Jobs to Be Done cover art

Jobs to Be Done

Theory to Practice

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Jobs to Be Done

By: Anthony W. Ulwick
Narrated by: Tom Askin
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £11.99

Buy Now for £11.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Why do so many innovation projects fail? What are the root causes of failure? How can they be avoided?

Since 1991, Tony Ulwick has pioneered an innovation process that answers these questions. In 1999, Tony introduced Clayton Christensen to the idea that "people have underlying needs or processes in their lives, that they are addressing in some way right now" - an insight that was to become the Jobs-to-Be-Done theory.

For 26 years, Ulwick and his company Strategyn have helped over 400 companies put Jobs-to-Be-Done Theory into practice, with a success rate of 86 percent, a five-fold improvement.

You will learn:

  • Why companies fail at innovation and how to avoid critical mistakes
  • How to employ the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to categorize, define, capture, and prioritize customer needs, including the following: the core functional job-to-be-done and desired outcomes, related jobs, emotional and social jobs, consumption chain jobs, and financially desired outcomes.
  • A Jobs-to-be-Done growth strategy matrix to categorize, understand, and employ five growth strategies: differentiated, dominant, disruptive, discrete, and sustaining
  • Outcome-based segmentation
  • Outcome-driven innovation - the tested innovation process that ties customer-defined metrics to the customer's job to be done
  • The language of Jobs-to-Be-Done - the syntax and lexicon of innovation

I call him the Deming of Innovation because, more than anyone else, Tony has turned innovation into a science," says the father of modern marketing, Philip Kotler, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

©2016 Anthony W. Ulwick (P)2020 Anthony W. Ulwick
Management Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales Business Innovation Project Management Customer Service Jobs Theory

Listeners also enjoyed...

Continuous Discovery Habits cover art
The Mom Test cover art
Product-Led Growth cover art
Outcomes over Output: Why Customer Behavior Is the Key Metric for Business Success cover art
The Lean Startup cover art
Competing Against Luck cover art
Obviously Awesome cover art
The Hard Thing About Hard Things cover art
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy cover art
Playing to Win cover art
Escaping the Build Trap cover art
How to Lead in Product Management cover art
Lean Guide cover art
Fast Forward cover art
Orchestrating Transformation cover art
Product Roadmaps Relaunched cover art
All stars
Most relevant
A great and forward thinking book although seem to whet my appetite for ODI rather than JTBD framework which the author already warned us about that it's not for everyone.

JTBD vs ODI

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

It's rare to have this concrete advice that can be immediately applied to your day to day work. As a sales leader I have to say that our mapping of client problems and needs just got redesigned thoroughly.

Concrete advice to really understand customers

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I previously held unchecked beliefs in the notion of trying lots of ideas at speed and failing fast. This is the sensible counterpoint to this that guides you through picking the right idea first. This framework is evangelised by our product team and has lead to many a great insight. The customer is not expected to be a product designer, the customer is not expected to know what they want. They do however know a great deal about the problem they're facing and how they're currently tackling it.

This framework leads product designers from their users' problem to an innovative solution that the customer wasn't aware they needed.

Puts innovation in a formulaic setting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

There are some actionable hints about quant research including Conjoint Analysis. However this “book” contains around 30% useful information and is 70% an advert for the author’s consultancy and training. There are few practical examples of how to apply the advice other than decontextualised extracts from lists. Skip this obvious attempt at content marketing for Strategyn. I’d recommend reading Jim Kalbach instead.

Sales pitch

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This just came across as an advert for the authors company and training.
Far to many “go read my Harvard Business Review” type comments.

I’m submitting for a refund and I recommend avoiding this.

Largely a waste of time.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews