Summary & Key Takeaways
Competing Against Luck is about how companies can reduce the risk of creating new products and businesses by adapting the framework called Jobs to Be Done. The JTBD framework at this point is quite popular amongst product development teams in the technology world but many people still don’t have a full grasp of what it is and how it can be applied across a number of different domains. Once you get a full understanding of how the framework works, it’s amazing the number of different things you see where it can be applied.
I encourage anyone who is creates a product or service for others to give this book a read and go through all the examples and case studies it presents to fully wrap your head around the Jobs to Be Done framework.
Takeaways
Jobs to Be Done is a framework for thinking about how to build innovative products. The point of the framework is to think about products as jobs that customers are hiring (or pulling in), not buying them.
Where to look for Jobs to Be Done
Your own desires and problems
Where people are not doing something
Where workarounds and other compensations exist
What people don’t want to do
Unusual use cases
Context matters when it comes to understanding the job to be done. Sometimes the same product can be used for many different reasons.
Building a company around the customers’ job to be done can be a huge competitive advantage. By building you company around a job to be done, your employees understand what the right choices to make are and you end up measuring the correct things.
Notes & Quotes
The most fundamental question to ask about your product
“What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?”
Customers pull your product into their lives
“There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.”
The specific context matters
“A job can only be defined — and a successful solution created — relative to the specific context in which it arises.”
“The emphasis on the circumstance is not hair-splitting or simple semantics — it is fundamental to the Job to Be Done. In our experience, managers usually don’t take this into account.”
“Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work”
“The circumstances in which consumers would hire Airbnb are very different from those in which they’d hire a hotel.”
Jobs have emotional and social dimensions
“A job has an inherent complexity to it: it not only has functional dimensions, but it has social and emotional dimensions...in reality, consumers’ social and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires.”
Needs are not a job to be done
“Those needs are important to consumers, but their generality provides only the vaguest of direction to innovators as to how to satisfy them. Needs are analogous to trends — directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another. Simply needing to eat isn’t going to cause me to pick one solution over another — or even pull any solution into my life at all...what will cause me to choose the milk shake are the bundle of needs that are in play in those particular circumstances.”
It’s not just about the product, but a whole set of experiences
“It means that perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrating those experiences into the company’s processes. When you’ve done that well, it’s almost impossible for competitors to copy.”
Don’t fall in love with your solution
“What’s important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.”
Understand what consumers care most about in that moment
“For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.”
It’s a competitive advantage
“Competitive advantage will be granted to whoever understands and best solves the job.”
The key is in asking the right questions
“The key was finally asking the right question that led them to better answers.”
It’s about creating services to address a customer’s job to be done
“When you are solving a customer’s job, your products essentially become services. What matters is not the bundle of product attributes you rope together, but the experiences you enable to help your customers make the progress they want to make.”
Jobs to be done can be found where there is frustration
“The solution lies not in the tools you’re using, but what you are looking for and how you piece your observations together. If you can spot barriers to progress or frustrating experiences, you’ve found the first clues that an innovation opportunity is at hand.”
Innovation is about enabling something new
“Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.”
Nonconsumption often represents the best opportunities
“Too often, companies consider only how they can grab shares away from competitors, but not where they can find unseen demand.”
Pay attention to existing work-arounds
“Consumers who are so unhappy with the available solutions to a job they very deeply want to solve that they’re going to great lengths to create their own solution. Whenever you see a compensating behavior, pay very close attention, because it’s likely a clue that there is an innovation opportunity waiting to be seized — one on which customers would place a high value.”
Become fully immersed in the context of the struggle to find jobs
“But you won’t even see these anomalies — compensating behavior and cobbled-together work-arounds — if you’re not fully immersed in the context of their struggle.”
Look for what people don’t want to do
“Negative jobs are often the best innovation opportunities.”
Look for unusual use cases
“You can learn a lot by observing how your customers use your products, especially when they use them in a way that is different from what your company has envisioned.”
The circumstances matter for what you end up choosing
“You pick the solution that best represents the values and tradeoffs you care about in those particular circumstances.”
Think about what you will be replacing
“Companies don’t think about this enough. 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.”
Overcoming anxieties is a big deal
“The job has to have sufficient magnitude to cause people to change their behavior — but the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new.”
Use storyboarding to think about the customer
“What are they really trying to accomplish and why isn’t what they’re doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new?”
You’re looking for recurring frustrations
“The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in people’s lives — those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses.”
Cluster together the stories, not the individuals
“You want to cluster together stories to see if there are similar patterns, rather than break down individual interviews into categories.”
More depth than breadth
“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...is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.”
Understand the customer’s life better than the competition
“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.
Breakthrough ideas might seem obvious, but they rarely are
“In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.”
It’s about enabling experiences, not features
“New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable.”
It’s hard to copy jobs-based businesses
“There’s a reason successful jobs-based innovations are hard to copy — it’s in this level of detail that organizations create long-term competitive advantage.”
Understand the whole picture
“What are the experiences that customers seek in not only purchasing, but also in using this product? If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re probably not going to be hired.”
An organization’s processes matter
“Processes are often hard to see — they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they profoundly matter...processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.”
It matters how an organization is set up around the job to be done
“Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers’ Jobs to Be Done.”
What you measure matters
“Jobs Theory changes not only what you optimize your processes to do, but also how you measure their success. It shifts the critical performance criteria from internal financial-performance metrics to externally relevant customer-benefit metrics.”
Metrics and processes work hand-in-hand
“Having the right measurements in place helps institutionalize a process.”
Measure the elements most critical to the customer
“Managers should ask what elements of the experience are the most critical to the customer, and define metrics that track performance against them.”
Customers want solutions to their problems
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole...Customers don’t want products, they want solutions to their problems.”
Organize around the job, not the product
“The railroad industry did not decline because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That need actually grew, but cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones stepped in to handle that job nicely...because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. In other words, the railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do.”
In the beginning, managers are puzzle solvers
“Innovators have to immerse themselves in the messy context of real life to figure out what potentially successful new products might offer to customers. In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers.”
Remember that data is man-made
“Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made.”
“All data is man-made. Somebody, at some point, decided what data to collect, how to organize it, how to present it, and how to infer meaning from it — and it embeds all kinds of false rigor into the process. Data has the same agenda as the person who created it, wittingly or unwittingly.”
Note: really important to remember about data; it’s so easy to lose sight of this reality
Manage the job, not the data
“As data about operations broadcasts itself loudly and clearly, it’s all too easy — especially as the filtering layers of an organization increase — for managers to start managing the numbers instead of the job.”
Note: use data to force behavior, rather than be forced by the data
Avoid “surface growth”
“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.”
Note: this probably explains why the vast majority of acquisitions that try to bring the acquired company into the parent company end up not working out, while ones that acquire and keep it operating independently, do have more success (a la Berkshire Hathaway)
People in the organization will know what to do if the culture is built around the job
“If that culture has formed around the job, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful...they are the result of shared learning — of employees working together to solve problems and figuring out what works...The advantage of this is that it causes an organization to become self-managing. Managers don’t need to enforce the rules. They understand the ‘commander's intent’ — a military term that explains why soldiers up and down the ranks know how to make the right choices absent a specific order. They are clear on the commander’s goals and priorities.”
Note: communicate the why; see Start with Why, Extreme Ownership, and Turn the Ship Around!
Straying from the job to help the customer is a good sign, not a bad one
“Bezos personally hands out the Amazon ‘Just Do It’ award — an old Nike shoe — every few months to an employee who has strayed from his or her official job responsibilities to do something for the greater good of Amazon.”
Good theories teach us how to think
“Good theories are not meant to teach us what to think. Rather, they teach us how to think.”