Price the Job, Not the Tool

Part 2 - A New Philosophy of Value: Pricing the "Job-to-be-Done"

Chapter 3: From Features to Function: The JTBD Revolution

The failures of the subscription and usage-based models are not failures of accounting; they are failures of philosophy. Both are built on a fundamental misunderstanding of why a customer buys anything. They are rooted in a product-centric worldview that sees the thing being sold—the software, the tool, the feature, the API call—as the source of value. This is a vendor-centric perspective, and as we’ve seen, it leads to a chronic misalignment of interests.

To build a new model, we must first adopt a new philosophy. We must find a new unit of analysis. That philosophy is the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory.

The term, often associated with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, is built on a single, profoundly simple insight: Customers don’t …