For episode 30 of the Traction Heroes podcast, I thought we’d try something a bit different. Rather than discuss a text in abstract terms, I brought to Harry a concrete situation where I’m struggling to gain traction. I wanted to see if looking at it through the lens of a classic business idea could help.
So I read the following passage from Competing With Luck by Clay Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David S. Duncan:
Is innovation truly a crapshoot? Or is innovation difficult because we don’t know what causes it to succeed? I’ve watched so many smart, capable managers wrestle with all kinds of innovation challenges and nagging questions, but seldom the most fundamental one: What causes a customer to purchase and use a particular product or service?
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customers don’t buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and in our metaphor we say that customers “hire” products or services to solve these jobs. When you understand that concept, the idea of uncovering consumer jobs makes intuitive sense.
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We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. This definition of a job is not simply a new way of categorizing customers or their problems. It’s key to understanding why they make the choices they make. The choice of the word “progress” is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration. A job is always a process to make progress, it’s rarely a discrete event. A job is not necessarily just a “problem” that arises, though one form the progress can take is the resolution of a specific problem and the struggle it entails.
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To summarize, the key features of our definition are:
- A job is the progress that an individual seeks in a given circumstance.
- Successful innovations enable a customer’s desired progress, resolve struggles, and fulfill unmet aspirations.
- They perform jobs that formerly had only inadequate or nonexistent solutions.
- Jobs are never simply about the functional—they have important social and emotional dimensions, which can be even more powerful than functional ones.
- Because jobs occur in the flow of daily life, the circumstance is central to their definition and becomes the essential unit of innovation work—not customer characteristics, product attributes, new technology, or trends.
- Jobs to Be Done are ongoing and recurring. They’re seldom discrete “events.”
I read a bit more, but you should be able to grok by now that I’m talking about Jobs To Be Done. It’s such an important idea! At its core: don’t focus on a product’s superficial manifestations, but the ultimate needs it serves.
What happens when there’s a dissonance in a service’s ultimate JTBD and how the market “hires” for that job? That’s the question we explored in this episode — using my consulting practice as the study subject.