Toyota developed processes that ensured that every defect was identified and fixed as soon as it was created. As long as Toyota is continually identifying “anomalies” in the manufacturing process, every single defect is seen as an opportunity to make the process better. There are, in effect, a set of rules that ensure that this happens. For

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

Jobs are not flexible—they have existed for years and years, even centuries. But how we solve for jobs varies over time. The important thing is to be attached to the job, but not the way we solve it today. Processes must flex over time when a better understanding of customer jobs calls for a revised orientation. Otherwise you’ll risk changing the

Historically, FranklinCovey operated like a typical training company. It created content that potential customers, such as sales people, would find useful and designed courses that enabled client training managers to perform their job of offering sales training to their employees. But it discovered that training budgets are highly vulnerable in

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

What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.

One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need—and this interview illustrates—is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.

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

Companies see products all around them made by other companies and decide to copy or acquire them. But in doing so, companies often end up trying to create many products for many customers—and lose focus on the job that brought them success in the first place.7 Worse, trying to do many jobs for many customers can confuse customers so they hire the