Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

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

Customers hire a product to make progress, the job they’re trying to get done and the product/service solves these jobs.

Jobs Theory also take into account circumstances, people's values, emotional and social needs, and more.

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

The power lies in not being able to explain to successes but in helping a predict future innovation successes

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

These questions help you step into your customer shoes and truly see the world through their eyes

You not only have to think of the product itself but how they find, purchase, and initially learn how to use your product

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

Whatever you see customers compensating see this as a great opportunity for some innovation which people would pay highly for

Negative jobs, or what people don’t want to do, are also a rich resource for innovative ideas

Observing customers use your product or service, especially in any unusual ways, is full of opportunities for improvement or for horizontal moves

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

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

Customers are infamously bad at knowing what they want but they can tell you very quickly and accurately where they struggle

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

You are selling progress, not products

Consistent small “hires” is a great indicator you are satisfying the job needed

Companies should be organized around the job to be done, rather than by geography, product line, etc.

Products which nail the job they’re supposed to do don’t have to worry about price - customers are grateful for the solution

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

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

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

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