I just finished up reading Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice written by Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan. I’ve been following the Jobs-to-Be-Done theory for a few years. There’s a good Udemy course on the interviewing technique but I have been waiting for a book dedicated to the topic. Christensen originally touched on this in his book The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. A few books have been recently published around Jobs-to-Be-Done and this is the first one I’ve read.

The authors frame the problem people in companies struggle with innovation in the introduction “Why you should hire this book”,

Innovation can be far more predictable-and far more profitable-but only if you think about it differently. It's about progress, not products.

and later,

This book is not focused on celebrating past innovation successes, however. It's about something much more important to you: creating and predicting new ones.

The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done which focuses on deeply understanding your customers' struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendent set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers' jobs well, every time.

As a contrast to a common tool–personas–Jobs-to-Be-Done is about understanding what is the causal mechanism within a specific circumstance. It’s not about a consumers demographics. IMO, personas do attempt to describe the behavioral reasons why a consumer whats to do something, but they often become demographic representations. Or worse, given the propensity for designers and researchers to ask consumers what they want, they become bias riddled descriptions of what consumers think we ( product and design) want to hear. A consumer won’t tell you how to innovate.

A great nuance that I picked up is that Jobs are not just tasks that a consumer wants to accomplish, there are social and emotional dimensions that add complexity. What are the obstacles they are trying to overcome and what are the compensatory behaviors that arise during their struggle?

When going ‘Job hunting’ as the authors call it, key aspects to consider include,

seeing Jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in "noncomsumption", identifying workarounds, zoning in on things you don't want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products.

Wait “seeing Jobs in your own life”?! This seems to be pretty common in product people and designers that is a bit of a slippery slope. After all, rarely are we the consumer we are building for. But the authors provide cases studies on Sony and Khan Academy as examples on how to use this lens to identify jobs. This was one of most helpful ideas to help me get started on what potential Jobs there are in my business.

I like the metaphor of a Job. A consumer can hire or fire your product to help them make progress. Its simple concept to understand and communicate. The authors use the term “Big Hire” to denote when a consumer has purchased or hired your product, and the “Little Hire” when they actually start using/consuming that product in their life. In order to hire your product, it has to fire another product. So a key question to ask is “What has to get fired for my products to get hired?”.

The Job has to offer significant improvement in the consumers’ struggle in order for them to consider switching. The push of the situation is one of the forces that create opportunities for new products. The other component of this is the perceived attractiveness for the new product to solve this struggle.

But there are all to familiar forces that oppose change. These include feelings, “I’ve always done it this way” and “It’s not the easiest way, but I’m comfortable”. But even worse is that there is anxiety and apprehension in changing to a new solution that may not offer a better alternative. The authors remind us of Kahneman and Tversky’s concept of loss aversion. A new solution has to offset a significant bias toward loss of a known way to solve a problem.

One of the most valuable parts of this book is organizing your company around Jobs. The authors describe how the Mayo Clinic organizes in this fashion. Later, they describe how Amazon ( particularly relevant example for me) focuses on three components of a Job - “vast selection, low prices and fast delivery”. What is interesting is that they have built processes, metrics and goals that show how they are doing in these areas on a minute-by-minute basis. This is something that I’m exploring now on how we can restructure around Jobs to be more competitive and innovative.

They also define the problem of surface growth whereby the attractiveness of increase profitability by increasing the number of products sold. So we focus on more things, this opens the door for a disruptive innovator that focuses on doing on thing well to compete with us.

For me, another extremely relevant tidbit when discussing discount retailers,

And even as these three ( Walmart, Costco and Target) have won the battle of attrition, no customer on the planet has a Jobs to Be Done called "I really need to spend a couple of hours going to the store today." Consequently, companies organized around a brick-and-mortar business model rather than a customer job are unlikely to thrive over the longer term. Increasingly, they will find themselves playing defense rather than profitably expanding.

One of the last chapters is interesting and challenging as it concerns itself with staying focused on the Job and that “data is all man-made” containing biases and limitations. The data we are collecting isn’t related to the story of the struggle that consumers experience, but consists more of product-related data or “unfiltered context.” Management’s dilemma when they now have access to data they didn’t have before, is to respond, but without the appropriate context, that data will detract and cause us to lose focus on what matters, the Job and the consumers’ struggle.

If you are looking for a book to tell you how to get started on Monday with the approach, this isn’t your book. While it does go into important concepts like the definition of progress and why this theory works, it doesn’t provide the tools needed to implement. There are a lot of great case studies throughout that illustrate the success companies have had with this approach. But this is a great high-level overview on the value of this approach that you can use to help sell your organization on why this theory should be explored.