The History of JTBD: From Christensen to Ulwick to Modern Practice

Two Men, One Idea, a 30-Year Argument

The history of Jobs to Be Done is not a clean origin story. It is a messy, contested, productive intellectual dispute between two of the most influential thinkers in innovation, each of whom claims a different version of where the idea came from and what it actually means.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the phrase, saw JTBD primarily as a narrative lens — a way of telling stories about customer motivation that made product decisions feel more human. Tony Ulwick, the practitioner who worked alongside Christensen at the beginning, saw something entirely different: a quantitative framework for eliminating product failure by measuring unmet needs with statistical precision.

Both of them are right. Both of them are incomplete without the other. And the productive tension between their versions of the same idea has generated what is now one of the most rigorous approaches to product strategy available to senior product teams.

Understanding this history is not an academic exercise. It matters because the version of JTBD your organization adopts will determine whether you get insight or decisions — whether JTBD becomes a better way of thinking about customers or a systematic process for building products customers actually want. This article traces that history from the early 1990s to today, with particular attention to what actually changed in practice at each stage.

The Pre-History: Marketing Theory Before JTBD

Theodore Levitt and the Product Myopia Problem

The conceptual roots of JTBD reach back further than either Christensen or Ulwick. In 1960, Theodore Levitt published “Marketing Myopia” in the Harvard Business Review — a paper that argued companies define their markets too narrowly, in terms of products rather than customer needs. Levitt’s observation that railroad companies should have defined themselves as being in the transportation business, not the railroad business, is recognizably proto-JTBD thinking.

But Levitt offered no method. He identified the myopia; he did not provide the corrective surgery. His insight lived in business school curricula for three decades, influencing how managers thought about competitive dynamics without changing how they actually built products.

Russ Ackoff and the Purpose Hierarchy

Systems theorist Russell Ackoff contributed another element in the 1970s and 1980s: the concept of hierarchical purposes. Ackoff argued that understanding what a person is trying to accomplish requires looking not just at the immediate action but at the broader goal it serves — and the even broader goal above that. A carpenter drives a nail not to drive a nail but to join two boards; not to join two boards but to build a frame; not to build a frame but to create shelter.

This recursive purpose-thinking is directly embedded in modern JTBD job mapping: every job exists within a larger goal context, and understanding that context is what prevents you from solving the wrong problem at the wrong level.

Neither Levitt nor Ackoff, however, solved the practical problem: how do you systematically discover what people are trying to accomplish and measure how well current solutions are doing it?

Tony Ulwick and the Birth of Outcome-Driven Innovation (1990s)

The IBM Printer Problem

The story of JTBD as a methodology begins not with a milkshake but with a printer. In the early 1990s, Tony Ulwick was working with IBM on a product that was technically excellent but commercially struggling. The team kept adding features that customers requested in surveys and focus groups, and the product kept failing to gain traction.

Ulwick had a hypothesis: the reason traditional market research kept producing wrong answers was that it was asking the wrong questions. Surveys asked customers what they wanted in a product — which forced customers to think like engineers and describe solutions. But customers are not engineers. They are people trying to accomplish things. And what they want in a product is a derivation of what they are trying to accomplish, filtered through their limited awareness of what is technically possible.

The right question, Ulwick concluded, was not “what do you want the product to do?” It was: “what are you trying to accomplish — and where does the current solution fail you?”

The Outcome Statement Framework

Ulwick’s first major intellectual contribution was the concept of the desired outcome statement — a specific, measurable articulation of what customers are trying to achieve at each step of the job they are trying to do. Outcomes follow a strict syntax: direction of improvement + metric + object of control + contextual clarifier.

For example: “Minimize the time it takes to confirm that the connection is secure before loading begins.” This is not a feature request. It is a measurable statement of customer need that any solution — mechanical, digital, procedural — could address. It is also testable: you can survey 300 customers on how important this outcome is and how satisfied they are with current solutions. The gap between importance and satisfaction is the opportunity.

This insight — that customer needs can be expressed as measurable outcome statements and that gap between importance and satisfaction is quantifiable — was the foundation of what Ulwick would eventually call Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). He filed a patent for the method in 1992 and began refining it through client work throughout the decade.

What Customers Want (2005)

By the mid-2000s, Ulwick had worked with enough clients — across medical devices, industrial equipment, consumer electronics, and financial services — to codify the methodology. His 2005 book “What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services” laid out the full ODI process for the first time in accessible form.

The book introduced the opportunity algorithm — the formula that calculates opportunity scores from importance and satisfaction data — and showed how those scores translate directly into product strategy decisions. It argued that the reason 70-90% of new products fail is not a creativity problem or an execution problem: it is an input problem. Teams are building products based on feature requests, opinions, and anecdotes rather than quantified customer needs.

At the time, the book did not receive the mainstream attention it deserved. It was overshadowed by the wave of design thinking enthusiasm that was sweeping through corporate innovation in the mid-2000s. But practitioners who read it found in it something design thinking conspicuously lacked: a way to measure whether they were solving the right problems.

Clayton Christensen and the Narrative Turn (2000s)

The Milkshake Story

Clayton Christensen came to JTBD from a different direction. His primary intellectual project was disruptive innovation — explaining why market leaders consistently fail to see disruptive competitors until it is too late. JTBD emerged as a conceptual tool for explaining consumer behavior in a way that made disruption more predictable.

The milkshake case study — which originated from research Christensen conducted with consultant Bob Moesta and others — became the most famous illustration of JTBD thinking. A fast-food chain studied milkshake sales. Traditional market research identified the category of milkshake buyers and asked them what they wanted: more chocolate? thicker? cheaper? None of these improvements moved sales.

When the research team instead asked “what job is someone hiring this milkshake to do?” they discovered that morning commuters were the primary purchasers and their job was not “enjoy a milkshake” — it was “get through a long, boring commute without being hungry, without making a mess, and with something I can hold in one hand.” The milkshake competed with bananas, bagels, and granola bars, not with other milkshakes. The improvements that would actually grow sales — making the milkshake harder to consume so it lasted the whole commute — were counterintuitive from a product perspective and obvious from a job perspective.

Christensen taught this case for years before publishing it widely. It became the entry point for thousands of product managers and executives into JTBD thinking.

Competing Against Luck (2016)

Christensen’s JTBD book, “Competing Against Luck,” co-authored with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan, appeared in 2016 — more than a decade after Ulwick’s “What Customers Want.” Where Ulwick’s book was a methodology manual, “Competing Against Luck” was a business narrative — full of cases, stories, and qualitative illustrations of how understanding the job changes product and business strategy.

The book emphasized the “hiring” metaphor: customers hire products to do jobs for them, and when products do the job better, customers hire them; when they do it poorly, customers fire them. This metaphor gave practitioners a vivid mental model for thinking about competition and customer choice.

What “Competing Against Luck” did not provide — and was criticized for — was a systematic process for discovering jobs, mapping outcomes, and measuring opportunity. It was inspirational but methodologically thin. You could read it and come away convinced that JTBD was important without knowing what to do Monday morning.

Christensen gave us the language to talk about what customers are trying to accomplish. Ulwick gave us the math to measure it. If you read one book and skip the other, you have half a methodology. In my experience, most companies have read Christensen and skipped Ulwick — and that is exactly why their JTBD initiatives produce insight decks instead of better products.

The Schism: Two Schools of JTBD

The Ulwick School: ODI as Quantitative Science

By the 2010s, two distinct schools of JTBD practice had emerged. Ulwick’s school — operationalized through his practice and codified in ODI — treated JTBD as a quantitative science. The job is defined with precision. Outcomes are captured through structured qualitative interviews and expressed in outcome statement syntax. Those outcomes are then measured through large-scale surveys (200-600 respondents minimum). Opportunity scores are calculated. Segments are identified through cluster analysis. Product strategy is derived from data, not intuition.

This approach is rigorous, expensive, and produces results with statistical validity. Ulwick reports an 86% product success rate for ODI-guided innovations, compared to an industry average of 15-30%. Those numbers are from his own practice and come with obvious caveats — but the directional claim is consistent with what I have seen in my own client engagements over 20 years.

The Innovation Narrative School

The other school — associated with Bob Moesta (a former Christensen collaborator who now runs the Re-Wired Group), Alan Klement, Chris Spiek, and others — took JTBD in a more qualitative direction. This school emphasizes understanding the “forces” that push customers toward a new solution and pull them back to the old one: the struggling moments, the anxieties, the social and emotional dimensions of switching behavior.

This approach generates rich, narrative insights about customer motivation. It is particularly useful for understanding why customers switch between products — essential for positioning and messaging. It is less useful for product prioritization, because it lacks the quantitative machinery to compare the magnitude of different unmet needs.

The Controversy

The two schools have not always been collegial. Ulwick and Moesta have publicly disagreed about the intellectual genealogy of JTBD, about what constitutes a “job,” and about whether emotional and social outcomes belong in the JTBD framework or represent a separate category. These disputes generated heat on the internet through the 2010s and produced the confusing situation where practitioners encounter multiple incompatible definitions of the same concept.

For a practical product team trying to adopt JTBD, the schism is mostly a distraction. The productive synthesis is this: use the Ulwick/ODI framework for measuring opportunity and making prioritization decisions; use the narrative and forces-of-progress tools when you need to understand switching behavior for positioning and messaging. They are not competing — they are complementary tools for different stages of the work.

Bob Moesta and the Forces of Progress (2010s)

Bob Moesta’s contribution to the JTBD canon deserves specific mention because it addressed something Ulwick’s framework underemphasized: the dynamics of customer decision-making over time.

Moesta developed the concept of the “four forces” that govern whether someone hires a new solution: the push of the problem with the current situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety about adopting something new, and the habit of the existing solution. The tension between push and pull and between anxiety and habit explains why customers with genuine unmet needs often continue using inferior solutions for years.

This framework is particularly valuable in B2B contexts, where switching costs are high and purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders with different risk tolerances. Understanding the forces helps product teams design onboarding experiences and sales narratives that address anxiety rather than simply emphasizing features.

JTBD in the 2020s: Convergence and Professionalization

The Post-Hype Maturation

JTBD went through a hype cycle in the mid-2010s. Every product management blog had a JTBD article. Design agencies offered “JTBD workshops.” Consultants without methodology training were selling JTBD as a flavored version of their existing user research practices.

The result was predictable: companies ran JTBD projects, produced job statements and job maps, and then found that the outputs did not change product decisions because they were qualitative artifacts without quantitative validation. The backlash followed: “We tried JTBD and it didn’t work.”

What did not work was not JTBD. What did not work was JTBD without outcome measurement — a car with an engine but no fuel. The framework needs the quantitative phase to produce decisions rather than narratives.

By the early 2020s, the organizations that had stayed with the full methodology — including MYLES’ engagements with Liebherr, Palfinger, and Hilti — had accumulated enough experience to distinguish between what the framework promises and what shortcuts deliver.

The Integration with Product Management

The other development of the 2020s has been the integration of JTBD concepts into mainstream product management practice. Frameworks like continuous discovery, outcome-based roadmaps, and opportunity solution trees incorporate JTBD thinking even when they do not use the vocabulary. The product management community has internalized — if imperfectly — that product strategy should be anchored to customer outcomes, not to feature requests.

The risk of this diffusion is dilution. When JTBD becomes synonymous with “understanding the user,” it loses its methodological precision. Understanding the user is necessary but not sufficient. What distinguishes JTBD/ODI from generic user research is the systematic capture of outcomes in measurable form, the quantitative validation of which outcomes are underserved, and the derivation of strategy from opportunity scores rather than qualitative judgment.

What Each Figure Contributed: A Practitioner’s Balance Sheet

Tony Ulwick’s contributions:

• The desired outcome statement — a measurable, solution-agnostic expression of customer need
• The opportunity algorithm — quantifying where needs are underserved
• The Universal Job Map — an eight-step process template for decomposing any job
• The ODI process — a repeatable methodology from market definition to growth strategy
• The documented success rate — 86% vs. industry average of 15-30%

Clayton Christensen’s contributions:

• The “hiring” metaphor — an intuitive way to understand customer choice
• Popularization at scale — JTBD entered the product management mainstream through Christensen’s platform
• The link between JTBD and disruption theory — explaining why incumbents lose to disruptors
• Narrative richness — qualitative cases that make JTBD accessible to non-methodologists

Bob Moesta’s contributions:

• The four forces framework — explaining the dynamics of customer switching behavior
• The switch interview — a qualitative method for understanding purchase decisions in depth
• Emphasis on timeline — job execution as a process that unfolds over time, not a moment of choice

The synthesis: A complete JTBD practice uses Ulwick’s framework for opportunity identification and product strategy, Christensen’s narrative for organizational communication and competitive framing, and Moesta’s forces for understanding switching and informing positioning. Using any one of these in isolation produces a partial result.

The MYLES Practice: ODI in the DACH Region

Our practice at MYLES is explicitly built on the Ulwick methodology. As experienced ODI practitioners, in the DACH region, we bring the full ODI process to industrial, MedTech, and B2B product teams — not as a license to use the name, but as a working knowledge of the methodology accumulated through 20+ years and dozens of engagements.

What that means in practice: we run the full cycle, from job definition through quantitative survey design through opportunity scoring through strategic synthesis. We do not stop at job maps. We do not treat qualitative interviews as a complete deliverable. We produce decision-grade inputs that change product roadmaps.

The history of JTBD matters to us because it explains why shortcuts fail. When a client tells me “we did JTBD last year and it wasn’t that useful,” I know before asking that they stopped at the qualitative phase. That is not a JTBD failure. That is a Christensen-only implementation — valuable for understanding, insufficient for deciding.

For the foundational concepts behind what the history produced, see What Are Jobs to Be Done? and for how those concepts connect to ODI’s systematic process.

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