Why You Should Solve for Progress, Not Just Products or Features

For decades, companies have poured money into perfecting features, adding bells and whistles, and segmenting their customers by age, gender, or location. Yet, most new products flop, causing frustration at every level of leadership. Imagine a major company with customer data dashboards, market research, and endless brainstorming sessions, unable to stem sliding sales. The numbers say 'add faster delivery' or 'make it more customizable', but nothing moves the needle. In these moments, the lesson repeatedly overlooked is that people are not just buying a product—they're hiring something to solve a very personal struggle or to help them make progress in a specific moment.

The 'Job to Be Done' framework pushes you to dig beneath the surface. Take the case of a breakfast food chain frustrated by stagnant milkshake sales. Instead of asking what flavor or thickness people wanted, they watched who bought milkshakes and when. It turned out that early-morning buyers weren't craving sweet treats; they wanted something to keep them full on a long, solo commute and occupy their hands when driving. In the evening, parents bought milkshakes as a quiet gesture to spoil their kids after saying 'no' all week. The difference had nothing to do with demographics or ingredients—in both cases, the milkshake was 'hired' for wildly different jobs.

True progress is about context, emotion, and the obstacles that stand between a person and the result they crave. Sometimes, the smallest detail—a product being fun to use on a boring bus ride, a brand making you feel competent, or a service quietly removing your stresses—matters more than dazzling features. Many organizations only discover this once innovation efforts fail to spark, despite 'listening' to what customers say they want. The hidden mechanism at work is causality: not what kind of customer they are, but what is happening in their life when they reach for a solution.

Behavioral science tells us that motivation to change is driven by a specific mix of frustration, desire, context, and opportunity. Until innovators frame their work as solving for clear, circumstance-based progress, they’ll keep spinning in circles, mistaking correlation for cause.

Start by clarifying—in plain words—what genuine progress your customer or user seeks in their own life, then home in on the circumstances that fuel their struggle. Don’t waste energy stringing together features or focusing on surface demographics; ask, ‘Why are they reaching for help and what’s really in their way?’ Listen closely to anecdotes and frustrations—those scattered details hold the raw material for breakthrough ideas. Let go of your checklists, and train yourself to seek the patterns of cause at the heart of every hire or fire. Take a moment to apply this thinking to one audience today—you might be shocked at what comes to light.