Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

But that doesn’t have to be the case, not when you truly understand what causes consumers to make the choices they do. Innovation can be far more predictable—and far more profitable—but only if you think about it differently. It’s about progress, not products.

“If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?

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.

But the theory of disruptive innovation does not tell you where to look for new opportunities.

How do successful companies know how to grow?

I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to “hire” a milk shake?

innovation—what causes customers to make the choices they do—doesn’t seem to get traction with most organizations.

Even customer satisfaction metrics, which reveal whether a customer is happy with a product or not, don’t give any clues as to how to do the job better. Yet it’s how most companies track and measure success.

That experience made me realize that part of the problem is that we’re missing the right vocabulary to talk about innovation in ways that help us understand what actually causes it to succeed.

At its heart, 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.

But to do all this well takes a holistic effort—from the original insight that led to the identification of the job all the way through to the product finding its way into the hands of a consumer—involving the decisions and influence of virtually everyone in the company. Even great innovators who are crystal clear on the jobs their customers are hiring their products and services to do can easily lose their way. Pressures of return on net assets (RONA), well-intended efficiency drives, and decisions made every d...

Chapter Takeaways Disruption, a theory of competitive response to an innovation, provides valuable insights to managers seeking to navigate threats and opportunities. But it leaves unanswered the critical question of how a company should innovate to consistently grow. It does not provide guidance on specifically where to look for new opportunities, or specifically what products and services you should create that customers will want to buy. This book introduces the Theory of Jobs to Be Done to answer these questions and provide clear guidance for companies looking to grow through innovation. At its heart, Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives: they do this to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise. And this, in turn, explains why some innovations are successful and others are not. Jobs Theory not only provides a powerful guide for innovation, but also frames competition in a way that allows for real differentiation and long-term competitive advantage, provides a common language for organizations to understand customer behavior, and even enables leaders to articulate their company’s purpose with greater precision.

The Big Idea The more we think we know, the more frustrating it becomes that we keep getting innovation wrong. But you don’t have to leave your fate to luck. Successful innovations don’t result from understanding your customers’ traits, creating jazzy new bells and whistles for your products, catching hot trends, or emulating your competitors. To elevate innovation from hit-or-miss to predictable, you have to understand the underlying causal mechanism—the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances. Welcome to the Theory of Jobs to Be Done.

Embracing theory is not to mire ourselves in academic minutiae but, quite the opposite, to focus on the supremely practical question of what causes what.

What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service? We believe Jobs Theory, at last, provides an answer.

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. A job is not necessarily just a “problem” that arises, though one form the progress can take is the resolution of a specific problem and the struggle it entails.

Circumstance 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?”

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

Functional, Social, and Emotional Complexity 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. Think of how you would hire childcare. Yes, the functional dimensions of that job are important—will the solution safely take care of your children in a location and manner that works well in your life—but the social and emotional dimensions probably weigh more heavily on your choice. “Who will I trust with my children?” 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.”

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.

Jobs take into account a far more complex picture. The circumstances in which I need to eat, and the other set of needs that might be critical to me at that moment, can vary wildly.

What will cause me to choose the milk shake are the bundle of needs that are in play in those particular circumstances. That bundle includes not only needs that are purely functional or practical (“I’m hungry and I need something for breakfast”), but also social and emotional (“I’m alone on a long, boring commute and want to entertain myself, but I’d be embarrassed if one of my colleagues caught me with a milk shake in my hand so early in the morning”).

On the other end of the spectrum from needs are what I’ll call the guiding principles of my life—overarching themes in my life that are ever present, just as needs are. I want to be a good husband, I want to be a valued member of my church, I want to inspire my students, and so on. These are critically important guiding principles to the choices I make in my life, but they’re not my Jobs to Be Done. Helping me feel like a good dad is not a Job to Be Done. It’s important to me, but it’s not going to trigger me to pull one product over another into my life. The concept is too abstract.

The jobs I am hiring for are those that help me overcome the obstacles that get in the way of making progress toward the themes of my life—in specific circumstances.

Understanding jobs is about clustering insights into a coherent picture, rather than segmenting down to finer and finer slices.

One thought experiment we’ve found helpful to really grasp a job is to imagine you are filming a minidocumentary of a person struggling to make progress in a specific circumstance. Your Video Should Capture Essential Elements: What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the desired progress? For example, a job that occurs in a lot of people’s lives: “I want to have a smile that will make a great first impression in my work and personal life”; or a struggle many managers might relate to: “I want the sales force I manage to be better equipped to succeed in their job so that the churn in staff goes down.” What are the circumstances of the struggle? Who, when, where, while doing what? “I see a dentist twice a year and do all the right things to keep my teeth clean, but they never look white enough to me” or “It seems like every week, another one of my guys is giving notice because he’s burned out and I’m spending half my time recruiting and training new people.” What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making that progress? For example, “I’ve tried a couple of whitening toothpastes and they don’t really work—they’re just a rip-off” or “I’ve tried everything I can think of to motivate my sales staff: bonus programs for them, offsite bonding days, I’ve bought them a variety of training tools. And they still can’t tell me what’s going wrong.” Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions through some k...

It’s important to note that 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.

With all theory building, you have to be open to finding things that the theory can’t explain—anomalies—and use them as an opportunity to strengthen it. We know, for example, that Jobs Theory is not useful if there is no real struggle for a consumer or the existing solutions are good enough. It’s not useful when the decision to be made relies almost entirely on a mathematical analysis, such as commodities trading. Cost or efficiency is not a core element of a job. In those circumstances, there is not a complex bundle of social, emotional, and functional needs in search of progress. There are rational decisions to be made—and ones that can just as easily be made by a computer.

if we fail to understand why customers make the choices they make, we’re just getting better and better at a fundamentally flawed process. Without the right understanding of the causal mechanism at the center of the innovation universe, companies are trying to make sense of the universe revolving around the earth. They’re forced to rely on an array of borrowed best practices, probabilistic tools, and tips and tricks that have worked for other companies, but which can’t guarantee success. As you look at innovation through the lenses of the Jobs Theory, what you see is not the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but the customer’s Job to Be Done. It may seem like a small distinction—just a few minutes of arc—but it matters a great deal. In fact, it changes everything. Chapter Takeaways While many in the business world associate the word “theory” with something purely academic or abstract, nothing could be further from the truth. Theories that explain causality are among the most important and practical tools business leaders can have. The field of innovation is in need of better theory, especially for the foundational question “What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?” Jobs Theory answers this question by asserting that customers purchase and use (or “hire” in our jobs metaphor) products and services to satisfy jobs that arise in their lives. A job is defined as the progress that a customer desires to make in a particular cir...

What are the experiences customers seek in order to make progress? There were no more leisurely responses to inquiries about financial aid.

What obstacles must be removed? Decisions about a prospect’s financial aid package and how much previous college courses would be counted toward an SNHU degree were resolved within days—instead of weeks or even months. What are the social, emotional, and functional dimensions? The university’s ads for the online program were completely reoriented so that they focused on how it could fulfill the job for later-life learners.

competitive advantage is built not just by understanding customers’ jobs, but by creating the experiences that customers seek both in purchasing and using the product or service—and then, crucially, building internal processes to ensure that those experiences are reliably delivered to the customer every time. That is what’s hard for competitors to copy.

The progress they wanted to make was more about what they didn’t want to do than what they did.

What Cook and his team identified was the difference between a task (enter a debit in the ledger) and a genuine struggle—in specific circumstances.

It became clear that Intuit’s competitors for this Job to Be Done were not the other sophisticated accounting software products already on the market, but rather the decision whether to hire another person just to do the books, spending extra hours at the office just to get the paperwork done, figuring out how to construct and use one of the generic spreadsheet

A clear view of customers’ jobs means an organization should never overshoot what those customers are actually willing to pay for. On the contrary, we believe that when customers find the right product to respond to their Job to Be Done, they’re often willing to pay more—something we’ll demonstrate throughout this book. Intuit’s $4 billion in revenue and $25 billion in market cap makes clear that Cook and his team understand that. “All that we do is focus on solving the customers’ struggle,” Cook says. “That’s all we do and the only thing we do.” “We Get You”

So many innovations that are launched with great hope and fanfare flop because they have focused on improving the product on dimensions that are irrelevant to the consumer’s actual Job to Be Done, with enormous resources wasted in the process. This is because improvements on such dimensions do not cause a customer to pull that product into his life. A product that has been designed specifically to fulfill a well-understood Job to Be Done allows you to crawl into the skin of your customer and see the world through her eyes. It says to the customer, “We get you.”

Your organization has to build the right set of experiences in how customers find, purchase, and use your product or service—and integrate all the corresponding processes to ensure that those experiences are consistently delivered. 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.

We believe the thinking in this book has the potential to change not just innovation success rates, but to transform companies themselves. But first, executives have to change what they believe is possible. For far too long, companies have accepted that innovation success is just random and we’ve allowed ourselves failure rates that we wouldn’t tolerate in any

other aspect of business. Innovation does not have to be the least successful thing that companies do. Chapter Takeaways 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. Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus 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. Nonconsumption has the potential to provide a very, very big opportunity. Seeing your customers through a jobs lens highlights the real competition you face, which often extends well beyond your traditional rivals. Questions for Leaders What jobs are your customers hiring your products and services to get done? Are there segments with distinct jobs that you are inadequately serving with a one-size-fits-none solution? Are your products—or competitors'—overshooting what custo...

The Big Idea So where are all these jobs just waiting to be discovered—and how do you find them? The solution lies not in the tools you’re using, but what you are looking for and how you piece your observations together. If you can spot barriers to progress or frustrating experiences, you’ve found the first clues that an innovation opportunity is at hand. 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. Here’s how job hunting works.

Jobs Theory is an integration tool—a way to make sense of the complex amalgam of needs that are driving consumer choices in particular circumstances. It tells you which pieces of information are needed, how they relate to one another, and how they can be used to create solutions that perfectly nail the job. Jobs Theory is effective because it focuses you on the right complexity, breaking it down into elements you need to understand for successful innovation. It’s the difference between having a full, comprehensive narrative versus a few scattered frames of the movie, randomly selected as highlights. Jobs to Be Done tell the whole story.

We’ve chosen to include here some ideas that may provide a different view through a jobs lens. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is fond of quoting, “Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points.”

1. Finding a Job Close to Home

Understanding the unresolved jobs in your own life can provide fertile territory for innovation. Just look in the mirror—your life is very articulate. If it matters to you, it’s likely to matter to others.

You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead. Too often, companies consider only how they can grab shares away from competitors, but not where they can find unseen demand. They may not even see it at all because existing data isn’t going to tell them where to find it.