Jobs-to-be-Done Interview
Don't ask what they want — make them re-live the day they switched, and the why falls out.
- Term
- JTBD Interview
- School
- Christensen's theory; Moesta's method
- Tools
- The timeline; the four forces
- Output
- Switch language for positioning and copy
Forms & parts of speech
Definition in plain terms
The jobs-to-be-done interview is a research method that reconstructs a REAL purchase in forensic detail — when the customer first thought about switching, what struggle triggered it, what they tried, what almost stopped them, and what finally tipped the decision. The premise (Christensen's JTBD theory, Bob Moesta's interview craft): customers 'hire' products to make progress in a circumstance, and the truth about why lives in the story of an actual switch, not in opinions about features.
The mechanics
The craft: interview RECENT SWITCHERS (memory decays — 90 days is gold), walk the TIMELINE backwards (first thought → passive looking → active looking → deciding → consuming), and map the FOUR FORCES — the push of the struggle, the pull of the new solution, the ANXIETY about the change, and the HABIT holding them in place. Marketing inherits the output directly: the push language becomes problem copy, the anxieties become objection-handling, the tipping moments become campaign timing, and the competing 'hires' (the spreadsheet, the intern, doing nothing) redraw the real competitive set. It is the Mom Test's depth-charge cousin — past behavior, zero hypotheticals.
When it matters
Run JTBD interviews at positioning resets (the switch stories ARE the positioning research), at funnel mysteries (high interest, low conversion usually means unaddressed anxiety forces), and before building 'what customers asked for' (the job behind the feature request is the real spec). Five to ten good switch interviews routinely out-inform a thousand-response survey — the sample is small because the data is deep.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Antonyms
Origin & history
The theory descends from Clayton Christensen's jobs-to-be-done school (the famous milkshake study, told in The Innovator's Solution, 2003, and Competing Against Luck, 2016); the interview METHOD — timeline plus four forces — is the craft of Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek's Re-Wired Group, who ran the original milkshake research with Christensen.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- What is a JTBD interview?
- A forensic reconstruction of a real purchase — the timeline and forces behind an actual switch — to find the job the customer hired for.
- What are the four forces?
- Push of the struggle, pull of the solution, anxiety about the change, and habit of the present — the diagram of every switch.
- Who developed the method?
- The theory is Clayton Christensen's school; the interview craft is Bob Moesta's (with Chris Spiek) — the milkshake research's lineage.
Related tools & calculators
Resources & people to follow
- bookCompeting Against Luck — Christensen
- bookDemand-Side Sales 101 — Moesta
- bookThe Mom Test — the sibling discipline
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where jobs-to-be-done interview is a core concern: