On builders, the human condition, and why your job is bigger than you think.
Building products and services is about helping humans live a better life, perceived or otherwise.
From Aristotle to Mises to Christensen, humans have been observed to do one thing above all else: strive to improve their condition. You as a builder are part of that story.
Praxeology and Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) are two traditions that follow in this lineage. In this article you'll learn how they overlap, and why it matters for anyone trying to get serious about their craft.
What is Praxeology?
Praxeology was formalized by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his 1949 book Human Action.
Mises argued that economics, and the study of human behavior more broadly, didn't require empirical observation to arrive at truth. To oversimplify, he started with a single axiom: humans act. This must also mean:
- They have goals
- They act purposefully
- They notice a gap between where they are and where they want to be
- Human action is always an attempt to close that gap
This tradition became the backbone of the Austrian School of economics, with thinkers like Hayek, Rothbard, and Kirzner. A few of this school's observations worth noting:
- Value is always subjective - value is always perceived by the individual in a sociocultural-historical context
- Markets are spontaneous order - market participants coordinate value based on the emerging chaos of individual value perception
- Entrepreneurship is discovery - builders discover gaps in the marketplace
While praxeology has been applied to economics, political philosophy, and monetary theory, it hasn't been leveraged in product and service innovation. Few people have explicitly asked what this tradition can tell us about what we're actually doing when we build. (Kirzner came closest to applying this product building, but his lens was market discovery, not the actual process of building products and services.)
Jobs to Be What?
JTBD is a mental model and set of practices popularized by Clayton Christensen. Since then, thinker-practitioners like Ulwick, Moesta, Klement, and Kalbach have added and expanded on it.
Adherents claim that products and services are simply vehicles that people choose to use to accomplish certain jobs. These jobs include:
- Functional jobs - for practical tasks
- Emotional jobs - for feeling a certain way
- Social jobs - for how they want to be perceived by others
- Personal jobs - for how they want to perceive themselves
The job of the JTBD-informed builder is to be solution-resistant while exploring what jobs their clients, users, or patients are looking to accomplish. This is critical because being solution-resistant is dreadfully difficult. For example, if the job is "when I am trying to write an article, I want to organize my ideas so that I can more clearly think about my arguments," the solution can be any number of the following, if not all:
- A notepad
- A friend to talk with
- A feature-rich Obsidian AI-powered gigarocket
Or... just a walk around the neighborhood.
JTBD is also a set of practices. These help the practitioner better distill the jobs the person is looking to accomplish, how they're doing so already, and how the builder or organization can solve those jobs for them. Examples include:
- Switch interviews - where you learn why a person elected to switch from one solution to another
- Job mapping - to frame the path of jobs a person is looking to solve from start to end
- Solution generation - where you laterally and divergently generate potential solutions to the most important jobs your users have
The Twain Shall Meet
What's interesting is that creators of these two traditions arrived at the same observation through very different approaches. Mises used pure reasoning, asking "what must be true about humans, independent of observation?" Meanwhile, Ulwick repeatedly watched companies fail and arrived at his insight through empirical observation.
But to merge two seemingly irreconcilable approaches: human action is solving jobs.
Yeah, So What?
Knowing the praxeological foundation underneath JTBD doesn't make you a better product builder. It makes you a changeworker.
A person who sees their work as part of a longer human story. Someone who designs relationships, and meetings, and outputs with the same intentionality as the product itself.
And critically, who has the agency to consciously choose whether to engage in changework or not.