Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

If a company doesn’t understand why I might choose to “hire” its product in certain circumstances—and why I might choose something else in others—its data3 about me or people like me4 is unlikely to help it create any new innovations for me.

every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets.

Shifting our understanding from educated guesses and correlation to an underlying causal mechanism is profound.

Theory has a voice, but no agenda. A theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply to some companies or people and not to others. Theories are not right or wrong. They provide accurate predictions, given the circumstances you are in.

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.

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?”

Simply needing to eat isn’t going to cause me to pick one solution over another—or even pull any solution into my life at all. I might skip a meal.

Because of the inherent complexity of jobs, insights from observing customers in their moments of struggle do not easily break down into bits of data that can be fed into spreadsheets to be analyzed. In practice, seeing a job clearly and fully characterizing it can be tricky. Jobs insights are fragile—they’re more like stories than statistics. When we deconstruct coherent customer episodes into binary bits, such as “male/female,” “large company/small company,” “new customer/existing customer,” we destroy meaning in the process. Jobs Theory doesn’t care whether a customer is between the ages of forty and forty-five and what flavor choice they made that day.

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 wear this awful mouth guard overnight and it kind of burns my teeth . . .” or “I have to spend time making sales calls myself—and I don’t have time for that!” How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they willing to make? For example, “I want the whitening performance of a professional dental treatment, without the cost and inconvenience” or “T...

Why? Because it means that perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes (as we’ll discuss in depth later in the book). When you’ve done that well, it’s almost impossible for competitors to copy.

Our understanding of the Job to Be Done can always get better.

Sound theory—the kind that truly explains, predictably, what will cause what to happen—does not develop overnight. It has to be shaped, tested, and refined, and the context in which it does and does not apply must be understood.

We know, for example, that Jobs Theory is not useful if there is no real struggle for a consumer or the existing solutions are good enough.

Though the chief learning officer’s team loved FranklinCovey products for learning and development, it hadn’t been clear to their own internal customers—leaders inside the company—how these products helped them with the priorities they cared most about: driving customer loyalty and delivering growth.

In fact, Whitman says, traditional consulting firms have become a source of work for them—FranklinCovey’s been retained to help see a new strategy through. 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.

Within Intuit he refers to the “improvement in the customer’s life that matters most to him in selecting the product.”

These business owners didn’t need to understand the complexities of recognized standards of accounting. “‘Civilians’ don’t know that stuff,” Cook recalls.

They just wanted to get money in and out of their business as efficiently as possible.

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

It says to the customer, “We get

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.

If you can spot barriers to progress or frustrating experiences, you’ve found the first clues that an innovation opportunity is at hand.

Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.

Jobs Theory is an integration tool—a way to make sense of the complex amalgam of needs that are driving consumer choices in particular circumstances.

It’s the difference between having a full, comprehensive narrative versus a few scattered frames of the movie, randomly selected as highlights.

The same is true when uncovering jobs: the problem lies not in the tools you’re using, but what you are looking for and how you piece your observations together.

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

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. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead. Too often, companies consider only how they can grab shares away from competitors, but not where they can find unseen demand. They may not even see it at all because existing data isn’t going to tell them where to find it. But nonconsumption often represents the most fertile

A jobs perspective can change how you see the world so significantly that major new growth opportunities arise where none had seemed possible before. In fact, if it feels like there isn’t room for growth in a market, it could actually be a signal that you’ve defined the job poorly. There may be an entirely new growth opportunity right in front of you.

Good point

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. A story I often use to explain to my students how to find jobs that are hidden in plain sight is the case of Church & Dwight’s baking soda “category.” For nearly a century, the company’s iconic orange box of Arm & Hammer baking soda had been a staple in every American kitchen, an essential ingredient for baking. But in the late 1960s, management observed the diverse circumstances for which consumers grabbed that orange box off the shelf.

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.

“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.”

When you start with the assumption that you’re just altering what you already have created, or relying on broader industry-accepted category definitions, you may have already missed the opportunity to uncover the real job for consumers.

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.

With a theory to predict what will cause what to happen, breakthrough innovations do not require getting lucky.

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.

How many apps do you have on your phone that seemed like a good idea to download, but you’ve more or less never used them again? If the app vendor simply tracks downloads, it’ll have no idea whether its app is doing a good job solving your desire for progress or not.

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

Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired?

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.

Consumers are often stuck in the habits of the present—the thought of switching to a new solution is almost too overwhelming. Sticking with the devil they know, even if imperfect, is bearable. I refused to upgrade my mobile phone for years, in spite of all the whiz-bang things my assistant assured me the new phone could do, because I was comfortable with the one I had. 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

The anxieties that come into play are powerful: anxiety about the cost, anxiety of learning something new, and anxiety o...

“What if the new one fails at some point?” “What if I find myself in some kind of unanticipated situation where I need a backup phone?” “What if . . . ?”

There’s almost always some friction associated with switching from one product to another, but it’s also almost always discounted by innovators who are sure that their product is so fabulous it will erase any such concerns.

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.