Jobs to be Done and the four forces

Nobody buys your product

They buy what it does to their life. A patient doesn't want physiotherapy — physiotherapy is inconvenient, costs €65 a session and sometimes hurts. They want to be on the ski trip they've booked. An accountant doesn't want onboarding software; she wants to stop chasing documents by email and to look organised in front of a new client. Nobody has ever wanted a plate.

The Jobs-to-be-Done idea says: a customer hires a product to make progress in a specific circumstance. Name that progress precisely and two things happen. Your messaging starts writing itself, because you can finally say what the customer is actually trying to get done. And your real competitors become visible — and they are rarely who you think.

That's the whole idea. It's had a small industry of jargon built on top of it; you need none of it. You need one sentence format and one diagram, and both fit on this page.

The job statement

When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].

The worked example from the Herzog patient you'll meet below:

When pain starts threatening things I've planned, I want expert treatment that fits around work, so I can stop worrying about my body.

Notice what the sentence contains: a circumstance (pain meets a plan), a motivation (expert help that doesn't wreck the diary), an outcome (stop worrying). Notice what it doesn't contain: an age, a gender, a city, or the word "physiotherapy".

The test that matters. The commonest failure is writing a demographic description in disguise — "When accountants aged 35–55 in the Netherlands need onboarding, they want software, so they can do onboarding." That sentence contains no situation, no progress, and no information. Two checks catch it:

1. Could a different kind of person have the same job? A 61-year-old man buying an Ostara dinner set as a wedding gift and a 29-year-old woman doing the same have the same job. If your statement would change when the demographics change, you've written a persona, not a job.
2. Does the product appear in it? "I want to use your software" is not a motivation anyone wakes up with. If deleting your product from the sentence breaks it, rewrite it.

Three layers of every job

Every job has a functional, an emotional and a social dimension, and messaging that only speaks to the functional layer underperforms. Storkflow, layered:

• Functional: automate collecting documents, ID checks and engagement letters from a new client.
• Emotional: stop dreading new-client admin — the chasing, the half-finished folders.
• Social: look professional and organised to a client you've just won.

Lena's homepage currently sells only the functional layer. The emotional and social layers are where the pull actually lives — "start the actual work looking organised" persuades; "document collection workflows" describes.

Your fiercest competitor doesn't have a website

Ask Ana who Ostara competes with and she'll name other ceramics brands. But the person who almost bought a €120 dinner set and didn't, mostly didn't buy from a rival. They kept using the plates they already own. Storkflow's fiercest competitor is email and a spreadsheet. Herzog's is "it usually passes; I have a foam roller."

This is non-consumption — doing nothing, or a DIY workaround — and for most SMEs it takes more sales than any named rival. It changes what your marketing must argue. You're rarely proving you're better than the competitor; you're proving the problem is worth solving at all, now, with money.

The four forces

Why does a person who has the job, knows about you, and can afford you — still not buy? Because every switch, from old way to new way, sits in a tug of war:

• Push — the pain of the current way. It has to hurt enough to move.
• Pull — the appeal of the new way. What the better life looks like.
• Anxiety — fears about the new way. Will it work for me? What if I'm wasting money?
• Habit — the inertia of the current way. It's familiar, it's tolerable, switching is effort.

Purchase happens when push + pull outweigh anxiety + habit. Not before — no matter how good the product is.

One Herzog patient, read through the forces

A real patient's story, reconstructed:

• Push. Back pain has started interfering with sleep, and a ski trip is booked for February. The pain now threatens a plan — that's what converts a nuisance into a job.
• Pull. A colleague raved about Herzog. A quick search finds the clinic with 23 Google reviews averaging 4.6.
• Anxiety. "Will my insurance cover any of it? Will it be ten sessions of being told to do exercises I won't do? What does the first €80 assessment even involve?"
• Habit. "It usually passes. I have a foam roller. I've managed so far."

Now the diagnosis. Push and pull are strong here, and Tomas controls neither — the pain and the colleague did that work. What he does control is the anxiety column, and his 2019-era website answers none of it: nothing on insurance, nothing on what a first assessment involves, no way to book without phoning during working hours. The highest-leverage change to his site isn't a prettier homepage. It's an insurance-and-what-to-expect section — a page that exists purely to lower anxiety.

That generalises into the most practical rule in this lesson: reducing anxiety usually beats adding pull. The SME instinct under pressure is to pile on claims and features — more pull. But the buyer stuck at the line is usually held there by anxiety and habit, and what moves them is risk removal: clear prices, what-happens-next explanations, reviews, guarantees, easy cancellation. Module 3 builds offers and proof on exactly this insight.

Draft now, verify next

You'll now write three job statements and one forces analysis. They are best guesses — hypotheses, exactly like your funnel leak hypothesis in Module 1. The next three lessons exist to test them against what customers actually wrote and said. Label them "draft — pending evidence" in your Plan until Lesson 2.6; that label is a feature.

---