Competing Against Luck

My Take

Competing against Luck introduces one of those elementary questions, that seem to be at the core of everything - absolutely everything - in our life: What job did you hire that product to do?

The book revolves around this central idea and expands on it with different examples in different contexts. By itself, one may not be able to apply this principle after reading the book. But when combined with other parts of our lives, like business strategy, product design, buying patterns, and even essentialism, the mental model of a **job** can be pretty illuminating.

Treat this book's content as a building block in your arsenal of tools to make sense of this world!

Summary

What job did you hire that product to do?

This question can help us understand the causality underlying a customer's decision to pull a new product into his or her life.

Innovators are left to mix, match, and often misapply inadequate concepts and terminology designed for other purposes. We also often hear a success dismissed as simply the right product at the right time. But we may be able to do better. Job Theory provides a framework that can help improve innovation - making it both predictable and replicable. The value of Jobs Theory is not in explaining past successes, but in predicting new ones.

Jobs Theory explains why customers pull certain products and services into their lives.

So why isn't Jobs Theory being used already?

• A "Job" is not an all-purpose catchphrase for something that a customer wants or needs. It takes work to find and understand jobs - and then create the right product or service to solve them.
• The Jobs Theory construct has multiple layers to ensure that we create products that customers will not only want to buy, but also products they're willing to pay premium prices for.
• A Job's insights, once uncovered and understood, need to be translated into a blueprint to guide the development of products and services that customers will love. The blueprint should include the right set of experiences that accompany your product or service in solving the Job.
• We should integrate our company's internal capabilities and processes to nail the job consistently.
• Doing all this well - from the original insight that led to the identification of the job all the way through to the product finding its way into the hands of a consumer - takes holistic effort. The decisions and influence of virtually everyone in the company will be needed.

Theories that explain causality are invaluable to business leaders. The field of innovation is in need of a better theory, especially for the foundational question "What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?"

Jobs Theory answers this question by asserting that customers purchase and use (or "hire") products and services to satisfy jobs that arise in their lives.

How is a Job defined?

• A Job is defined as the progress that a customer desires to make in a particular circumstance. The choice of the word progress is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration.
• A Job can only be defined relative to the specific context in which it arises.
• A Job has an inherent complexity becuase it has social and emotional dimensions, in addition to functional dimensions.

More aspects of a Job:

• Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring - they're seldom discrete "events".
• Jobs are not "needs". "Needs" are more generic and ever present. Needs, by themselves, don't explain behavior.
• We don't create Jobs, we discover them.

Understanding the customer's Job to Be Done clarifies the true competition. This in turn provides critical information for how to innovate to make your solution more attractive than any competitor's.

Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one. Deeply understanding jobs opens up new avenues for growth and innovation by bringing into focus distinct "jobs-based" segments - including groups of non-consumers who don't have an acceptable solution. They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that the job does poorly.

Jobs Theory is an integration tool - a way to make sense of the complex anagram of needs that are driving consumer choices in particular circumstances. It tells you which pieces of information are needed, how they relate to one another, and how they can be used to create solutions that perfectly nail the job. Jobs to Be Done tell the whole story.

Ways to uncover jobs:

• Find a job close to home
• Find a job that currently has no acceptable solution (non-consumption)
• Look for workarounds or compensating behaviors
• Look for what people don't want to do
• Look for unusual uses

Deeply understanding a customer's real Job to Be Done can be challenging - Customers are often unable to articulate what they want.

Seemingly objective data about consumer behavior can be misleading. The most commonly tracked is what is called the "Big Hire" - the moment the product is bought. But there's an equally important moment that doesn't show up in most sales data: when you actually "consume" it, called the "Little Hire."

Jobs to Be Done have always existed. But what has to get fired for my product to get hired?

We can build customer stories through a scientific process:

• Once upon a time ....
• Every day ....
• One day ...
• Because of that, we did this ...
• Because of this, we did that ...
• Finally I did ...

Once a job is well understood, the next step is to develop a solution that perfectly solves it. The solution must have similar richness and complexity to it, just as the Job.

We can capture the relevant details of the job in a job spec, that would contain:

• 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
• The obstacles and anxieties that must be overcome

Complete solutions must not only include the core product or service, but also carefully designed experiences of purchase and use, that overcome obstacles a customer might face in hiring your solution and firing another. If the job is successfully nailed, the company's brand can become a purpose brand, one that customers automatically associate with the successful resolution of their most important jobs.

To nail the job consistently, a company needs to develop and integrate the right set of processes that deliver the necessary experiences. These form a powerful source of competitive advantage that is very difficult for others to copy. But this form of integration does not come naturally to companies. New processes that focus on the complete set of experiences need to be devised and they need to coordinate functions that are usually siloed.

A powerful lever to drive job-centric process development and integration is to measure and manage to new metrics aligned with nailing the customer's job. The critical elements of the experience should have defined metrics, that track performance against them. This helps overcome the fallacies of traditional organization structures and siloes. THe processes should also be flexible enough to continuously adapt and improve the experience, as a customer's job changes over time.

The moment a product hits the market, companies tend to lose focus on the job that was the centre of focus earlier. The primary drivers that increase this tendency are the three fallacies of Innovation data:

• The Fallacy of Active Data vs. Passive Data
• The Fallacy of Surface Growth
• The Fallacy of Conforming Data

A well-crafted statement of the jobs a company exists to solve can be both inspiring and practical. An organization focused on a clearly defined job enjoys four key benefits:

• Distributed Decision Making
• Resource Optimization
• Inspiration
• Better Measurement

The Theory of Jobs to Be Done is inductive in nature. A proposition is developed about what causes things to occur, and why, based on careful examination of phenomena and data about the phenomena.

The term Job is a construct. A construct is an abstraction, and rarely directly observable. It is a visualization that helps observers see how the phenomena interact with and change each other, over time. Whereas correlations reveal static relationships among the phenomena, a construct is a stepping-stone that helps us to see the dynamics of causality.

Two problems to avoid with Jobs Theory:

• If a Job to Be Done is described in adjectives and adverbs, it is not a valid job. A well-defined Job is expressed in verbs and nouns.
• Defining a Job at the right level of abstraction is critical to ensuring that the theory is useful. If the architecture of the system or product can only be met by products within the same product class, the concept of Job to Be Done does not apply.