Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

It’s about progress, not products.

Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth.

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.

“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?

For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (“pass the time while waiting in line”), some are big (“find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase”), some regularly (“pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”). Other times we know they’re comi...

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.

Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time.

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.

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.

Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a “pre–quality revolution” state.1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation.

What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?

We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.

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.

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?” And so on. Our notion of a circumstance can extend to other contextual factors as well, such as life-stage (“just out of college?” “stuck in a midlife crisis?” “nearing retirement?”), family status (“married, single, divorced?” “newborn baby, young children at home, adult parents to take care of?”), or financial status (“underwater in debt?” “ultra-high net worth?”) just to name a few. 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.

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.”

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 kind of compensating behavior? Are they buying and using a product that imperfectly performs the job? Are they cobbling together a workaround solution involving multiple products? Are they doing nothing to solve their dilemma at...

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.

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 circumstance. This definition is specific and important: Fully understanding a customer’s job requires understanding the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances and understanding all of its functional, social, and emotional dimensions—as well as the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make. Once you understand the customer’s Job to Be Done, it brings into sharp relief the true competition you face to be hired. This provides critical information for how to innovate to make your solution more attractive than any competitor’s.

Questions for Leaders Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead? How do your products or services help your customers to make progress in their lives? In which circumstances are they trying to make that progress? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of this progress? What is competing with your products and services to address these jobs? Are there competitors outside of those included in the traditional view of your industry?

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 customers are actually willing to pay for? What experiences do customers seek in order to make progress—and what obstacles must be removed for them to be successful? What does your understanding of your customers’ Jobs to Be Done reveal about the real competition you are facing?

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 th...

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?

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. It is also critical...

Questions for Leaders What evidence do you have that you’ve clearly understood your customers’ jobs? Do your customers’ actions correspond to what they tell you they want? Do you have evidence that your customers make the Little Hire and the Big Hire? Can you tell a complete story about how your customers go from a circumstance of struggle, to firing their current solution, and ultimately hiring yours (both the Big and the Little Hires)? Where are there gaps in your storyboard and how can you fill them in? What are the forces that impede potential customers from hiring your product? How could you innovate the experiences surrounding your product to overcome these forces?

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

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?

After you’ve fully understood a customer’s job, the next step is to develop a solution that perfectly solves it. And because a job has a richness and complexity to it, your solution must, too. The specific details of the job, and the corresponding details of your solution, are critically important to ensure a successful innovation. You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, which includes the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress; the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make; the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten; and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. The job spec becomes the blueprint that translates all the richness and complexity of the job into an actionable guide for innovation. Complete solutions to jobs must include not only your core product or service, but also carefully designed experiences of purchase and use that overcome any obstacles a customer might face in hiring your solution and firing another. This means that ultimately all successful solutions to jobs can be thought of as services, even for product companies. If you can successfully nail the job, over time you can transform your company’s brand into a purpose brand, one that customers automatically associate with the successful resolution of their most important jobs. A purpose brand provides a clear guide to the outside world as to what your company represents and a clear guide to your employees that can gui...

Questions for Leaders What are the most critical details that must be included in the job spec for your target job? Do you understand the obstacles that get in customers’ way? Do your current solutions address all these details? What are the experiences of purchase and use that your customers currently have? How well do these align with the requirements of their complete job spec? Where are there opportunities to improve them?

Jobs Theory changes not only what you optimize your processes to do, but also how you measure their success. It shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial-performance metrics to externally relevant customer-benefit metrics.

the key to successful innovation is to create and deliver the set of experiences corresponding to your customer’s job spec. To do this consistently, a company needs to develop and integrate the right set of processes that deliver these experiences. Doing so can yield a powerful source of competitive advantage that is very difficult for others to copy. Despite the value of developing a set of processes integrated around the customer’s job, it does not come naturally to most companies. Processes abound in all companies, of course, but in most cases they are aimed at improving efficiency or achieving a narrow outcome within a specific function. Delivering a complete set of experiences to nail the job usually requires that new processes be deliberately defined, and new mechanisms put in place to coordinate functions that are usually siloed. A powerful lever to drive job-centric process development and integration is to measure and manage to new metrics aligned with nailing the customer’s job. Managers should ask what elements of the experience are the most critical to the customer, and define metrics that track performance against them. Most organizations do not have one person who is the “steward” ensuring the company consistently delivers against the customer’s job. Traditional organizational structures and siloes do have value and are likely to endure, and large-scale reorgs are not usually practical. Therefore, the best way to move toward a more jobs-centric organization i...

Questions for Leaders How does your organization ensure that the customer’s job guides all critical decisions related to product development, marketing, and customer service? Do the different functions that are part of your customer’s experience (for example, your product, service, marketing, sales, after-sale service) all support nailing your customer’s job in a coordinated, integrated way, or are they in conflict? What new processes could you define to ensure more integrated delivery of the experiences required by your customers’ jobs? What elements of the end-to-end experience are most critical to perfectly solving your customer’s job? What metrics could you define to track performance against these elements?

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

The origin story of most companies typically involves an entrepreneur identifying an important job that does not have an existing satisfactory solution, and developing a creative way to solve it. As a company grows up, however, it’s very common for it to lose focus on the job that sparked its existence in the first place. Despite the best intentions and a century of marketing wisdom, companies start to act as if their business is defined by the products and services they sell (“quarter-inch drills”) instead of the jobs that they solve (“quarter-inch holes”). While there are many drivers of this drift away from the true north of the customer’s job, foremost among them is the tendency of managers to fall prey to the Three Fallacies of Innovation Data: The Fallacy of Active Data Versus Passive Data: Instead of staying cognizant of and focused on the type of data that characterizes the rich complexity of the job (passive data), growing companies start to generate operations-related data (active data), which can seduce managers with its apparent objectivity and rigor but which tends to organize itself around products and customer characteristics, rather than Jobs to Be Done. The Fallacy of Surface Growth: As companies make big investments in customer relationships, they focus their energies on driving growth through selling additional products to those customers or solving a broader set of their jobs, what we call surface growth—as opposed to staying focused on solving the core...

Questions for Leaders How connected are your innovation efforts to the core jobs your company was started to solve? How would your people characterize the fundamental business you are in? Would they describe it in terms of solving an important job in their customers’ lives, or in terms of the products and services you offer? What data drives your innovation and investment decisions? How closely connected is this data to your customers’ jobs? Are you falling prey to the Fallacy of Surface Growth, that is, are you overly focused on driving growth through selling new products to existing customers without an understanding of the progress customers are trying to make in their lives? What data is gathered and presented to make important innovation and investment decisions? What mechanisms do you have in place to ensure that this data reveals what you need to see, rather than what is comforting to believe? How are you ensuring that your customers’ Job to Be Done has a voice in your decision making and resource allocation activities?

Understanding the most important jobs your company solves for customers can be translated into a rallying cry that aligns individuals across the organization behind a common purpose and functions as an enduring innovation North Star. In contrast to the usually generic nature of most companies’ mission statements, a well-crafted statement of the jobs a company exists to solve can be both inspiring and practical. An organization explicitly focused on a clearly defined job enjoys four key benefits: Distributed decision making: Employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good decisions that align with the job, and to be autonomous and innovative. Resource optimization: The jobs focus shines a light on which resources are aligned against what matters most and which are not, and enables them to be rebalanced accordingly. Inspiration: Solving a customer’s job is inherently inspiring to individuals in an organization, as it enables them to see how their work enables real people to make progress in their lives. Better measurement: With a focus on the job, people will naturally seek to measure and manage to more customer-centric metrics. Finding the right way to articulate the job your company is in business to solve—and driving this deeply into your culture—can be difficult and takes real work, but the benefits are worth it.

Questions for Leaders What are the most important jobs—or the most important job—your organization exists to solve? How broadly understood are these jobs across your organization? Are they reflected in your mission statement or other key company communications? Do your leaders consistently communicate the centrality of these jobs? How could you embed these jobs in all your leadership communications, your corporate communications, and your culture?