# Jobs to Be Done

> JTBD framework for product innovation — an AI agent skill based on *Competing Against Luck* by Clayton Christensen.

Published 2026-02-19 · Updated 2026-08-17 · Product & Innovation · Free and MIT-licensed
Canonical: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/jobs-to-be-done/
Source: https://github.com/wondelai/skills/tree/main/jobs-to-be-done

**Install:** `npx skills add wondelai/skills/jobs-to-be-done --global`

## What is the Jobs to Be Done skill?

Jobs to Be Done turns Clayton Christensen’s Competing Against Luck into instructions your AI agent loads on demand. It makes the agent reconstruct the progress a customer was trying to make — the circumstance, the struggle, the functional, social and emotional stakes — then judge every feature against that job rather than against a competitor’s feature list.

## Key concepts from Competing Against Luck your agent applies

- **The Job, Not the Product** — Customers "hire" products to make progress — understand the job, not just the feature request.
- **Circumstances & Struggles** — The context in which a job arises matters as much as the job itself — design for the situation.
- **Competing Against Nonconsumption** — Your biggest competitor might be nothing at all — people living with the problem unresolved.
- **Functional, Social & Emotional** — Every job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions — address all three for strong adoption.
- **Job Stories** — Write "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]" instead of user stories.

## When to use Jobs to Be Done — and when not to

Reach for it when:

- Your roadmap is a list of competitor features and nobody can say what progress any of them helps a customer make.
- You keep losing deals to spreadsheets, interns doing it by hand, and customers deciding to just carry on as they are.
- Two segments with near-identical demographics behave completely differently and your personas cannot explain why.
- A feature everyone asked for shipped, and the people who asked for it never abandoned their old workaround.

Reach for something else when:

- You already know the job and need to hear it from customers without leading them — The Mom Test teaches the interview craft.
- The theory is settled and what is missing is a team habit that keeps producing evidence — that is Continuous Discovery.
- The job is clear and the hard part is finding a market nobody else is serving — try Blue Ocean Strategy.
- You understand the job and need prospects to grasp the product in thirty seconds — that is Obviously Awesome’s territory.

## About Clayton Christensen

Harvard Business School professor, father of disruptive innovation. Clayton Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor whose theory of disruptive innovation fundamentally changed how executives think about strategy. He was named the world's most influential management thinker.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen · https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5130292
The book: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26428781M/Competing_Against_Luck

## Example prompts

- Conduct a JTBD interview analysis for my productivity app using jobs-to-be-done skill _(Customer research)_
- Identify the jobs our customers hire our product to do using jobs-to-be-done skill _(Product strategy)_
- Rewrite our feature roadmap around customer jobs using jobs-to-be-done skill _(Product planning)_
- Create job stories for our next sprint planning using jobs-to-be-done skill _(Agile)_

## Frequently asked questions

### How do I install the Jobs to Be Done skill?

Run `npx skills add wondelai/skills/jobs-to-be-done --global`. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Jobs to Be Done skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.

### Which book is the Jobs to Be Done skill based on?

It packages *Competing Against Luck* by Clayton Christensen — harvard Business School professor, father of disruptive innovation. The skill distils the book's method into instructions your agent follows while it works, covering the job, not the product, circumstances & struggles and competing against nonconsumption. It sits in the Product & Innovation part of the library.

### How is this different from The Mom Test skill?

Jobs to Be Done is a theory of demand: what a job is, why circumstance matters more than demographics, how non-consumption competes with you. The Mom Test is interview craft: the phrasing that stops people being polite at you. JTBD tells your agent what to look for in a transcript; The Mom Test governs how that transcript gets produced. Teams that use both frame the hypothesis with one and collect the evidence with the other.

### What actually counts as a “job”?

Progress in a circumstance. “Be healthier” is a goal and “export the report” is a task; a job reads *When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]* and never names your product. It carries three dimensions at once — functional, social and emotional — and the emotional and social ones are usually where the differentiated product hides. The test: could a competitor built on entirely different technology be hired for the same job? If not, you have written a feature request.

### Do I need to have read Competing Against Luck?

No. The skill carries the working parts — job statements, the circumstance-over-demographics rule, the Big Hire and Little Hire, competing against non-consumption. What the book adds is the case evidence: the milkshake study, the condo buyers and their old dining tables, dozens of pages of companies discovering they had misread their own customers. That evidence is what convinces a sceptical colleague; the skill will not do that arguing for you.

### Can it find the job without customer evidence?

It will produce a job statement from nothing, and that is the risk. JTBD is far easier to apply backwards — Christensen’s examples are reconstructions of things that already worked — than forwards to a product that does not exist yet. Given only your description, the skill returns a confident, well-formed hypothesis. Ask it to mark its assumptions, then go and try to disprove them with switching stories from people who actually changed something.

## Related

- All Product & Innovation skills: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/product/
- Hooked UX: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/hooked-ux/
- Improve Retention: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/improve-retention/
- Lean Startup: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-startup/
- Design Sprint: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/design-sprint/
- Continuous Discovery: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/continuous-discovery/
- Inspired: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/inspired-product/
- The Mom Test: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/mom-test/
- The 37signals Way: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/37signals-way/
- Lean Analytics: https://skills.wondel.ai/skills/lean-analytics/