The method

Jobs to be done and Outcome-Driven Innovation, in plain words

Jobs to be done is a way to understand customers by what they are trying to get done, not by who they are or what they buy. Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), the method Tony Ulwick built at Strategyn, makes it precise: it breaks each job into steps and lists how customers measure success at every step. Those lists tell you what to build next.

By Pancrazio Auteri · Last updated November 11, 2026

The idea in one minute

People “hire” a product to make progress in a particular situation, and “fire” it when something does that job better. Clayton Christensen and his co-authors made this the center of their 2016 Harvard Business Review article on jobs to be done.

The job stays the same while the solutions change. A bookkeeper closed each client's books every month long before accounting software existed, and will still do it in ten years. What changes is how well the tools of the day help. So if you understand the job, and where today's tools fall short, you know where a new product can win.

ODI adds a discipline: describe the job as a series of steps, and for each step write down how the person judges success, in a fixed form that can later be measured in a survey.

The terms you need

Job executor: The person who carries out the job, in the market's own words: “a freelance bookkeeper with 25 small-business clients.” The executor is not always the buyer.
Core job: What the executor is trying to get done, as a verb, an object and a short clarifier: “Close a client's books each month.” It names no product (no app, no spreadsheet) and holds no measure of success (no “fast”, no “easy”). A good test: it should have been true 20 years ago and still be true in 10.
Job map: The steps of the core job, in order. Lance Bettencourt and Tony Ulwick showed in 2008 that almost every job passes through eight universal stages: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify and conclude. A mature map usually has 12 to 20 steps. Each step is a verb and an object, again with no tool and no measure.
Desired outcome: How the executor measures success at one step, written as a direction, a metric, an object of control and a clarifier: “Minimize the time it takes to get every receipt from a client.” The metric is almost always time, likelihood or number. A study often finds 50 to 150 of them per job.
Current solutions: What people use today to get each step done: products, everyday tools such as spreadsheets and email, other people, and their own methods. What they tried and stopped using matters as much, with the reason they gave.
Related, emotional and social jobs: Other jobs done alongside the core job (“Collect payment from clients”), how people want to feel (“Avoid feeling behind every month”) and how they want to be seen (“Be seen as reliable by clients”).
Value themes: A few needs in the customer's own voice, each gathering the outcomes that serve one judgment or kind of progress: “Help me get what I need from clients without chasing them.” A team cannot keep 70 outcomes in mind; it can keep seven themes and sort every idea into one of them.
Unmet needs and the opportunity score: An outcome is unmet when it is important to people and today's solutions serve it poorly. Ulwick's opportunity score measures that with a survey that rates each outcome for importance and satisfaction. Interviews cannot give you the score; they give you the list of outcomes to put in the survey, and a first signal of where the gaps are.

An example: a bookkeeper's month-end

This study is invented, and it is the same one as on the home page. Six freelance bookkeepers talk about closing their clients' books each month. One of them says:

“I spend the first week of every month chasing clients for receipts. I keep a spreadsheet of who still owes me what.”

That one sentence holds a step (collect the client's documents), an outcome (less time to get every receipt), and a current solution (a spreadsheet of missing documents). Another bookkeeper adds what did not work: “We tried a client portal. Nobody logged in.” Here is part of the job map that comes out of the six interviews.

Job map for “Close a client's books each month”, with one desired outcome for some steps
Stage	Step	A desired outcome
Define	Decide what this month's close needs	…
Locate	Collect the client's documents	Minimize the time it takes to get every receipt from a client
Prepare	Sort the documents by account	…
Confirm	Check that the documents are complete	Minimize the likelihood of closing the month with a document missing
Execute	Record the transactions	…
Monitor	Reconcile the books with the bank	Minimize the time it takes to find the cause of a mismatch
Modify	Correct the entries that do not match	…
Conclude	Report the month to the client	Minimize the time it takes to explain a change in the numbers to a client

How to find jobs and outcomes in interviews

Ask about a specific recent time, not about the general case: “Walk me through the last time you closed a client's month.”
Listen for struggles and workarounds. “I keep a spreadsheet of who still owes me what” is a solution and a hint of an outcome.
Turn every complaint and every feature request into an outcome. “I want a reminder app” becomes “Minimize the time it takes to get every receipt from a client.”
Keep the customer's exact words next to each finding, so anyone can check it later.
Ask “why?” of each person's job until the jobs of different people meet. If they only meet at “run a business”, you are looking at two different jobs.

The interview analysis guide walks through each step with an AI assistant.

Jobs, personas and feature requests

A persona describes who the customer is. A job describes what they are trying to get done, and it often cuts across personas: a solo bookkeeper and a small firm's accountant both close a client's month. A feature request describes one solution. Jobs to be done asks for the outcome behind it, which opens more than one way to help.

How Product Weaver applies the method

The Product Weaver plugin runs this method inside your AI assistant. From your transcripts it finds the job executors and core jobs, builds a job map on the eight stages, writes desired outcomes in the form above, collects current solutions and what people stopped using, and groups the outcomes into value themes when you ask. Every quote is checked word for word against its transcript before it goes in.

It counts how many people voiced each outcome. That count is a signal from interviews, not an opportunity score, and the plugin never presents it as one.

Sources

Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan, “Know Your Customers' ‘Jobs to Be Done’”, Harvard Business Review, September 2016. hbr.org
Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick, “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map”, Harvard Business Review, May 2008. hbr.org
Anthony W. Ulwick, “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”, Harvard Business Review, January 2002. hbr.org
Anthony W. Ulwick, What Customers Want, McGraw-Hill, 2005, and Strategyn's overview of Outcome-Driven Innovation. strategyn.com

Outcome-Driven Innovation® is a registered trademark of Strategyn, LLC. Product Weaver follows the method as published; it is not made or endorsed by Strategyn.