Jobs to Be Done
JTBD framework for product innovation
Discover what customers really need using Clayton Christensen's Jobs to Be Done theory. This skill helps your AI agent uncover the progress people are trying to make in their lives and design products that fulfill those jobs better than any alternative.
Competing Against Luck
npx skills add wondelai/skills/jobs-to-be-done --global This skill is compatible with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and other agentskills.io-compatible agents.
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.
Example prompts for the Jobs to Be Done skill
Conduct a JTBD interview analysis for my productivity app using jobs-to-be-done skill
Customer researchIdentify the jobs our customers hire our product to do using jobs-to-be-done skill
Product strategyRewrite our feature roadmap around customer jobs using jobs-to-be-done skill
Product planningCreate job stories for our next sprint planning using jobs-to-be-done skill
AgileJobs to Be Done vs the other Product & Innovation skills
All 10 Product & Innovation skills are free and install the same way — the only question is which framework fits the job in front of you.
| Skill | Based on | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs to Be Done | Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen | JTBD framework for product innovation |
| Hooked UX | Hooked — Nir Eyal | Habit-forming product design |
| Improve Retention | Tiny Habits — BJ Fogg | Behavior design for user retention using B=MAP |
| Lean Startup | The Lean Startup — Eric Ries | Build-Measure-Learn methodology |
| Design Sprint | Sprint — Jake Knapp | 5-day process for validating ideas through prototyping |
| Continuous Discovery | Continuous Discovery Habits — Teresa Torres | Habits for continuous product discovery |
| Inspired | Inspired — Marty Cagan | Building products customers love |
| The Mom Test | The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick | Customer conversations that reveal the truth |
| The 37signals Way | Shape Up — Jason Fried & DHH | Lean, opinionated product development from Getting Real to Shape Up |
| Lean Analytics | Lean Analytics — Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz | Startup metrics and the One Metric That Matters |
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.
Guides that use this skill
Install Jobs to Be Done
Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/jobs-to-be-done --global MIT Licensed · Works with Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent & other agentskills.io agents · No account needed
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