Competing against Luck – Jobs to Be Done

Books · Business · Source

Christensen posits why well run companies fail to innovate, suggests a solution for this problem (the Jobs to Be Done framework), and then describes how this solution can be implemented in large organizations

His key arguments are:

  1. Companies are getting better and better at the wrong thing. Businesses have more data about customers than ever, but still don't understand what jobs customers are hiring their products to solve. This means that they often use data to drive incremental innovation instead of identifying breakthrough value

  2. This is insufficient. Understanding the true causal mechanism behind why customers make the decisions they make allows you to do much more than simply understanding correlations. Customer interviews and a deep knowledge of what jobs they are hiring your product to do is instrumental for delivering breakthrough value

  3. Functions like user research and customer insights allow you to have a nuanced understanding of the job to be done, and prevents you from falling in love with your solution to it. Deeply understanding jobs can help you create segmented products and features

  4. Often, customers don’t have tools that match with jobs to be done. And so they do nothing. This non consumption has the potential to offer a very, very big opportunity to people who can identify the right job to be done and offer the right tools for it

  5. If a consumer doesn’t see a job to be done in your product, it’s already game over. Moreover, if they hire the product for something other than its intended job to be done, you risk alienating that customer forever

  6. Understand "What has to get fired for my product to get hired"? Is the pull of my product enticing though to fire the incumbent?

  7. The principal pull of the incumbent is that it needs no deliberation and that some intuitive plausibility as the solution already. Loss aversion > gain maximization. So people won’t leave the incumbent solution unless the alternative is really amazing or unless it doesn't solve their job to be done. Overcoming customer anxieties is very difficult

  8. One limits of Jobs to Be Done - the solution may not be clear even if you figure out what the job to be done is (knowing that flight was a job to be done did not help the Wright Brothers very much in inventing the airplane)

I liked the book, but didn't gain any useful insight from it. It was a clear articulation of the "understand your customer, and build something that matches a keenly felt need" principle that most founders follow. But didn't offer new lenses to view the world in the way that The Innovator's Dilemma or 7 Powers do.