The instantiation of an unmet need (Functional/Utility) or want (Emotional/Energy) in response to a trigger.
This is the setup of a job to be done: there is some kind of triggering event in your daily life, for example it's 12AM, your body starts reacting and saying "I'm hungry", and the functional job is to get some food in your body.
Context defines what we need, so depending on the day, how much time you have, what mood you're in etc. you'll pick a particular job. After the functional job is done it's important to uncover what's the satisfaction, what's the bigger emotional feeling in people's minds (emotional job). If you can get that in the interviews, that's a huge plus. Otherwise you oftentimes only end up with surface answers, for example "Why have you bought this product? It was because of this feature vs that feature" but you don't get to the root causes of those buying decisions.
When people are describing their steps more like a set of tasks that's oftentimes when we are still in the solution world thinking about workflow and what people are doing (functional job), but not why and what's the bigger context and story afterwards (emotional job).
This is not an interesting story to study because it is rooted in habit. There is no switch story here. This is a situation that happens every single day: when triggered (tired) people are going to hire the same product over and over again (bed). People don't even think about these choices, there's no emotion, this is where habits come in. That's why when we are looking at people to interview we ideally want to find some change that is causing them to look for something different.
Triggering events are just things that will re-occur. Depending on the frequency of the product usage there gonna be different triggers like eating, sleeping etc.
Switching triggers are what make people move from one product to the other (e.g. When would I not hire my bed?). There needs to be an event that happens in people's lives where there is some kind of an expectation violation.
I am out of town (switching trigger – expectation violation) I can't sleep in my bed and I have to find a different bed somewhere. Depending on the context of the situation (e.g. Work trip? Pleasure trip? Am I in a big city? Am I in a remote village somewhere?) my choices vary accordingly. Same triggering event, at some point your body need to sleep, but what you do next is going to be entirely different because now you have this expectation violation. This is what you study.