Competing Against Luck

Author: Clayton Christensen Type: #book

• What is a job to be done?

  Desire to make progress in particular circumstances.

Jobs Theory aims to explain the causality between why customers do what they do.

Product innovation shouldn't be up to luck.

• What are the dimensions of a job to be done?

  • Functional
  • Social
  • Emotional

• What are the ways/places of uncovering jobs?

  • looking at your own life
  • nonconsumption
  • workarounds
  • unusual use cases

• When customers hire a solution, they also fire one (incl. not doing anything at all).

• Forces of change

  Forces that promote change:

  • push of the current situation (frustration or unsolved problem)

  • pull of a potential solution (promise of the progress)

    Forces that block change:

  • habit (what people are used to doing)

  • anxieties (fear of the new & unknown)

• What causes companies to lose focus from the JTBD?

  1. Fallacy of Active vs. Passive data
     1. When companies deliver a product that solves a JTBD, focus tends to shirt from data that describe the complexity of a job (passive data) to the operational data generated by the product (active data).
     2. Companies start to operate based on the product they sell ("quarter-inch drills") instead of the job they solve ("quarter-inch holes")
  2. Fallacy of Surface Growth
     1. Companies have a tendency to expand and try to solve too many JTBD at once. They succumb to the allure of selling more products to existing customers.
  3. Fallacy of Conforming Data
     1. People have a tendency to work with data in a way that confirms their pre-existing views.
     2. We should be paying as much attention to WHAT we measure as to the data itself.

We need to be careful when defining what is a job.

• What isn't a job?

  When the need could be only satisfied by products of the same category.

  Jobs are on a higher level of abstraction.

Tags: jobs-to-be-done