Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

You can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, which includes the functional, emotional, and social dimensions that define the desired progress; the tradeoffs the customer is willing to make; the full set of competing solutions that must be beaten; and the obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome. The job spec becomes the bluep

if you or a colleague describes a Job to Be Done in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job.

As W. Edwards Deming is also credited with observing, every process is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. If we believe that innovation is messy and imperfect and unknowable, we build processes that operationalize those beliefs. And that’s what many companies have done: unwittingly designed innovation processes that perfectly churn

Innovations get skewed to do the jobs that executives want them to do—which is to confirm that the customers want to buy the products that the managers want to sell them.

Processes are powerful. By their very nature, processes are set so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change. When processes are organized around the customer’s Job to Be Done—optimized to facilitate the progress and deliver the experiences that customers seek—processes are the source of competi

defining a job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful. This can be more art than science, but there is a good rule of thumb: if the architecture of the system or product can only be met by products within the same product class, the concept of the Job to Be Done does not apply. If only products in the sa

So many innovations that are launched with great hope and fanfare flop because they have focused on improving the product on dimensions that are irrelevant to the consumer’s actual Job to Be Done, with enormous resources wasted in the process. This is because improvements on such dimensions do not cause a customer to pull that product into his life

Anomalies do not disprove anything. Rather, they point to something that the theory cannot yet explain. Scholars who find anomalies need to roll up their shirtsleeves and work to try to improve a theory or replace it with a better one.

“We’d designed a terrific software system that we thought would help this doctor get his job done, but he was choosing to ‘hire’ a piece of paper and pen instead,” Dunn recalls. “It really hit home for me—we’d designed everything in that room from a functional perspective, but we had completely overlooked the emotional score.”