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Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Summary

This book is about how to better create, predict, and act upon innovation breakthroughs. It helps us better understand why customers behave the way they do and make decisions, shifting from relying on luck to competing against luck.

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Key Takeaways
  1. It often looks like companies have good innovation processes but the fundamental problem is that the hordes of data we have today is not organized in such a way as to helpfully indicate which might be the next breakthrough idea. The data never tells you why the customers make the decisions that they do. Understanding this process and some of the questions you can pose will help you get away from relying on lucky and hit or miss innovations and being able to better predict what customers truly want. This leads us to "The Jobs Theory"
  2. The Jobs Theory
    1. The better question to ask is, “what job did you hire that product to do?” This change in perspective helps clear up what your customers truly want. Most of the focus is on customers and the products themselves and not how well the product is truly solving the job that the customer wants. This helps us understand the why of customer behavior, providing the fundamental driver of innovation success
    2. Customers hire a product to make progress, the job they’re trying to get done and the product/service solves these jobs.
    3. Jobs Theory also take into account circumstances, people's values, emotional and social needs, and more.
    4. Never fall in love with your solution to the job, always try to find way to better understand the job and how to best solve it. These questions and lens will help you more accurately define who your competition truly is. For example, Netflix competes with every form of leisure including a bottle of wine and sleep
    5. The power lies in not being able to explain to successes but in helping a predict future innovation successes
    6. Jobs Theory is an integration mechanism allowing you to create a full narrative and to focus on the right type of complexity. The priorities and trade-offs of customers may totally change with this lens and it’ll get you to focus on what’s truly important the why of customer decision making
    7. These questions help you step into your customer shoes and truly see the world through their eyes
    8. You not only have to think of the product itself but how they find, purchase, and initially learn how to use your product
    9. Non-consumption could be your biggest opportunity as customers don’t do anything because there is no solution which satisfies their needs. This opportunity will not show up in any data but you can uncover it by observing people‘s behavior. You can learn everything you need to know about your product or service just by observing people who use and don’t use your products but you have to know what you’re looking for
    10. Whatever you see customers compensating see this as a great opportunity for some innovation which people would pay highly for
    11. Negative jobs, or what people don’t want to do, are also a rich resource for innovative ideas
    12. Observing customers use your product or service, especially in any unusual ways, is full of opportunities for improvement or for horizontal moves
    13. You have to think through and understand what other product/service/behavior is being "fired" or what you are replacing, in order to better understand where your product fits and what job it is truly doing for you and your customer
    14. Two important forces that are very rarely considered are habits (the fact that people are comfortable with something that tends to be good enough) and anxiety of choosing a new product
    15. Customers are infamously bad at knowing what they want but they can tell you very quickly and accurately where they struggle
    16. Only by constructing the narrative and taking everything into account that led to the purchase can you change the ending and see how your product could fit in
    17. You are selling progress, not products
    18. Consistent small “hires” is a great indicator you are satisfying the job needed
    19. Companies should be organized around the job to be done, rather than by geography, product line, etc.
    20. Products which nail the job they’re supposed to do don’t have to worry about price - customers are grateful for the solution
    21. Taking a job perspective will easily allow you to shift into a mindset and see clearly how to shift annoyances from the customer to internally so that the customer experience is better than ever before
    22. When a product commands high market share and has high pricing power, it is rarely the product itself which is amazing. The overall experience fits the job so perfectly that they’re hard to copy or replace. Creating experiences around this job almost inoculate you to competitors. You must understand the job, the set of experiences around the job that you need to create, and integrating around the job are critical. Helping the customer make progress, incorporating the functional/social/emotional aspects, and aligning experiences and the job
    23. Aligning around the job to be done and making that job crystal clear gives people confidence to act on their own and efficiently scales decision making because the goal is clear. This unlocks human ingenuity, innovation and enthusiasm
    24. Jobs to be done should be in verbs and nouns and not in adjectives and adverbs. It should describe the process itself and not what the customer feels
  3. A genuine insight is a thought which is known as true upon conception - no further analysis is needed
  4. Because it is so much easier to measure efficiency than effectiveness, that's what most organizations optimize towards. It is hard but necessary to keep top of mind what is important (whether easy to measure or not) and work towards that
  5.  The voice of the customer must be the loudest voice in any decision
  6. Beware the fallacy of “data is always objective”. Data is man made and fallible
  7. SNHU keeps one vital statistic - if you could go back in time knowing what you know now, would you choose SNHU again?
What I got out of it
  1. What job is your product or service being hired to do. This framework helps you better understand what your customers need and how to best serve them. All customers buy products or services to make progress, not for the product/service itself

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