Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

It’s about progress, not products.

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.

Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause.

“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.

The good news is that if you build your foundation on the pursuit of understanding your customers’ jobs, your strategy will no longer need to rely on luck. In fact, you’ll be competing against luck when others are still counting on it. You’ll see the world with new eyes. Different competitors, different priorities, and most important, different results. You can leave hit-or-miss innovation behind.

The Big Idea Why is innovation so hard to predict—and sustain? Because we haven’t been asking the right questions. Despite the success and enduring utility of disruption as a model of competitive response, it does not tell you where to look for new opportunities. It doesn’t provide a road map for where or how a company should innovate to undermine established leaders or create new markets. But the Theory of Jobs to Be Done does.

At its core, it’s a theory of competitive response to an innovation. It explains and predicts the behavior of companies in danger of being disrupted, providing insight into the mistakes incumbent leaders make in response to what initially seem to be minuscule threats. It also provides a way for incumbents to predict what innovations on the horizon are likely to be the greatest disruptive threats.

So we thought of approaching the question in a totally different way: I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to “hire” a milk shake?

Those customers weren’t simply buying a product, they were hiring the milk shake to perform a specific job in their lives.

So we asked them: “Excuse me, please, but I have to sort out this puzzle. What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milk shake?”

For me, framing innovation challenges through the lens of jobs customers are trying to get done was an exciting breakthrough. It offered what the theory of disruption couldn’t: an understanding of what causes customers to pull products or services into their lives.

Instead of looking at the way the world is and assuming that’s the best predictor of the way the world will be, great innovators push themselves to look beyond entrenched assumptions to wonder if, perhaps, there was a better way.

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 enable...

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.

The Japanese experimented relentlessly to learn the cause of manufacturing defects. If they could only identify the root cause of each and every problem, they believed, then they could design a process to prevent that error from recurring.

In short, what the Japanese proved is that in spite of inherent complexity, it is possible to reliably and efficiently produce quality cars, when you focus on improving the manufacturing process.

If they were going to make any cars that an average Japanese consumer could afford to buy, Toyota and others would have to develop a process quite different from the prevailing mainstream: they would need to design defects out of the process.

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 call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and in our metaphor we say that customers “hire” products or services to solve these jobs.

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 can only be defined—and a successful solution created—relative to the specific context in which it arises.

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.

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.

The difference between needs and circumstances. Circumstances provide deeper understanding of what the customer is trying to achieve

In practice, seeing a job clearly and fully characterizing it can be tricky. Jobs insights are fragile—they’re more like stories than statistics.

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.

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.

Our understanding of the Job to Be Done can always get better. Adopting new technologies can improve the way we solve Jobs to Be Done. But what’s important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.

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

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.

But even more significantly, SNHU was also competing with nothing: nonconsumption. People choosing to do nothing to further their education at that stage of life. With that perspective, the size of the market suddenly went from seeming finite and hardly worth fighting for, to one with enormous untapped potential. Who wouldn’t want to be competing with nothing?

The key was finally asking the right question that led them to better answers.

What are the experiences customers seek in order to make progress?

What obstacles must be removed?

What are the social, emotional, and functional dimensions?

In every case, uncovering why customers make choices allows organizations to better create solutions that get hired.

Jobs Theory, explains Rod Hogan, vice president of New Business Development at Sargento, “forces you to define the offering in the context of a very specific consumer struggle. And that is neither easy nor natural for most large companies.”

On the surface the list of breakthrough winners might seem random—International Delight Iced Coffee, Hershey’s Reese’s Minis, and Tidy Cats Lightweight, to name just a few—but they have one thing in common: Every single one of them nailed a poorly performed Job to Be Done.

As Whitman continued his visits to customers, he realized he was hearing the same thing over and over: for the people buying FranklinCovey products, their single biggest challenge was getting line leaders and other influencers within the company to recognize what they did in learning and development was mission critical. They wanted to be seen as vital, contributing members to the company’s long-term goals. But they hadn’t always been able to connect the work they were doing to something that business leaders would recognize as helping them achieve their objectives. These HR and learning professionals wanted their work to matter—and to be acknowledged to matter—in implementing their companies’ most important priorities.

FranklinCovey also sells entire processes and experiences geared toward satisfying a particular Job to Be Done. At a high level, the offerings are grouped around various categories of jobs—for example leadership, execution, customer loyalty, sales performance—but underneath each of those categories are offerings aimed at specific Jobs to Be Done. Jobs that are measured in business outcomes.

“So we own the outcomes with them. Our deliverable is really a process, not a product.”

As we’ll discuss later in the book, 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.

Competitors were focused on making the best accounting software possible. Cook and his team focused on the job customers were trying to do.

“All that we do is focus on solving the customers’ struggle,” Cook says. “That’s all we do and the only thing we do.”

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.”

But as we’ll discuss throughout this book, uncovering an unsatisfactorily resolved job is only the first step. 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.