In SaaS, speed is survival. But speed without the right direction is just waste in motion.
Bob Moesta, co-architect of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework alongside Clayton Christensen, offers a mindset shift embraced by companies like Apple, Intercom, and GitLab. It’s a lens that reframes product, sales, marketing, and even hiring around one question:
“What progress is someone trying to make, and why now?”
People Don’t Buy Products, They Hire Them to Make Progress
Customers aren’t interested in your roadmap. They’re interested in progress, solving a problem in their life or business that’s urgent enough to take action on.
The classic drill analogy is still gold: customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. In JTBD, that “hole” is the real job they’re trying to get done and if there’s no struggling moment, there’s no purchase.
Why Most SaaS Thinking Is Backwards
Most leaders operate from the supply side: If we build it, they will come. Or If we make it better, they’ll upgrade. Both are false.
JTBD forces a demand-side perspective:
- Customers are pulled into action by a change in their life or work context.
- They “hire” solutions to solve a specific struggle.
- The winner is rarely the “best” product – it’s the one that solves the right struggle in the least painful way.
Example: Casper didn’t win by making the best mattress. They won by eliminating the miserable mattress-buying experience. QuickBooks didn’t win by turning small business owners into accountants. They won by being “just easy enough” for non-accountants to handle.
The Four Forces of Progress: Why Customers Switch
Every customer decision is a tug-of-war between four forces:
- Push of the Situation – the pain of staying where they are.
- Pull of the New Solution – the benefits you promise.
- Anxiety of the New – fear of change.
- Habit of the Present – comfort with the status quo.
Here’s the kicker: reducing anxiety and habit often drives more adoption than adding new features. One homebuilder grew sales 22% not by upgrading kitchens, but by bundling moving services and storage – removing the pain of relocation.
How Decisions Really Happen
Customers move through a decision journey:
- First Thought – a flicker of dissatisfaction.
- Passive Looking – awareness grows, but no urgency.
- Active Looking – research begins, demands feel limitless.
- Deciding – trade-offs must be made. This is where most SaaS sales lose the deal.
- First Use – initial wins matter more than “future potential.”
- Ongoing Use – habit-building is the moat.
Your job: remove friction at each stage. In B2B, 60% of proposals vanish because companies fail to help buyers make the trade-offs required to commit.
The Social & Emotional Jobs That Kill Deals
Founders obsess over features, but big buying decisions also carry social and emotional jobs:
- Will this make me look smart in front of my board?
- Will this decision put my team at risk?
- Will this reduce the stress that’s keeping me up at night?
Ignore these at your peril.
JTBD Beyond Products: Talent, Teams, and Retention
JTBD also applies internally: employees “hire” your company to make progress in their careers and lives. If they’re not making progress, they’ll leave — no matter the perks.
- Stop writing “unicorn” job descriptions. Instead, identify the pushes driving talent away from their current roles and the pulls your role offers.
- One healthcare group struggling to recruit doctors in Montana succeeded by targeting overworked city doctors who wanted to reset their life.
The same logic that wins customers wins talent.
CEO Takeaways: Three Strategic Shifts
- Find Struggling Moments – they’re the seeds of growth. For customers and employees.
- Think Progress, Not Product – align roadmaps, messaging, and hiring around desired outcomes.
- Obsess Over Trade-Offs – win by being great at the few things that matter most to their progress.
Southwest Airlines thrives despite “sucking” at in-flight food because that trade-off funds the things their customers actually value.
In SaaS, you don’t win by building more. You win by making the right progress inevitable for the right people, at the right moment.
JTBD isn’t just a framework. It’s a CEO-level operating system for growth.
This article draws on excerpts from Bob Moesta‘s talk, “Jobs-to-be-Done Across the Organization“, at Business of Software Conference.