Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a passionate Capoeira practitioner for more than 26 years. It is an important part of my life. But getting older also means learning to manage the physical struggles that come with age, especially when you want to continue practicing something as demanding as Capoeira.
I was leaving my new physiotherapist after one of those sessions when I began to wonder whether getting the customer’s job done is really enough.
Most physiotherapy follows a familiar pattern: assess the problem, treat it over several sessions, and finish when the immediate condition has improved. The pain eases, movement improves, and I usually leave in a better state than when I entered.
By that measure, the job has been done.
But that is not really what I am paying for.
I do not want a collection of successful treatment episodes. I want something about the pattern itself to change. Ideally, the problem should occur less frequently, I should understand my body better, become more confident in how I move, and need less help managing the same situation when it returns.
That does not mean never seeing a physiotherapist again. Some conditions require ongoing support, and preventing deterioration can itself represent meaningful progress. But the value cannot be judged only by whether I feel better when I walk out of the treatment room.
Jobs to Be Done helps us understand the progress that pulls a solution into someone’s life. My experience made me interested in what happens on the other side of that moment:
The job may be done. But what was there an impact on the trajectory behind it?
Products Are Visible. Jobs Are Not.
Jobs to Be Done shifted attention away from products and customer categories toward the progress people seek in a particular circumstance.[1]
Someone buys a drill, but the drill itself was never the desired result. Someone enrolls in a course, although sitting through lessons is rarely the progress they ultimately want. Someone commissions a report, even though owning another document is seldom the true objective.
The product is visible. The job is not.
Understanding the job requires us to look beyond the transaction and reconstruct what was happening in the customer’s life when the solution became necessary. We need to understand what had changed, what had become uncomfortable, what the customer had already tried, and why they were finally willing to abandon a familiar routine and commit money, time, effort, access, or reputation to something new.
Different approaches within Jobs to Be Done have made this thinking increasingly actionable. Switching research examines the forces that push people away from their current situation and pull them toward an alternative. Solution-independent job mapping breaks progress into the steps customers must complete, regardless of the product they currently use. Outcome-oriented methods identify the measures customers use to judge whether the job has been performed successfully.[1][2]
These approaches help us understand why a solution is hired, where customers struggle, what prevents them from switching, and what better means from their perspective.
I want to extend that temporal lens in the other direction.
We reconstruct what happened before the hire to understand why a solution entered the customer’s life. But what happens after the hire?
Not merely whether the customer got the desired outcome, but whether using the solution changed the pattern from which the next struggling moment will emerge.
The Job Sits Inside a Trajectory
My physiotherapy session did not really begin when I entered the treatment room. It emerged from a much longer sequence of recurring discomfort, previous treatments, exercises I continued or abandoned, temporary improvements, relapses, growing frustration, and changing beliefs about what might help.
Switching physiotherapists and methods was one event in a broader history of attempted progress.
The same is true in most markets.
A company does not suddenly commission a strategy report. The purchase may be the result of months of uncertainty, internal disagreement, postponed decisions, earlier analyses, executive pressure, and perhaps an approaching board meeting that has made continued ambiguity increasingly difficult to defend.
A product team does not suddenly adopt a discovery platform. It arrives there through unreliable interviews, feature debates, weak evidence, pressure to demonstrate progress, and growing concern that the roadmap may not be addressing anything customers genuinely value.
A person does not suddenly subscribe to a course. The decision may follow a promotion they did not receive, repeated attempts to learn independently, anxiety about becoming obsolete, admiration for someone else’s career, or the growing realization that their current path is no longer leading where they want to go.
The job captures the progress sought in the struggling moment.
The trajectory captures the pattern that produced that moment and continues after it.
That distinction matters because two customers can hire the same product for what appears to be the same immediate job while moving along very different trajectories.
Two people may both hire a physiotherapist to reduce back pain. One may be recovering from an isolated injury and need temporary support before returning to normal activity. The other may be caught in a recurring pattern involving movement, work, stress, behavior, and repeated short-term interventions.
The immediate job may sound identical.
What needs to change afterwards may not be.
An Outcome Is Not Yet an Impact
An outcome tells us that something happened. Pain decreased. A report was delivered. A behavior changed. A prototype was launched. A task was completed faster. A customer returned. A user adopted a feature.
Impact asks a more demanding question:
What changed because the solution entered the system, compared with what would probably have happened without it?
In rigorous evaluation practice, impact is not simply the condition observed after an intervention. It is the difference between that condition and a credible estimate of what would likely have happened otherwise.[3]
That does not mean product teams need randomized controlled trials every time they change a service. It means we should be careful about attributing every positive outcome that follows an intervention to the intervention itself.
Imagine that my pain falls from seven to three after every physiotherapy session but returns to seven two weeks later. The immediate outcome is real, and the treatment may still be valuable. Nevertheless, the broader trajectory may be largely unchanged.
Now imagine that the pain improves more slowly, but I learn what triggers it, become more confident in managing it, and experience fewer serious episodes over the following year. The immediate result may appear less dramatic, while the impact on the trajectory is considerably greater.
The same pattern appears in business.
A consultant may deliver an excellent report and help an executive team make a decision before an important deadline. The immediate job has been completed.
What happens, however, when the next uncertain decision arrives?
Perhaps the organization has learned how to expose assumptions, evaluate evidence, and disagree productively. Perhaps it temporarily borrowed the consultant’s capability and returned to its previous state afterwards. Or perhaps it has become even more dependent on external interpretation because internal judgment was displaced rather than strengthened.
The visible deliverable can be identical in all three cases.
The trajectory is not.
Research on service value already challenges the assumption that value is embedded in a product and simply transferred at the point of purchase. Value emerges through use, context, relationships, and the customer’s integration of multiple resources.[4] Customers’ assessments of value can also evolve throughout a service relationship rather than remaining fixed at the moment of the transaction.[5]
The trajectory perspective extends this thinking by asking not only whether value emerged during use, but what direction the customer was left moving in afterwards.
Every Solution Changes More Than the Immediate Job
When a solution is hired, it does more than remove a problem. It can redistribute work, knowledge, judgment, responsibility, and capability between the customer and the provider.
A navigation system performs part of the orientation that was once handled by the driver. A consultant performs analysis that an organization might otherwise have developed internally. An AI system may research, interpret, compose, recommend, and increasingly act. A physiotherapist may provide relief, diagnose a pattern, teach self-management, or become the recurring mechanism through which the problem is controlled.
None of these arrangements is inherently good or bad.
People and organizations depend on others because no individual or company can, or should, develop every capability internally. Human agency includes acting directly, acting collectively, and acting through others.[6]
The more interesting question is what that delegation does to the trajectory.
Does the customer become more capable of recognizing and responding to the next situation? Does the solution provide legitimate ongoing support for something the customer cannot reasonably perform alone? Does it preserve the customer’s ability to question, switch, recover, or continue independently?
Or does each successful use make independent action more difficult?
Automation research has long shown that removing routine work does not necessarily remove the need for human expertise. In some cases, people remain responsible for rare and abnormal situations precisely after the routine practice that helped maintain their capability has disappeared.[7] Related work distinguishes appropriate automation use from misuse, disuse, and designs that disregard the consequences automation creates for the people relying on it.[8]
The immediate job can therefore be performed more efficiently while the wider trajectory becomes less desirable.
That is not only an automation problem.
It is an impact problem.
Repeated Use Does Not Automatically Prove a Better Trajectory
Companies naturally interpret repeated use as evidence of value. The customer returns, the subscription renews, another consulting engagement is commissioned, another therapy session is booked, or the software becomes more deeply embedded in the customer’s operations.
Sometimes this is exactly what it appears to be. The need legitimately recurs, the solution continues to create value, and the customer chooses to remain.
Recurrence, however, is ambiguous.
A patient returning to a physiotherapist may indicate trust and effective long-term care. It may also indicate that each session relieves the episode without changing the pattern that continues to produce it.
A company renewing software may demonstrate that the product has become essential. It may also reveal that switching costs have become prohibitively high.
A leadership team repeatedly hiring consultants may reflect sensible access to specialized expertise. It may equally suggest that internal capability has never transferred.
Retention can indicate value, but it can also indicate dependency, inertia, or an unresolved job that keeps returning in a form the provider is paid to manage.
Churn is equally ambiguous.
A customer may leave because the product failed. They may also leave because the solution succeeded so completely that it is no longer needed.
When a course helps someone become independently capable, cancellation may be part of the intended impact. When physiotherapy enables someone to manage a recurring problem with fewer interventions, declining appointment frequency may represent success rather than failure. When a consultant helps an organization make similar decisions without external support, lower repeat revenue may signal that capability has genuinely transferred.
This creates an uncomfortable business-model question:
What happens when the customer’s best trajectory is economically less attractive to the provider than repeatedly completing the immediate job?
When the Business Model Benefits From the Job Returning
Many business models are rewarded for solving the same job repeatedly. Revenue grows when customers return, consume more, renew, remain active, or become more deeply integrated into the solution.
That does not mean providers deliberately preserve the customer’s problem. It does mean that the commercial model can favor visible, recurring outcomes over impacts that eventually reduce future demand.
A consultancy may be rewarded for producing excellent decisions without transferring decision capability. A software company may become more valuable as the customer’s processes and knowledge grow increasingly inseparable from the platform. An AI service may benefit when people delegate more tasks, even if repeated delegation weakens their ability to judge the output.
Ongoing revenue and positive impact can certainly coexist. Continued support may help a customer improve, remain stable, or decline more slowly than they otherwise would.
The relationship should simply not be assumed.
A recurring business model should be able to answer:
Are customers returning because their trajectory is improving with continued support, or because it never changes enough for the support to become less necessary?
That is more difficult to assess than satisfaction, completion, usage, or retention. It may also tell us something those measures cannot.
Every Solution Becomes Part of What Happens Next
A trajectory is shaped by accumulated choices.
Every solution introduces new habits, knowledge, expectations, dependencies, routines, and switching costs. Small early decisions can become self-reinforcing, making some future paths easier while gradually making others harder to reach.[9]
A solution therefore does not merely compete to perform the current job. It becomes part of the conditions under which the next job will arise.
An AI assistant may make today’s report easier while changing how tomorrow’s analyst learns to reason. A platform may simplify today’s coordination while determining which data, processes, and relationships remain available during the next transformation. A consultant may resolve today’s strategic uncertainty while changing whether the organization can resolve the next one itself. Physiotherapy may relieve today’s pain while changing—or failing to change—the likelihood, severity, and manageability of the next episode.
This gives us three different questions:
The job asks: What progress is the customer trying to make?
The outcome asks: What happened when the solution was used?
Impact asks: What became different afterwards compared with what was likely to happen otherwise?
The job explains why the solution enters the customer’s life.
The outcome tells us whether it performed.
Impact asks whether its presence changed what was likely to happen next.
That is the trajectory.
And it leads to a harder standard for judging innovation:
Completing the customer’s job is not enough to know whether we made an impact. We also need to understand what direction the customer was left moving in afterwards.
The practical challenge is how to evaluate that trajectory without turning ordinary product and innovation work into a longitudinal research program.
That is what the Trajectory Impact Review is designed to do.
The Trajectory Impact Review
Understanding the distinction between a job, an outcome, and an impact is only useful if it changes how we evaluate a real product, service, intervention, or innovation decision.
The Trajectory Impact Review is designed to make that distinction practical.
