Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

Complete solutions to jobs must include not only your core product or service, but also carefully designed experiences of purchase and use that overcome any obstacles a customer might face in hiring your solution and firing another. This means that ultimately all successful so...

If you can successfully nail the job, over time you can transform your company’s brand into a purpose brand, one that customers automatically associate with the successful resolution of their most important jobs. A purpose brand provides a clear guide to the outside world as to what your company represents...

Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization’s unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer’s job.

Resources, generally speaking, are fungible. They can be bought and sold. Products can, often, be easily copied. But it is through integrating processes to get the job done that companies can create the ideal experiences and confer competitive advantage.

Mayo clinic example

SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.”

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers’ Jobs to Be Done. When managers are focused on the customer’s Job to Be Done, they not only have a very clear compass heading for their innovation efforts but they also have a vital organizing principle for their internal structure.

Jobs Theory changes not only what you optimize your processes to do, but also how you measure their success. It shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial-performance metrics to externally relevant customer-benefit metrics. SNHU tracks how many minutes it takes to respond to an inquiry, for example, because it realizes that time is critical to the process of its online prospects.

Having the right measurements in place helps institutionalize a process. It’s how your employees know they’re doing the right thing, making the right choices. As the old saying goes, “What gets measured, gets done.”

The textbook definition tells us that process optimization relates to efficiency. But what Jobs Theory—and Amazon’s example—says is, “Yes, but . . .” The “but” is that optimization should also incorporate a factor for job alignment—otherwise you’re focusing on getting better and better at the wrong things.

Stack fallacy highlights the tendency of engineers to overweight the value of their own technology and underweight the downstream applications of that technology to solve customer problems and enable desired progress. “Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layers above yours,”

“Jobs gives you a very clear innovation trajectory,” Whitman says. “I can see how we need to improve for the next ten years. It’s less product oriented now than process oriented.” For example, Marriott was willing to devote nearly ten full-time employees on its staff to implementing the FranklinCovey “4 Disciplines of Execution” program. But not every customer will have the resources to do that. So FranklinCovey is figuring out how to make it cheaper, faster, and easier to roll out. “Two-thirds of our R&D budget is spent on process innovation,” Whitman says. The goal is to create offerings that shift complexity out of the client’s process, making the experience of using FranklinCovey’s products easier. “It’s no good if they thought they signed up for an exercise class and realized once they got there, they had to commit to climb Mount Everest!” Whitman says.

Despite the value of developing a set of processes integrated around the customer’s job, it does not come naturally to most companies. Processes abound in all companies, of course, but in most cases they are aimed at improving efficiency or achieving a narrow outcome within a specific function. Delivering a complete set of experiences to nail the job usually requires that new processes be deliberately defined, and new mechanisms put in place to coordinate functions that are usually siloed.

A powerful lever to drive job-centric process development and integration is to measure and manage to new metrics aligned with nailing the customer’s job. Managers should ask what elements of the experience are the most critical to the customer, and define metrics that track performance against them.

Most organizations do not have one person who is the “steward” ensuring the company consistently delivers against the customer’s job. Traditional organizational structures and siloes do have value and are likely to endure, and large-scale reorgs are not usually practical. Therefore, the best way to move toward a more jobs-centric organization is to carefully set up and integrate...

The day a product becomes real and hits the market, everything changes for managers. There’s so much pressure to grow that it’s possible to lose sight of why customers hired you in the first place.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Even in some of the best companies, the Job to Be Done that brought them success in the first place can somehow get lost in the shuffle of running and growing the business. They define themselves in terms of products, not jobs. And that makes a very big difference.

We can predict, however, that, as soon as a Job to Be Done becomes a commercial product, the context-rich view of the job begins to recede as the active data of operations replaces and displaces the passive data of innovation. Once products are launched, a faucet is opened and data is created, data that didn’t exist until sales had been made and customers created. Managers feel an understandable sense of reassurance when they shift their attention from the hazy contours of a story of struggle to the crisp precision of a spreadsheet.

For all the time that senior leaders spend analyzing data, they should be making equal investments to determine what data should be created in the first place. What dimensions of the phenomena should we collect data on and what dimensions of the phenomena should we ignore?

As a company grows up, however, it’s very common for it to lose focus on the job that sparked its existence in the first place. Despite the best intentions and a century of marketing wisdom, companies start to act as if their business is defined by the products and services they sell (“quarter-inch drills”) instead of the jobs that they solve (“quarter-inch holes”).

The Fallacy of Active Data Versus Passive Data: Instead of staying cognizant of and focused on the type of data that characterizes the rich complexity of the job (passive data), growing companies start to generate operations-related data (active data), which can seduce managers with its apparent objectivity and rigor but which tends to organize itself around products and customer characteristics, rather than Jobs to Be Done. The Fallacy of Surface Growth: As companies make big investments in customer relationships, they focus their energies on driving growth through selling additional products to those customers or solving a broader set of their jobs, what we call surface growth—as opposed to staying focused on solving the core job better. The Fallacy of Conforming Data: Managers focus on generating data that conforms to their preexisting business models.

Many companies have lofty mission statements with a variety of intentions from motivating workers to informing strategies to attracting investors, but almost as many companies struggle to translate these mission statements into everyday behaviors. However, when the job has a voice in an organization, individual work streams have meaning and employees understand why their work matters. A well-articulated job provides a kind of “commander’s intent,” obviating the need for micromanagement because employees at all levels understand and are motivated by how the work they do fits into a larger process to help customers get their jobs done.

In the case of TurboTax, the team had a flawed essential unit of analysis when it focused on relentlessly improving the interview. But this is exactly what most companies do when they follow the wrong innovation guides. How can a leader consistently rally his team about such a challenging goal—and keep them focused? “I think you’re on to the sixty-four-billion-dollar question,” Cook says. Staying relentlessly focused on the job enables—and even compels—employees to new and better ways of working. A deep understanding of customers’ Jobs to Be Done should trigger a cascade of questions about how the company is organized, what’s measured and rewarded, what priorities run throughout the company, and how people work together to solve problems.

In Intuit’s case, Cook says, the organization is so focused on customers’ jobs that it allows itself to operate like a “network of start-ups” in which small teams launch new product pilots with minimal senior-level approval because they are so clearly aligned with jobs. When everyone on the team understands that the goal is “taxes are done,” they’re all pulling in the same direction.

Business leaders need to ensure that employees everywhere in the company make the right choices every day without requiring constant supervision. This is nothing new: as far back as ancient Rome, emperors would send an associate off to govern a newly conquered territory thousands of miles away. As the emperors watched the chariot go over the hill—knowing full well they would not see their associate again for years—they needed to know that their understudy’s priorities were consistent with their own and that he would use proven, accepted methods to solve problems.

A clearly defined job spec that everyone understands can serve the same purpose—a focal point for employees to make the right decisions without being told specifically what to do each time.

What gets measured, gets done.”

As we discussed earlier, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been crystal clear since its inception that there are three things that matter in their retail business: vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery. In Amazon’s now famous “customer backward” innovation process, those three measures are monitored on a minute-by-minute basis. Bezos doesn’t consider delays to be accidents or poor performance, he considers them “defects” to be eradicated.

Successful organizations pursue operational efficiency without compromising the customer Job to Be Done.

Understanding the most important jobs your company solves for customers can be translated into a rallying cry that aligns individuals across the organization behind a common purpose and functions as an enduring innovation North Star.

An organization explicitly focused on a clearly defined job enjoys four key benefits: Distributed decision making: Employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good decisions that align with the job, and to be autonomous and innovative. Resource optimization: The jobs focus shines a light on which resources are aligned against what matters most and which are not, and enables them to be rebalanced accordingly. Inspiration: Solving a customer’s job is inherently inspiring to individuals in an organization, as it enables them to see how their work enables real people to make progress in their lives. Better measurement: With a focus on the job, people will naturally seek to measure and manage to more customer-centric metrics.

First, if you or a colleague describes a Job to Be Done in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job. It might describe an experience that a customer needs to have in order to do the job, but it is not a job, as we have defined it here. For example, “convenience” is not a Job to Be Done. It might be an experience that might cause a customer to choose your product rather than a competitor’s product, but it is not a job. A well-defined Job to Be Done is expressed in verbs and nouns—such as, “I need to ‘write’ books verbally, obviating the need to type or edit by hand.” In contrast, the sentence “We should aspire to be more honest” is a noble goal, but it’s not a job. Second, defining a job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful. This can be more art than science, but there is a good rule of thumb: if the architecture of the system or product can only be met by products within the same product class, the concept of the Job to Be Done does not apply. If only products in the same class can solve the problem, you’re not uncovering a job. A couple of examples: “I need to have a chocolate milk shake that is in a twelve-ounce disposable container” is not a job. The possible candidates that I could hire to do this are all in the milk shake product category. I could call this a need or a preference—but it isn’t a job. We need to go up another level of abstraction in order to discover the job. “I need something that will keep me occupie...