Strategy Frameworks
Jobs to Be Done
Also known as: JTBD
A lens that says customers do not buy products — they "hire" them to get a specific job done. Competition is defined by the job, not the product category.
Origin: Developed across the work of Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) and Anthony Ulwick (Outcome-Driven Innovation); popularized in Christensen et al., Competing Against Luck (2016).
Definition
Jobs to Be Done reframes what a market is. Instead of segmenting customers by demographics or by product category, it asks: what progress is the customer trying to make in a given circumstance? The "job" is that progress — functional, emotional, and social — and any product that can be hired to make it happen is a competitor, whether or not it appears in your category on an analyst quadrant.
The classic illustration is the milkshake study popularized by Clayton Christensen: morning commuters were not comparing milkshakes with other milkshakes — they were hiring a milkshake against bananas, bagels, and boredom on a long drive. The competitive set implied by the job was completely different from the one implied by the product category.
For competitive strategy, JTBD is a defence against the most common blind spot: watching only the rivals who look like you. A spreadsheet, an agency, an intern, or "do nothing" can all be hired for the same job your product does — and those alternatives often win more deals than any named competitor.
Why it matters for competitive intelligence
Your most dangerous competitor is whatever else can be hired for the job — including manual workarounds and the status quo. A JTBD view keeps your tracked competitor set honest about substitutes, not just look-alikes.
How Rivalize helps
When Rivalize builds a competitive set, it is not limited to same-category vendors — you can track any company whose product competes for the same job, and the report treats "how they position against the job" as a first-class question.
Related terms
Product-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand — the moment demand starts to pull the product rather than the team pushing it.
Positioning
The act of shaping the place a product occupies in the customer's mind relative to alternatives — the single idea you want to own in the category.
Market Segmentation
Dividing a heterogeneous market into groups with distinct needs and buying behaviour, so product, pricing, and messaging can be aimed instead of averaged.
Value Proposition
The specific, believable statement of the value a customer gets from choosing you — the pains removed and gains created, relative to the alternatives they would otherwise use.
See it live in Rivalize
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Why not just use ChatGPT?
Prompts guess. Rivalize knows.
15-25% of teams use AI prompts for competitive research. Here is why that approach falls short.
Real scraping, not hallucination
We scrape 40+ actual pages per competitor. AI prompts guess from training data that may be months or years out of date.
Source attribution on every claim
Every data point links to where we found it. Prompts cannot cite sources because they do not access real-time data.
Monitoring, not one-shots
Rivalize tracks changes over time and scores momentum trends. Prompts give you a snapshot that is already stale by the time you read it.
Real data, real sources, real intelligence.
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Sources
- Clayton M. Christensen et al., Competing Against Luck (HarperBusiness, 2016)
- Anthony W. Ulwick, "Turn Customer Input into Innovation," Harvard Business Review (2002)
This definition is an educational summary of an established concept, written by the Rivalize team. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the originators of the framework.