Competing Against Luck

Key Concepts

Jobs to be Done definition

“We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.” (p. 27)

“The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration. 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.” (p. 27)

“Second, the idea of a “circumstance” is intrinsic to the definition of a job. A job can only be defined—and a successful solution created—relative to the specific context in which it arises.” (p. 28)

“Finally, a job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions, too. In many innovations, the focus is often entirely on the functional or practical need. But in reality, consumers’ social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.” (p. 29)

Studying a customer should feel like filming a documentary and capturing these elements

“1. What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of the desired progress?” (p. 32)

“2. What are the circumstances of the struggle? Who, when, where, while doing what?” (p. 32)

“3. What obstacles are getting in the way of the person making that progress?” (p. 33)

“4. 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 all?” (p. 33)

“5. How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they willing to make?” (p. 33)

Where to look for jobs

“Jobs analysis doesn’t require you to throw out the data and research you have already gathered. Personas, ethnographic research, focus groups, customer panels, competitive analysis, and so on, can all be perfectly valid starting points for uncovering important insights—if you’re looking with the right lenses.” (p. 74)

“Understanding the unresolved jobs in your own life can provide fertile territory for innovation.” (p. 75)

“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.” (p. 76)

“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.” (p. 79)

“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.” (p. 81)

“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.” (p. 82)

Big Hire v. Little Hire

“The most commonly tracked is what we call the “Big Hire”—the moment you buy the product. But there’s an equally important moment that doesn’t show up in most sales data: when you actually “consume” it. The moment a consumer brings a purchase into his or her home or business, that product is still waiting to be hired again—we call this the “Little Hire.” If a product really solves the job, there will be many moments of consumption.” (p. 96)

Customers have to “fire” one solution before they can hire yours, and this is often an emotional decision

“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.” (p. 98)

“Secondly, the pull of an enticing new product or service to solve that problem has to be pretty strong, too. The new solution to her Job to Be Done has to help customers make progress that will make their lives better.” (p. 98)

“First, ‘habits of the present’ weigh heavily on consumers. ‘I’m used to doing it this way.” Or living with the problem. ‘I don’t love it, but I’m at least comfortable with how I deal with it now.’” (p. 98)

“And potentially even more powerful than the habits of the present is, second, the ‘anxiety of choosing something new.’ ‘What if it’s not better?’” (p. 98)

“Remember, the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic. They’re rich and complex.” (p. 105)

“Talk to consumers as if you’re capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later. Pixar has this down to a science: as you piece together your customers’ struggle, you can literally sketch out their story: 

• Once upon a time . . . 

• Every day . . . 

• One day . . . 

• Because of that, we did this . . . 

• Because of this, we did that . . . 

• Finally I did . . .” (p. 104)

Companies should organize their processes around delivering on a job

“Resources, generally speaking, are fungible. They can be bought and sold. Products can, often, be easily copied. But it is through integrating processes to get the job done that companies can create the ideal experiences and confer competitive advantage.” (p. 153)

“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.” (p. 174)

When companies put a product in market, they can start to measure the wrong data rather than staying focused on the core job

“Making meaning out of the jumble of real-life experiences is not about tabulating data but about assembling the narrative that reveals the Job to Be Done. Innovators have to immerse themselves in the messy context of real life to figure out what potentially successful new products might offer to customers.” (p. 183)

“We can predict, however, that, 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.” (p. 183)

Getting an organization aligned around a single Job to be Done helps it align resources and attention

“Enable distributed decision making with clarity of purpose—employees throughout the organization are empowered to make good jobs-focused decisions and to be autonomous and innovative.” (p. 200)

“Align resources against what matters most—and free resources from what does not.” (p. 200)

“Inspire people and unify your culture in service of what they care about most.” (p. 200)

“Measure what matters most—customer progress, employee contributions, and incentives.” (p. 200)

Quotables

“But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it.” (Introduction)

As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: ‘If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.’” (Introduction)

“To elevate innovation from hit-or-miss to predictable, you have to understand the underlying causal mechanism—the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances.” (p. 21)

“It’s important to note that 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.” (p. 35)

“But what’s important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.” (p. 36)

“So no matter how new or revolutionary your product idea may be, the circumstances of struggle already exist. 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 all.” (p. 97)

“When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough?’ we’re left with opinions and never-ending arguments,” explains Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta’s partner in the Re-Wired Group. “It’s nearly impossible to distinguish between bad, good, good-enough, excellent without the Job to Be Done. When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough to help a consumer make this kind of progress in this kind of situation?’ the answers come easily. The circumstance of the progress they are trying to make is critical to understanding causality.” (p. 103)

“New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.” (p. 123)

“By contrast, with jobs-based innovations, customers don’t resent the price, they’re grateful for the solution.” (p. 132)

“W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: ‘If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.’” (p. 153)

“As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. They enforce ‘this is what matters most to us.’” (p. 154)

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It’s a profound insight—first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.” (p. 177)