Clayton Christensen developed The Innovator’s Dilemma to help established organizations understand that when they serve their most profitable customers it leaves them susceptible to innovators who enter the low-end of the market but serve the customers better and move up the market to become the newly established organization.
There’s also a solution.
Why were innovators successful?
They’re undercapitalized, under-experienced, and underwhelming relative to the established company.
The answer was Jobs To Be Done, told in Christensen’s et al. book Competing Against Luck.
Jobs is a way to describe the functional, social, and emotional progress a person wants to make in a given context.
Christensen’s work includes the milkshake example, where he and a team found that people bought milkshakes first thing in the morning. They ‘hired’ the shake to entertain them on the commute and provide some calories. They also finished before work so as not to be judged by their colleagues.
Christensen’s experiences included buying his son a milkshake. This is a different set of functional, social, and emotional progress a person wants to make in the context of being a dad in the afternoons.
This contrast is Jobs.
It’s work to find, but worth it. The process of understanding the job, the context, the progress, and all the parts creates a sustainable advantage (aka profits and avoidance of the market mechanism).
Think about Netflix. If a capitalized and connected Hollywood mogul wanted to compete with Netflix, they could buy all the streaming rights but that misses all the work: physical networks, social networks, technology, production, and so on.
Jobs exist for solutions to enduring and persistent problems. Snapchat was preceded by the IM, which was preceded by the extra-long telephone cord which was preceded by passing notes in class.
Kids talking to each other without adults’ oversight is an enduring and persistent problem.
A large example from the book covers the Southern New Hampshire University online program. Once the staff adopted a Jobs perspective they noticed two sets of customers.
The first was conventional high school graduates who wanted a conventional college experience.
The second was adult learners who needed information, training, and accreditation yesterday.
SNHU found the context was a parent alone at the kitchen table at night and looking for immediate information. Their functional progress was training and certification. Their emotional progress was as role models for their kids.
A university seems like a singular thing. But in the context of these two customers, it must act differently.
With hindsight, Jobs stories are obvious – and we’ve shared plenty – but to find them takes clustering data. The interviews are hard, especially relative to the alternative innovations of: cheaper, faster, sooner, shipped, or a different color.
Some clustering insights:
GM’s OnStar division listened to customer calls and found that it was people who were in an unfamiliar place and wanted to feel safe. OnStar wasn’t directions so much as security.
V8’s product manager saw things through the eyes of their customers who wanted to “eat” their fruits and vegetables. V8 is a juice whose competition isn’t in the juice aisle.
Intuit found that customers didn’t want tax optimization so much as tax minimization. Make this painless, fast, and damn sure I don’t get audited we don’t have time for that.
Along with Bob Moesta’s books, Competing Against Luck is the best introduction to Jobs. Though a touch academic, the sections are fast and full of examples and theories.
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