“Nobody buys a drill because they want a drill. They buy it because they want a hole in the wall.”

This timeless metaphor captures the essence of the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory. Yet, many companies still miss this point. They pour endless energy into adding features, polishing interfaces, and bragging about speed, but fail to ask the single most important question:

What job is my product really being hired to do?

The Hidden Reason Products Succeed

Most teams assume adoption is about better specs: faster, cheaper, smarter. But history repeatedly shows that products succeed not simply because they do things better, but because they fulfill a different job that people care about more.

Think of AI-powered development tools. On paper, they promise engineers faster code, fewer bugs, and cleaner refactoring. These are useful, yes. But here’s the twist: that’s not why companies sign massive contracts for them.

The job being done runs much deeper.

The Real Job: Signaling Progress

When a company adopts an AI coding assistant at scale, it’s not only empowering engineers. It’s the leaders — CEOs, CTOs, or VPs of Engineering — who are really “hiring” the tool.

For them, the tool performs a powerful job of signaling:

  • To investors: We are AI-first, efficient, and future-ready.
  • To employees: We invest in the best tools for you to thrive.
  • To customers: We build with speed and cutting-edge technology.
  • To the market at large: We’re ahead of the curve, not lagging behind.

Suddenly, the tool is no longer just about productivity. It becomes a strategic narrative, a credibility marker, a cultural statement.

That’s the real job being done.

Why This Matters For Builders and Marketers

This shift changes everything. If you’re building or selling a product, it’s tempting to lead with features: 2x faster, 30% cheaper, 10x more efficient. Features are easy to list. But they rarely explain true adoption.

Great products resonate because they serve multiple jobs across multiple stakeholders.

  • The feature-level job: what the end user directly achieves.
  • The strategic job: what decision-makers need to signal or solve.
  • The emotional job: how people feel when they adopt it (secure, forward-looking, proud).

Ignore these deeper jobs, and you’ll keep fighting uphill battles on specs alone.

Bringing It All Together

The success of AI development tools is not about autocomplete or bug fixes. It’s about enabling leaders to visibly align with the future.

And that’s the core power of JTBD thinking: it forces you to see beyond features, beyond surface needs, into the hidden motivations that actually drive decisions.

So the next time you ask yourself why a product is winning, flip the lens. Don’t ask “what features does it offer?” Ask:

“What job are people truly hiring this product to do — and who needs that job done the most?”

The answer is often where real product success lives.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who’s obsessed with features but hasn’t yet discovered the deeper world of Jobs To Be Done. It might change how they see every product decision from now on.