Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

We all have jobs we need to do that arise in our day-to-day lives and when we do, we hire products or services to get these jobs done.

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.

Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives: they do this to resolve highly important, unsatisfied jobs that arise.

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

A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance.

enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations.

Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and...

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.”

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.

Understanding jobs is about clustering insights into a coherent picture, rather than segmenting down to finer and finer slices.

don’t “create” jobs, we discover them. Jobs themselves are enduring and persistent, but the way we solve them can change dramatically over time.

conventional view of the competitive landscape puts tight constraints around what innovation is relevant and possible, as it emphasizes benchmarking

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

It’s not useful when the decision to be made relies almost entirely on a mathematical analysis, such as commodities trading.

Understanding the unresolved jobs in your own life can provide fertile territory for innovation.

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,”

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.

I think I have as many jobs of not wanting to do something as ones that I want positively to do. I call them “negative jobs.” In my experience, negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.

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 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 product really solves the job, there will be many moments of consumption. It will be hired again and again. But too often the data companies gather reflects only the Big Hire, not whether it meets customers’ Jobs to Be Done in reality.

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

The new solution to her Job to Be Done has to help customers make progress that will make their lives better.

Consumers are often stuck in the habits of the present—the thought of switching to a new solution is almost too overwhelming.

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.

uncovering jobs is about clustering insights, not having a single eureka.

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request.

If the forces opposing change are strong, you can often innovate the experiences you provide in a way that mitigates them, for example by creating experiences that minimize the anxiety of moving to something new.

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

That involves not only understanding the job, but also the right set of experiences for purchase and use of that product, and then integrating those experiences into a company’s processes. All

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

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

purpose brands frequently reconfigure industry structure, change the basis of competition, and command premium prices.

The price premium that a purpose brand commands is the wage that customers are willing to pay the brand for providing this guidance.

ultimately all successful solutions to jobs can be thought of as services, even for product companies.

Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

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.

In discovering an unfilled or poorly done job, managers are surrounded by nonconsumption and workarounds. They are immersed in the passive data of context.

Passive data does not broadcast itself loudly. You have to seek it out, put clues together, relentlessly ask why? But it’s critically important because it is the way to identify innovation opportunities.

as soon as a Job to Be Done becomes a commercial product, the context-rich view of the job begins to recede as the active data of operations replaces and displaces the passive data of innovation.

The marginal cost of selling more products to existing customers is very small—and the profit is oh so alluring. We call this “surface growth.”

We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.”8 We don’t realize this, we don’t mean for it to happen, but it is an unfortunate frailty of the human brain.

Many people view numerical data as more trustworthy than qualitative data. But where does “objective” data come from? The data used in many research projects comes from companies’ financial statements, for example. Is this objective?

The healthiest mindset for innovation is that nearly all data—whether presented in the form of a large quantitative data set on one extreme, or an ethnographic description of behavior on the other—is built upon human bias and judgment.

efficiency is only value creating when it is in the performance of a process that is creating customer value by fulfilling a high-priority job.

A well-defined Job to Be Done is expressed in verbs and nouns—such

defining a job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful. This can be more art than science, but there is a good rule of thumb: if the architecture of the system or product can only be met by products within the same product class, the concept of the Job to Be Done does not apply.

Good theories are not meant to teach us what to think. Rather, they teach us how to think.