Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

In 2000 Ford announced a joint venture with Qualcomm to create Wingcast, a competitor to OnStar, with a promise to be in the market by 2003. Ford didn’t focus on the Job to Be Done as OnStar did, but rather suggested that Wingcast would be the next great thing in mobile connectivity. That never happened. Ford scrapped the project two years later. It simply couldn’t match the processes that GM had already developed to solve customers’ jobs through OnStar. Ford’s core mistake—of focusing on the product spec rather than the job spec—gets repeated all the time. In fact, the misstep is so common in the high-tech world, that Anshu Sharma of Storm Ventures has earned justifiable recognition for calling attention to the problem, which he has dubbed “stack fallacy.” Stack fallacy highlights the tendency of engineers to overweight the value of their own technology and underweight the downstream applications of that technology to solve customer problems and enable desired progress. “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.” Stack fallacy applies outside of the technology sphere, too. For instance, it might be easy for you to have a vegetable ...