Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

Once a company shakes off the shackles of category-based competition, the market for a breakthrough innovation can be much larger than might be assumed from the size of the traditional view of the competitive landscape. You won’t see nonconsumption if you’re not looking for it.

3. Workarounds and Compensating Behaviors As an innovator, spotting consumers who are struggling to resolve a Job to Be Done by cobbling together workarounds or compensating behaviors, as Kimberly-Clark did with Silhouettes, should cause your heart to beat a little faster. You’ve spotted potential customers—consumers who are so unhappy with the available solutions to a job they very deeply want to solve that they’re going to great lengths to create their own solution. Whenever you see a compensating behavior, pay very close attention, because it’s likely a clue that there is an innovation opportunity waiting to be seized—one on which customers would place a high value. But you won’t even see these anomalies—compensating behavior and cobbled-together workarounds—if you’re not fully immersed in the context of their struggle.

4. Look for What People Don’t Want to Do 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.

You can learn a lot by observing how your customers use your products, especially when they use them in a way that is different from what your company has envisioned.

Some of the biggest successes in consumer packaged goods in recent years have come not from jazzy new products, but from a job identified through unusual uses of long-established products.

We’ve identified above five different fertile areas to mine for jobs.2 But to do it properly, once you’ve found a promising vein, you have to look all around it to understand the context of a job before you can innovate to solve it. If you are to create products and services that customers want to pull into their lives, you have to drill deep and look wide, identifying not only the functional, but also the social and emotional dimensions of the progress your customers are trying to make. Even the most experienced innovators can miss rich opportunities that are buried in the context of understanding a job well if their focus is too narrow.

“It really hit home for me—we’d designed everything in that room from a functional perspective, but we had completely overlooked the emotional score.”

What they have in common is the search for cause. With a theory to predict what will cause what to happen, breakthrough innovations do not require getting lucky.

Jobs Theory provides a clear guide for successful innovation because it enables a full, comprehensive insight into all the information you need to create solutions that perfectly nail the job. There are many ways to develop a deep understanding of the job, including traditional market research techniques. While it’s helpful to develop a “job hunting” strategy, what matters most is not the specific techniques you use, but the questions you ask in applying them and how you piece the resulting information together.

A valuable source of jobs insights is your own life. Our lives are very articulate and our own experiences offer fertile ground for uncovering Jobs to Be Done. Some of the most successful innovations in history have derived from the experiences and introspection of individuals. While most companies spend the bulk of their market research efforts trying to better understand their current customers, important insights about jobs can often be gathered by studying people who are not buying your products—or anyone else’s—a group we call nonconsumers. If you observe people employing a workaround or “compensating behavior” to get a job done, pay close attention. It’s usually a clue that you have stumbled on to a high-potential innovation opportunity, because the job is so important and they are so frustrated that they are literally inventing their own solution. Closely studying how customers use your products often yields important insights into the jobs, especially if they are using them in unusual and unexpected ways. Most companies focus disproportionately on the functional dimensions of their customers’ jobs; but you should pay equally close attention to uncovering the emotional and social dimensions, as addressing all three dimensions is critical to your solution nailing the job.

Questions for Leaders What are the important, unsatisfied jobs in your own life, and in the lives of those closest to you? Flesh out the circumstances of these jobs, and the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the progress you are trying to make—what innovation opportunities do these suggest? If you are a consumer of your own company’s products, what jobs do you use them to get done? Where do you see them falling short of perfectly nailing your jobs, and why? Who is not consuming your products today? How do their jobs differ from those of your current customers? What’s getting in the way of these nonconsumers using your products to solve their jobs? Go into the field and observe customers using your products. In what circumstances do they use

them? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the progress they are trying to make? Are they using them in unexpected ways? If so, what does this reveal about the nature of their jobs?

Most companies want to stay closely connected to their customers to make sure they’re creating the products and services those customers want. Rarely, though, can customers articulate their requirements accurately or completely—their motivations are more complex and their pathways to purchase more elaborate than they can describe. But you can get to the bottom of it. What they hire—and equally important, what they fire—tells a story. That story is about the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of their desire for progress—and what prevents them from getting there. The challenge is in becoming part sleuth and part documentary filmmaker—piecing together clues and observations—to reveal the jobs customers are trying to get done.

Consumers can’t always articulate what they want. And even when they do, their actions may tell a different story.

Check out this quote.

No one aspires to be environmentally unfriendly, but when the actual decision to pull a product into your life has to be made, you pick the solution that best represents the values and tradeoffs you care about in those particular circumstances.

And most data only tracks one of the two important moments in a customer’s decision to hire a product or service. 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. But too often the data companies gather reflects only the Big Hire, not whether it meets customers’ Jobs to Be Done in reality.

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. There are always two opposing forces battling for dominance in that moment of choice and they both play a significant role. 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. A problem that is simply nagging or annoying might not be enough to trigger someone to do something differently. 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. This is where companies tend to focus their efforts, asking about features and benefits, and they think, reasonably, that this is the roadmap for innovation. How do we make our product incredibly attractive to hire? 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 c...

The anxieties that come into play are powerful: anxiety about the cost, anxiety of learning something new, and anxiety of the unknown can be overwhelming. Why do many consumers hang on to their old mobile phones, even when they might get some trade-in value toward a new one?

Innovators all too often focus exclusively on the forces pushing for change—making sure that the new solution for resolving a customer’s struggle is sufficiently alluring to cause them to switch. But they completely ignore the powerful forces blocking that change.

Overcoming customer anxieties is a very big deal.

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.

But when the decision involves firing something that has emotional and social dimensions to solving the job, that something is far harder to let go. No matter how frustrated we are with our current situation or how enticing a new product is, if the forces that pull us to hiring something don’t outweigh the hindering forces, we won’t even consider hiring something new. The progress customers are trying to make has to be understood in context.

This is true even in the B2B arena, where you might think the constraints of a procurement process would leave little room for emotional and social factors—and anxieties and habits of the present. But think about the plant manager making a decision to purchase parts or supplies. It’s critically important to her that she can count on having the supplies she needs, when she needs them.

Building Customer Stories

Talk to consumers as if you’re capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later.

critical storyboard moments,

The Airbnb storyboards—which have been constantly tweaked and improved since its founding—reflect the importance of the combination of pushes and pulls that drive their customers’ Big Hires and Little Hires.

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. Remember, the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic. They’re rich and complex. Ultimately, you want to cluster together stories to see if there are similar patterns, rather than break down individual interviews into categories.

What gets in the way of someone choosing to make the decision to hire something to solve their job? But in other cases, the barriers are surrounding the Little Hire. Why is this solution difficult for you to use—or not, in reality, solving your problem at all? In both cases, those barriers can be so significant as to cause a consumer to not hire your product in the first place or fire it once they’ve brought it into their lives. Innovators have to have a heat-seeking sensor for the tensions, struggles, stress, and anxiety of both the Big Hire and the Little Hire.

Innovators have to have a heat-seeking sensor for the tensions, struggles, stress, and anxiety of both the Big Hire and the Little Hire.

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When you have an insight, you don’t have to convince yourself that it’s important or powerful. You just know.

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have

Chapter Takeaways Deeply understanding a customer’s real Job to Be Done can be challenging in practice. Customers are often unable to articulate what they want; even when they do describe what they want, their actions often tell a completely different story. 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. Hearing what a customer can’t say requires careful observation of and interactions with customers, all carried out while maintaining a “beginner’s mind.” This mindset helps you to avoid ingoing assumptions that could prematurely filter out critical information. 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. As 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. I...

New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.

Whereas the job itself is the framing of the circumstance from the perspective of the consumer with the Job to Be Done, as he or she confronts a struggle to make progress, the 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?

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. © James de Vries

The reason why we are willing to pay premium prices for a product that nails the job is because the full cost of a product that fails to do the job—wasted time, frustration, spending money on poor solutions, and so on—is significant to us. The “struggle” is costly—you’re already spending time and energy to find a solution and so, even when a premium price comes along, your internal calculus makes that look small compared with what you’ve already been spending, not only financially, but also in personal resources.

You can only shape the experiences that are important to your customers when you understand who you are really competing with. That’s how you’ll know how to create your résumé to be hired for the job. And when you get that all right, your customers will be more than willing to pay a premium price because you’ll solve their job better than anyone else.

I should clarify, however: sometimes customers get pushed into paying for premium products because they’re interdependent with a product that they have already hired to solve a job in their lives.

Removing the Obstacles Products that succeed in solving customers’ jobs essentially perform services in that customer’s life. They help them overcome the obstacles that get in their way of making the progress they seek.

Creating experiences and overcoming obstacles is how a product becomes a service to the customer, rather than simply a product with better features and benefits.

Organizations that focus on making the product itself better and better are missing what may be the most powerful causal mechanism of all—what are the experiences that customers seek in not only purchasing, but also in using this product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be hired.

From the business’s perspective, they represent the first time in history where you have to think about how to convey who should not hire your product.

Purpose Brand There is a tool that helps you avoid leaving your product or service vulnerable to customers who hire it for the wrong reasons. Done perfectly, your brand can become synonymous with the job—what’s known as a purpose brand.

Purpose brands play the role of communicating externally how the “enclosed attributes” are designed to deliver a very complete and specific experience. A purpose brand is positioned on the mechanism that causes people to purchase a product: they nail the job. A purpose brand tells them to hire you for their job.

The reward for perfectly performing a job is not brand fame or brand love—though that may follow—but rather that customers will weave you into the fabric of their lives. Because purpose brands integrate around important Jobs to Be Done rather than conform to established bases of competition, purpose brands frequently reconfigure industry structure, change the basis of competition, and command premium prices.