Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has shown—the principal pull of the old is that it requires no deliberation and has some intuitive plausibility as a solution already. Loss aversion—people’s tendency to want to avoid loss—is twice as powerful psychologically as the allure of gains, as demonstrated by Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Overcoming customer anxieties is a very big deal. Think of it this way: the job has to have sufficient magnitude to cause people to change their behavior—“I’m struggling and I want a better solution than I can currently find”—but the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new. There’s almost always some friction associated with switching from one product to another, but it’s also almost always discounted by innovators who are sure that their product is so fabulous it will erase any such concerns.

The progress customers are trying to make has to be understood in context. I can’t think of a clearly defined job in which the emotional and social forces—and the forces compelling and opposing change—are not critically important. Customers are always reluctant to fire something until they are sure they have something better, even if they’re firing simply living with an imperfect solution.

think about the first-time project manager charged with managing an outside consulting firm. He’s going to want to look good to his peers and managers. He wants to be seen to manage the project on budget, on time, and to have developed a strong problem-solving relationship with the consulting firm.

“When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough?’ we’re left with opinions and never-ending arguments,” explains Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta’s partner in the Re-Wired Group. “It’s nearly impossible to distinguish between bad, good, good-enough, excellent without the Job to Be Done. When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough to help a consumer make this kind of progress in this kind of situation?’ the answers come easily. The circumstance of the progress they are trying to make is critical to understanding causality.”

The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives—those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses. The how—and this is a place where many marketers trip up—are ground-level, granular, extended narratives with a sample size of one.

Ultimately, you want to cluster together stories to see if there are similar patterns, rather than break down individual interviews into categories.

only by constructing the story can we innovate in ways that change the ending.

uncovering jobs is about clustering insights, not having a single eureka.

One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need—and this interview illustrates—is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.

Seemingly objective data about customer behavior is often misleading, as it focuses exclusively on the Big Hire (when the customer actually buys a product) and neglects the Little Hire (when the customer actually uses it). The Big Hire might suggest that a product has solved a customer’s job, but only a consistent series of Little Hires can confirm it.

Before a customer hires any new product, you have to understand what he’ll need to fire in order to hire yours. Companies don’t think about this enough. Something always needs to get fired.

Developing a full understanding of the job can be done by assembling a kind of storyboard that describes in rich detail the customer’s circumstances, moments of struggle, imperfect experiences, and corresponding frustrations.

part of your storyboard, it’s critically important to understand the forces that compel change to a new solution, including the “push” of the unsatisfied job itself and the “pull” of the new solution.

It is also critical to understand the forces opposing any change, including the inertia caused by current habit...

job spec is from the innovator’s point of view: What do I need to design, develop, and deliver in my new product offering so that it solves the consumer’s job well?

You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, including the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress, the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make, the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten, and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. That understanding should then be matched by an offering that includes a plan to surmount the obstacles and create the right set of experiences in purchasing and using the product.

Uncovering the Job, Creating the Desired Experiences, and Integrating around the Job—are critical. When a company understands and responds to all three layers of the job depicted here, it will have solved a job in a way that competitors can’t easily copy.

Done perfectly, your brand can become synonymous with the job—what’s known as a purpose brand. When I list these brands, you will surely instantly know what job they’ve been hired to do: Uber TurboTax Disney Mayo Clinic OnStar Harvard Match.com OpenTable LinkedIn

W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”

MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.”

systematically removes the complexity and frustrations from the prospective student—such

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.

A 2010 Bain & Company study reported that fewer than one-third of major reorgs reviewed delivered any material improvement and many actually destroyed value.3

shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial-performance metrics to externally relevant customer-benefit metrics.

Amazon focuses on when orders are delivered not when they are shipped. For each new product, Intuit develops a unique set of performance metrics based on the specific customer benefit that the specific Intuit solution delivers.

you get all this data about ‘conversions’ and ‘retention,’ and so on. We got seduced by that.” It is, to be sure, easier to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness.

How much time did we save this customer? Did we allow them to not spend time doing something they didn’t want to do? Did we improve their cash flow? Are our processes supporting the things customers are hiring us to do?

“What gets measured, gets done.” From its inception, Amazon has laser-focused on three things that solve customers’ jobs—vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery—and designed processes to deliver them. Those processes include measuring and monitoring how it’s achieving those three ultimate goals on a minute-by-minute basis.

there is a degree of ambidextrousness that enables processes to be both highly efficient and flexible. Jobs are not flexible—they have existed for years and years, even centuries. But how we solve for jobs varies over time. The important thing is to be attached to the job, but not the way we solve it today. Processes must flex over time when a better understanding of customer jobs calls for a revised orientation. Otherwise you’ll risk changing the concept of the job to fit the process, rather than the other way around.

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.

Questions for Leaders How does your organization ensure that the customer’s job guides all critical decisions related to product development, marketing, and customer service? Do the different functions that are part of your customer’s experience (for example, your product, service, marketing, sales, after-sale service) all support nailing your customer’s job in a coordinated, integrated way, or are they in conflict? What new processes could you define to ensure more integrated delivery of the experiences required by your customers’ jobs? What elements of the end-to-end experience are most critical to perfectly solving your customer’s job? What metrics could you define to track performance against these elements?

The Fallacy of Active Versus Passive Data, The Fallacy of Surface Growth, and The Fallacy of Conforming Data.

Even great companies veer off course in nailing the job for their customers and focus instead on nailing the job for themselves.

companies fall into believing one of three fallacies: The Fallacy of Active Versus Passive Data The Fallacy of Surface Growth The Fallacy of Conforming Data

The railroads were in trouble, Levitt wrote back in 1960, “because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”4 In other words, the railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do.

In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “There is nothing more deceptive than the obvious fact.”

While there are many drivers of this drift away from the true north of the customer’s job, foremost among them is the tendency of managers to fall prey to the Three Fallacies of Innovation Data: 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.

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.