People hire your product out to do a job. For a long time, a lot of these jobs were essentially taken care of by Microsoft Excel. Have a list of leads? Stick it in a spreadsheet. Need to visualize data? Stick it in a pivot table. People like to throw rocks at Excel, but at the end of the day it's a spreadsheet, and it does the job.

Most new solutions are hired to take care of old jobs-the solutions change but the jobs stay the same. Intercom's book on Product Management gives the perfect example of this:

People, particularly students and young people, wanted to pass notes and messages, without fear of other people seeing them...People still want this so today they use Snapchat.

People used to burn sensitive letters. Now there's Snapchat. Understanding the job is the only way to define what your customers want from your product in their own context, instead of yours.

Des Traynor, Intercom's founder, explains:

If you're building a new product, it's because you believe you can create a better solution that people will want to use because it delivers a better outcome. A strong understanding of the outcome customers want, and how they currently get it, is essential for you to succeed in product development.

Intercom is a company that makes jobs-to-be-done an extreme habit. They understand that product development isn't about how customers use your tool today. It's about the job your customers need handled. Whether your product becomes the new industry standard or gets chucked into the dustbin doesn't matter . The job still needs to be done.

When people start product pitches with phrases like "Wouldn't it be cool if…" and "What do you think about…" it's always speculative. The "jobs-to-be-done" framework is a way to constantly align product development back to first principles-the customers.