Understanding the Job
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the short, famous introduction to Jobs To Be Done and competition framing.
What it is
Clayton Christensen explains the jobs-to-be-done idea in five minutes, using the fast-food milkshake example. The point is that understanding the job a product is hired to do makes it easier to improve.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec sarreph · 2020-12 · on “The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar”
This is very much in the vein of Jobs to Be Done theory[0]. If you haven't heard of JTBD before, I would implore you to check-out Clayton Christensen's famous "milkshake" video here: [this video] It goes into enlightening detail about the same framing of competition as the author here does. [0] - [LINK]
Recommends andygcook · 2019-11 · on “Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” (2016)”
This video from Clayton Christensen gives a good summary of Jobs To Be Done using milkshakes at a fast food restaurant as an example: [this video] Unrelated, but I saw Clayton Christensen speak at a conference years ago. He started out the talk by telling everyone that he had a stroke years earlier and after it, he couldn't speak clearly. For a professor, you can imagine that's not ideal. So he went out and bought Rosetta Stone and taught himself how to talk again. I was blown away and besides a few small stutters during the talk, I barely noticed. That story of grit always stuck with me as a truly remarkable example of how versatile humans can be.
Recommends nomilk · 2024-09 · on “Measuring Developers' Jobs-to-be-done”
Also odd is the expression 'jobs to be done'. At first glance this seemed like an allusion to this famous ' Jobs to be Done ' Clay Christian talk [1] (well worth the 5 minute watch). But AFICT it's just coincidental use of the phrase. [1] [this video]