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Understanding the Job

Edward Capaldi · 507.8K views · 2016-03-31 · 4:56

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Overview

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.

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Cited as the short, famous introduction to Jobs To Be Done and competition framing.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2024

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What people said

sarreph · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

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: [VIDEO] It goes into enlightening detail about the same framing of competition as the author here does. [0] - [LINK]

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nomilk · 2024-09 · Recommendation

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] [VIDEO]

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andygcook · 2019-11 · Recommendation

This video from Clayton Christensen gives a good summary of Jobs To Be Done using milkshakes at a fast food restaurant as an example: [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.

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Sources

Video by Edward Capaldi, played through YouTube.

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