Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

We’re lost, but we’re making good time! —Yogi Berra

As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”

They were conceived, developed, and launched into the market with a clear understanding of how these products would help consumers make the progress they were struggling to achieve.

When you have a job to be done and there isn’t a good solution, “cheaper and crappier” is better than nothing. Imagine the potential of something truly great.

The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time.

we believe Jobs Theory provides a powerful way of understanding the causal mechanism of customer behavior, an understanding that, in turn, is the most fundamental driver of innovation success.

Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes.

What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?

There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.

We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.

The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration. A job is always a process to make progress, it’s rarely a discrete event.

Second, the idea of a “circumstance” is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined—and a successful solution created—relative to the specific context in which it arises.

There are dozens of questions that could be important to answer in defining the circumstance of a job. “Where are you?” “When is it?” “Who are you with?” “While doing what?” “What were you doing half an hour ago?” “What will you be doing next?” “What social or cultural or political pressures exert influence?” And so on.

Our notion of a circumstance can extend to other contextual factors as well, such as life-stage (“just out of college?” “stuck in a midlife crisis?” “nearing retirement?”), family status (“married, single, divorced?” “newborn baby, young children at home, adult parents to take care of?”), or finan...

The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be ...

Finally, a job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions, too. In many innovations, the focus is often entirely on the functional or practical need. But in reality, consumers’ social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.

What Is a Job? To summarize, the key features of our definition are: A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance. Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations. They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions. Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones. Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work—not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends. Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.”

What Isn’t a Job? A well-defined job offers a kind of innovation blueprint. This is very different from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because it entails a much higher degree of specificity about what you’re solving for. Needs are ever present and that makes them necessarily more generic. “I need to eat” is a statement that is almost always true. “I need to feel healthy.” “I need to save for retirement.” Those needs are important to consumers, but their generality provides only the vaguest of direction to innovators as to how to satisfy them. Needs are analogous to trends—directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another.

Jobs insights are fragile—they’re more like stories than statistics. When we deconstruct coherent customer episodes into binary bits, such as “male/female,” “large company/small company,” “new customer/existing customer,” we destroy meaning in the process.

What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the desired progress?

What are the circumstances of the struggle? Who, when, where, while doing what?

What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making that progress?

Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions through some kind of compensating behavior? Are they buying and using a product that imperfectly performs the job? Are they cobbling together a workaround solution involving multiple products? Are they doing nothing to solve their dilemma at all?

How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they willing to make?

we will refer to jobs in shorthand, simplistic terms for ease of reference—but it’s important to emphasize that a well-defined job is multilayered and complex.

it means that perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes

we don’t “create” jobs, we discover them. Jobs themselves are enduring and persistent, but the way we solve them can change dramatically over time.

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.

job is defined as the progress that a customer desires to make in a particular circumstance.

Fully understanding a customer’s job requires understanding the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances and understanding all of its functional, social, and emotional dimensions—as well as the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make.

discovery-driven planning, but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?”

“No one in that graduation ceremony had it handed to them. There’s so much that gets in the way of that happening—finances, busy lives, lack of academic preparedness, feeling like you don’t belong. They’d truly earned that moment.”

define the offering in the context of a very specific consumer struggle.

When you are solving a customer’s job, your products essentially become services. What matters is not the bundle of product attributes you rope together, but the experiences you enable to help your customers make the progress they want to make.

Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one.

distinct “jobs-based” segments—including groups of “nonconsumers” for which an acceptable solution does not currently exist. They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly.

Are your products—or competitors'—overshooting what customers are actually willing to pay for?

We offer here a sampling of ways to uncover jobs: seeing jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in “nonconsumption,” identifying workarounds, zoning in on things you don’t want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products.

Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.

five ways to uncover jobs that might be right in front of you if you know what you’re looking for: seeing jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in nonconsumption, identifying workarounds, zoning in on things we don’t want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products.

I think I have as many jobs of not wanting to do something as ones that I want positively to do. I call them “negative jobs.” In my experience, negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.

The most commonly tracked is what we call the “Big Hire”—the moment you buy the product. But there’s an equally important moment that doesn’t show up in most sales data: when you actually “consume” it.

The moment a consumer brings a purchase into his or her home or business, that product is still waiting to be hired again—we call this the “Little Hire.” If a product really solves the job, there will be many moments of consumption. It will be hired again and again.

How many apps do you have on your phone that seemed like a good idea to download, but you’ve more or less never used them again? If the app vendor simply tracks downloads, it’ll have no idea whether its app is doing a good job solving your desire for progress or not.

in order to hire your new solution, by definition customers must fire some current compensating behavior or suboptimal solution—including firing the solution of doing nothing at all.

What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.

A customer’s decision-making process about what to fire and hire has begun long before she enters a store—and it’s complicated.

The forces compelling change to a new solution: First of all, the push of the situation—the frustration or problem that a customer is trying to solve—has to be substantial enough to cause her to want to take action.

Secondly, the pull of an enticing new product or service to solve that problem has to be pretty strong, too. The new solution to her Job to Be Done has to help customers make progress that will make their lives better.

The forces opposing change: There are two unseen, yet incredibly powerful, forces at play at the same time that many companies ignore completely: the forces holding a customer back. First, “habits of the present” weigh heavily on consumers. “I’m used to doing it this way.” Or living with the problem. “I don’t love it, but I’m at least comfortable with how I deal with it now.” And potentially even more powerful than the habits of the present is, second, the “anxiety of choosing something new.” “What if it’s not better?”