Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the s

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.

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

Understanding jobs is about clustering insights into a coherent picture, rather than segmenting down to finer and finer slices.

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

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 example

Data has the same agenda as the person who created it, wittingly or unwittingly. For all the time that senior leaders spend analyzing data, they should be making equal investments to determine what data should be created in the first place. What dimensions of the phenomena should we collect data on and what dimensions of the phenomena should we ign

“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.”

W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.”