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Comment by garrickvanburen | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of JobsToBeDone, but partially because of this milkshake example, it took me years to grok.

As I see it, the milkshake example isn't about innovation, it's about actually having human-to-human conversations with customers and appreciating customers define their own competitive set, so perhaps closer to Gibson's "the street has its own use for things."

Outside of those two points, I'm not sure what repeatable lessons exist in the milkshake story for innovation, and because of that, it's probably doing more harm than help to JTBD as a concept.

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I disagree. The whole point of it is to shift the frame of reference away from the product and into the customer's job to be done. Ironically, we call it the milkshake example instead of the eating breakfast on the way to work example. But the lesson embedded in it is there all the same.

Personally, I found this example really helpful to wrap my head around jobs to be done theory.

It switched their frame from trying to innovate on the milkshake itself to the whole experience. Instead of making the milkshake chunky or thick or sweet or whatever they move the milkshake machine up closer to the door so people can be in and out faster.

I'm curious why you didn't see it this way. Did you miss something, or am I missing something?

If I recall correctly, the impetus for Christiansen to even look into this was to answer the question: “why are there so many milkshakes sold in the morning via drive thru?”

That’s a different question than, “how do we make our breakfast menu more popular?”

Now, perhaps the latter question begat the former, but either way it is not a product innovation story, it’s a customer/market research story articulating the shape of customer demand (which I fully support).

If there was a second part of the story - like, McD started marketing milkshakes in their breakfast menu and sales shot up ##% or they developed a breakfast flavor milkshake and sales shot up - then we’d have the product innovation story.

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