The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it provides an uncommon solution to a common problem - understanding your customers as you start a new enterprise or losing touch with customers as your business grows. The theory of Jobs to Be Done is taught at Harvard Business School in the course "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise ("BSSE," in HBS shorthand), which was created by the late Professor Clayton Christensen. It is practiced by many alumni of the course, as well as by numerous industry practitioners. Beyond them, there is a wider circle of professionals who are familiar with the theory or curious about it, and who are interested in converting that curiosity into practice. This multimedia toolbox walks through all of the stages of understanding and implementing Jobs to Be Done, including the foundational theory and its benefits to businesses; how to recruit customers, interview them, and analyze results; and feed that analysis into product development and marketing. The toolbox is a collection of original content as well as existing resources aggregated from across the web. To illustrate the theory the authors conducted a Jobs to Be Done research project to understand why our students "hire" Harvard Business School.

In March 2019, Molson Coors CEO Mark Hunter considered a request to pull forward $65 million CAD in anticipated future funding for Truss Beverages, a Toronto-based cannabis beverage company that Molson Coors created in a joint venture with a Canadian cannabis production company. The request was for the construction of a new production facility for cannabis beverages, a new product in an as-yet-nascent market.

This short case, meant for pairing with HBS case 615-013 "AmazonFresh: Rekindling the Online Grocery Market," explores Amazon's rationale for acquiring Whole Foods.

Unlike traditional market segmentations that are based on a correlation of product sales or service with the attributes of the purchaser (such as age, gender, income level, and education level), jobs-based segmentation seeks to understand the causal roots of purchase-when a buyer needs to "hire" a product or service to get a "job" done. This note details the thought process and the methodology behind a jobs-based segmentation and provides numerous examples. It highlights three levels in the architecture of a job: 1) What is the fundamental job or problem the customer is facing? This includes political, functional, emotional, and social dimensions; 2) What are the experiences in purchase and use that, if all provided, would sum up to nailing the job perfectly? (The "hiring criteria"); and 3) What do we need to integrate, and how must we knit those things together, so that we can provide these experiences?