.

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