Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

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.

Everything was designed to signal to buyers: we get you. We understand the progress you’re trying to make and the struggle to get there.

Some of the most significant advances in science come on the heels of bright minds observing all the same things, with all the same tools, for years and years before someone with fresh eyes comes with a breakthrough. Thomas Kuhn, the influential philosopher and scientific historian explores this phenomenon in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. These breakthrough moments, he concludes, represent a “paradigm shift” where “Scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.”

Sony founder Akio Morita actually advised against market research, urging instead to “carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

When marketers understand the structure of the market from the customer’s Job to Be Done perspective, instead of through product or customer categories, the potential size of the markets they serve suddenly becomes very different. Growth can be found where none seemed possible before.

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.

“We realized people have to have a broader view. It’s assumed that ‘user experience’ is all about a beautiful screen and making sure the buttons are in all the right places. But that has almost nothing to do with getting the experience of using the software right—in the real world where clinicians use it. You can’t do design requirements in a conference room. You have to get out in the wild and live it.”

If a consumer doesn’t see his job in your product, it’s already game over. Even worse—if a consumer hires your product for reasons other than its intended Job to Be Done, you risk alienating that consumer forever. As we’ll discuss more later, it’s actually important to signal “this product is not for you” or they’ll come back and say it’s a crummy product.

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.

Consequently, 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.

Companies don’t think about this enough. 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.

This is largely because—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.1

This is interesting: loss aversion == 2x gain allure

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.

Your customers may not be able to tell you what they want, but they can tell you about their struggles.

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.

There is no one special method of uncovering Jobs to Be Done and that is precisely the point: there is no black box. You just have to have a “beginner’s mind” as you walk through a consumer’s decision-making process, looking for clues as to the full picture of the struggle.3

Innovators have to have a heat-seeking sensor for the tensions, struggles, stress, and anxiety of both the Big Hire and the Little Hire. When we go out in search of innovation opportunities we are like detectives trying to piece together a complicated story with all its emotional richness, because only by constructing the story can we innovate in ways that change the ending.

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.

In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.

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.

Uncovering a job in all its rich complexity is only the beginning. You’re a long way from getting hired. But truly understanding a Job to Be Done provides a sort of decoder to that complexity—a language that enables clear specifications for solving Jobs to Be Done. New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.

I have found that creating the right set of experiences around a clearly defined job—and then organizing the company around delivering those experiences (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter)—almost inoculates you against disruption. Disruptive competitors almost never come with a better sense of the job. They don’t see beyond the product.

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.

Done perfectly, your brand can become synonymous with the job—what’s known as a purpose brand.

When competitors successfully enter markets that seem closed and commoditized, they do it by aligning with an important job that none of the established players has prioritized.

Purpose brands provide remarkable clarity. They become synonymous with the job. A well-developed purpose brand will stop a consumer from even considering looking for another option. They want that product.

Achieving a purpose brand is the cherry on the top of the jobs cake. Purpose brand, when done well, provides the ultimate competitive advantage. Look no further. Don’t even bother shopping for anything else. Just hire me and your job will be done.

Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job. Competitive advantage is conferred through an organization’s unique processes: the ways it integrates across functions to perform the customer’s job.

Helping customers have a delightful experience using your product is made up of processes. What information do we need to have in order to decide what to do next? Who is responsible for each step? What do we prioritize over other things?

Absence of a process, as is the case with most traditional hospitals, is actually still a process. Things are getting done, however chaotically. But that’s not a good sign. 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.”

Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly.

Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied.

Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers’ Jobs to Be Done. When managers are focused on the customer’s Job to Be Done, they not only have a very clear compass heading for their innovation efforts but they also have a vital organizing principle for their internal structure.

Solving a job was our unifying cause. Our reason for being. It was easy to rally around that.

It is, to be sure, easier to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness. Most businesses are very, very good at that. Creating the right metrics is hard. But so important.

New innovations at Amazon famously start with a mock “press release” that is presented to the team that will consider and work on that innovation. The press release contains the guiding principles for that innovation—all experiences and processes are derived from the clarity of what job customers will hire this product or service to do, as outlined in the press release at the innovation kickoff meeting. In that room are not just marketing people, but engineers, analysts, and so on—everyone whose work will play a role in fulfilling that Job to Be Done. “It all starts with that press release,” Piacentini says. “No matter who owns the pieces of the product, you’re part of that process.”

OnStar was being hired to provide peace of mind when you’re driving. A whole series of ideas flowed from that crystallization of the Job to Be Done.

“There’s so much at stake and you’re learning as you go. This is the source of your competitive advantage. Your processes have to get better and better, based on what you’re learning. And all of it has to align with the job your customers are hiring you to do.”

“Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layers above yours,” Sharma says. It’s the reason that companies fail so often when they try to move up the stack. “They don’t have first-hand empathy for what customers of the product one level above theirs in the stack actually want. They’re disconnected from the context in which their product will actually be used.”

Processes are powerful. By their very nature, processes are set so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change. When processes are organized around the customer’s Job to Be Done—optimized to facilitate the progress and deliver the experiences that customers seek—processes are the source of competitive advantage.

Managers should ask what elements of the experience are the most critical to the customer, and define metrics that track performance against them.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

When seen through a Jobs lens, V8 need not compete against Diet Coke and cappuccino. It can compete against vegetables! And just as the milk shake wins the game of commuting hands down against bananas and bagels, V8 wins hands down against peeling carrots, boiling spinach, and flossing celery strings out of your teeth.