Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers.

Organizations typically structure themselves around function or business unit or geography—but successful growth companies optimize around the job.

Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support.

Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes.

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.

There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can p... See more

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see... See more