Clayton Christensen popularized the jobs-to-be-done framework as a way to look at customer motivations. The logic being that people rarely behave like the “average” customer in their category might. People have problems they need solved, and “hire” a product or service to get the “job” done. Companies that understand this increase their chances of delivering products or services that are tailored to what customers are already trying to do.

So what job might we hire the Apple Watch to do for us? Leaving aside the fact that this product is called the Apple Watch, more broadly speaking, what job might we hire a “computer on our wrist” for? There are three main types of jobs:

Functional – what does the product do and how well does it do that?
Social – what will people think of me when they see me with this product?
Emotional – how do I feel when I have this product?

Functional jobs might be “tell time“, daily activity tracking such as “count my steps“, and so on. Given that most of these things can be done with an iPhone, one particular job that Apple thinks we might need to hire the watch for is “quickly access important information without having to pull out my iPhone“. This seems to stem from negative social perception from frequent use of the iPhone, e.g. what do people think of me when they see me pulling out my iPhone too many times to quickly access important information (granted that it is not always important information that people are using their iPhones for).

For social and emotional benefits of owning a product, in the past, the Apple faithful have lined up outside Apple stores to be the first to get a new product in their hands. Will they continue to do so for the Watch? We don’t know. However, it is safe to assume that there are always a small percentage of people who enjoy being seen as the flag bearers. Early adopters of the Google Glass on the other hand faced a backlash and were referred to as “glassholes“, perceived as being creepy or rude, whether they displayed that behavior or not. The Apple Watch Edition seems to be conjuring up similar perceptions that the $10,000 watch is “for people with too much money and too little sense“. We’ll come to that later. So what job do we hire the Apple Watch to do? That depends and there is no one answer.