In MedTech and healthcare, companies often invest enormous amounts of time refining technologies, testing features, and analysing customer segments, yet many still struggle to explain why some innovations achieve strong adoption while others fail to gain meaningful traction.
The problem is rarely the technology alone.
More often, companies fail to fully understand the real-world problems healthcare stakeholders are trying to solve, the pressures shaping their decisions, and the environments technologies must operate within.
This is where the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework has become increasingly influential. Rather than focusing narrowly on products, JTBD asks a far more important question:
What progress is the customer actually trying to make?
For healthcare companies operating within increasingly pressured and interconnected systems, this distinction matters enormously and sits at the heart of effective medical device market research and unmet need analysis in healthcare and MedTech.
The foundations of JTBD emerged during Christensen’s work on innovation and disruptive technologies in the 1990s.
His landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) transformed thinking around disruption and market evolution. However, it was later through Competing Against Luck (2016) that the Jobs to Be Done framework became more formally articulated and commercially influential.
Around the same time, Bob Moesta helped operationalize JTBD through deep qualitative interviewing techniques designed to uncover the hidden drivers behind customer decisions and switching behaviour.
Together, this work helped shift innovation thinking away from product-centric development toward understanding customer “jobs,” unmet needs, and the forces driving change.
One of the most famous JTBD examples involved something surprisingly simple: milkshakes.
Researchers initially attempted to improve milkshake sales by studying demographics and product attributes. However, deeper interviews revealed that many customers were “hiring” milkshakes during long morning commutes because they were convenient, filling, and helped relieve boredom during the drive.
The insight was not really about the milkshake itself. It was about the job the customer needed done. This principle has since become highly influential across innovation, product development, marketing, and increasingly, healthcare.
Healthcare markets are exceptionally complex. Technologies are rarely evaluated on clinical performance alone. Adoption decisions are shaped by workflow realities, operational pressures, financial constraints, interoperability requirements, staffing challenges, procurement dynamics, and increasingly, system-level efficiency expectations.
A product may demonstrate excellent technical performance and still struggle commercially because:
• it disrupts workflow
• implementation is too burdensome
• training requirements are unrealistic
• economic value is unclear
• clinicians perceive operational risk
• the solution fails to fit existing care pathways
Traditional research approaches often focus heavily on opinions, satisfaction scores, or feature preferences.
JTBD interviews seek something deeper: they aim to understand the underlying circumstances, frustrations, trade-offs, and motivations shaping real-world decisions. This is particularly valuable in healthcare because stakeholders are rarely solving a single isolated problem.
A clinician may not simply want “better technology.” They may be trying to:
• reduce cognitive burden
• improve patient throughput
• minimize procedural variability
• reduce administrative complexity
• improve confidence in decision-making
• protect staff resources
• improve patient adherence
• demonstrate economic value internally
These broader contextual drivers are often what truly determine adoption. This is also why JTBD methodologies are increasingly used within broader unmet needs analysis for MedTech companies, helping organizations identify not only where frustration exists, but where meaningful innovation opportunities emerge.
At their core, JTBD interviews are investigative rather than evaluative. The objective is not simply to ask respondents whether they like a concept or feature. The objective is to reconstruct the journey that led to a decision, a frustration, or a change in behaviour.
Strong JTBD interviews explore:
• what triggered dissatisfaction
• why existing solutions became insufficient
• what barriers delayed action
• which alternatives were considered
• where anxiety or resistance emerged
• what “success” ultimately looked like
Rather than discussing hypothetical future behaviour, JTBD interviews focus heavily on real situations and actual experiences. This distinction is critical because stated preferences and real-world behaviour are often very different — particularly in healthcare. For this reason, JTBD is often most effective when combined with broader qualitative healthcare market research methodologies that allow researchers to fully explore workflows, stakeholder dynamics, and contextual decision-making environments.
One of the most influential JTBD concepts, developed through Bob Moesta’s work, is the idea that decisions are shaped by competing forces. Customers are simultaneously influenced by:
• the push away from the current situation
• the pull toward a potential new solution
• the anxiety associated with change
• the habit of existing workflows and behaviours
This framework is particularly powerful in MedTech because healthcare environments are inherently risk-sensitive.
A surgeon may see clear clinical advantages in a new technology while simultaneously worrying about procedural disruption, operating room efficiency, training requirements, reimbursement implications, implementation burden, or staff acceptance. Similarly, hospital procurement teams may recognize long-term value while remaining cautious about short-term operational impact or capital investment. JTBD interviews are highly effective at uncovering these tensions.
Healthcare technologies today exist within increasingly interconnected ecosystems.
Success depends not only on clinical outcomes, but on how technologies integrate into workflows, support efficiency, reduce burden, and deliver measurable value across healthcare systems.
This is particularly true across:
• surgical technologies
• medical imaging
• clincial diagnostics
• sleep health & respiratory care
• patient monitoring
• healthcare IT
The most successful MedTech companies increasingly recognize that adoption is rarely driven by features alone. Instead, technologies succeed when they solve meaningful workflow, operational, clinical, or economic problems within real-world environments.
The real power of Jobs to Be Done lies in its ability to shift thinking away from products and toward human progress. Healthcare professionals are rarely looking for technology for its own sake.
They are trying to solve problems within highly constrained systems under growing operational and economic pressure. In increasingly crowded healthcare markets, that understanding can become a significant competitive advantage.
At IDR Medical, JTBD principles often form an important part of how we approach healthcare and MedTech market research.
Across areas such as medical imaging, surgical technologies, diagnostics, digital health, respiratory care, and patient monitoring, we help clients move beyond surface-level feedback to understand the real-world drivers shaping adoption and decision-making.
Our work frequently includes:
• unmet needs analysis
• qualitative market research
• value proposition development
• pricing research
What makes JTBD particularly valuable in healthcare is its ability to uncover not just what stakeholders say they want, but the broader clinical, operational, and economic challenges they are trying to solve.
In increasingly complex healthcare systems, those insights are often critical to successful innovation, positioning, and commercialization.
If you would like support applying Jobs to Be Done methodologies, unmet needs analysis, workflow research, or broader MedTech market research to your healthcare innovation, commercialisation, pricing, or positioning strategy, contact IDR Medical to discuss how we can help.