Achieving Innovation Success by Fulfilling Customer Jobs

“Being empathetic is seeing the world
through the eyes of the other,
not seeing your world
reflected in their eyes.”

— Carl Rogers

A misunderstanding of and misalignment to the true needs

The last four worldwide studies performed in 1990, 1995, 2004 and 2012 by the Product Development and Management Association, covering innovations on both new goods and services, high-tech and low-tech, B2B and B2C, and all of their mix, have indicated a slightly improving but relatively low average market success rate of respectively 58.0%, 59.0%, 59.0% and 61.0%. Here we are not even considering their profitability, on time and on budget completion, and only accounting for those that actually reach the end of their entire development process.

In A Note on Corporate Venturing and New Business Creation, David Garvin from Harvard Business School already concluded in 2002 that the lack of understanding of customers’ needs is the main cause of innovation’s failure.

 “Studies comparing successful and unsuccessful
innovation have found that the primary
discriminator was the degree to which user needs
were fully understood.” — David Garvin

It is not surprising and quite obvious that a better understanding of customer needs would contribute to increasing the market success rate of new products and services. However, these shortcomings raise two questions: How to better capture the true needs of customers? And, above all what is a true customer need?

Peter Drucker once noted in 1964 in his book Managing for Results that companies often discover that their customers use their products quite differently than they had originally intended, and that, in that case, for lack of a better choice, customers adapt themselves to their misalignment or force-fit them to their actual needs.

“The customer rarely buys what the business thinks
it sells him.” — Peter Drucker

He also wrote on the same page that companies have more than often their own misconceptions about the market and the customer. He was advocating that the only way to get insights about the customers’ needs, expectations, and preferences was through questioning, observing, and performing their activity. Indeed, the only one who best knows it is the customer.

“Only by asking the customer, by watching him, by
trying to understand his behavior can one find out
who he is, what he does, how he buys, how he uses
what he buys, what he expects, what he values,
and so on.” — Peter Drucker

A mindset shift from the capabilities to the benefits

Companies often fall in love with their offerings. Many companies define themselves by what they do rather than what they enable. They can’t stop praising their capabilities, performance, and features. Every time they get an opportunity, they explain at length and in detail, and with great zeal, what their products and services have or do. For sure, this is important, but is far from being conclusive in the customer’s mind to close the sales.

Customers need and want to know why and how they would benefit from a particular product and service. Instead of focusing on “what” a product or service has or does, the focus should be on the “why” behind it.

In fact, this is not a new idea. Percy Whiting, who was the Vice-President of the Sales Course at Dale Carnegie, already explained this in 1947 in his once acclaimed and still relevant book, The 5 Great Rules of Selling.

“People don’t buy things, they buy what things will
do for them.” — Percy Whiting

Traditional market analyses are deficient and flawed

The traditional segmentation of customers aims to differentiate and group them according to either customer attributes or product and service attributes. However, customers don’t necessarily conform to, and buy from, a market segment that shares the same demographics, lifestyle, geography, and behavioral traits or to a product category that shares the same characteristics.

Being on the demand side, customers often have a somewhat different perspective on the market offer. They are not always well-aligned with the way they are usually put in segment boxes by companies. For sure, these segmentations indicate potential buying correlations but they do not explain the real reasons behind their purchasing behaviors and decisions. Correlation does not imply causation.

 “Framing the market’s structure from the
customer’s point of view (jobs) instead of the
company’s perspective (product and customer
categories)” — Clayton Christensen (4)

The traditional exploration of customer needs consists of asking them to describe what solution they need and explain what benefit they expect from this solution. However, this is often misleading, for the revealed preference at the purchase time often differs from the stated preference. Most customers are also not best qualified to specify the product and service characteristics, and even less the technical and quality requirements. They also tend to think in terms of existing solutions, which leads more to incremental improvements. And obviously, adding more features doesn’t mean adding more value to the customer.

“Customers are often unable to articulate what they
want; even when they do describe what they want,
their actions often tell a completely different story.”
— Clayton Christensen (5)

Understanding the jobs customers seek to achieve

Customers have “jobs” to do, for which they will “hire” the product or service they consider the more relevant to do it. Clayton Christensen, a renowned professor at the Harvard Business School, is credited with introducing this new approach to innovation and popularizing this powerful metaphor.

“When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’
something to get a ‘job’ done.” — Clayton
Christensen (5)

Customer needs analysis should focus on the job the customer is trying to do. The objective is to understand the higher purpose for which customers buy products and services.

For example, customers don’t buy a lawnmower to cut the grass, but because they want to keep the grass low and beautiful. An autonomous lawnmower robot would do the job even better. Success in innovation comes from a deep understanding of the job the customer is trying to get done, and finding the right way from the customer’s perspective to enable it.

“A ‘job’ is the fundamental problem a customer
needs to resolve in a given situation.” — Clayton
Christensen (3)

Targeting innovations at the circumstances in which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, increases their relevancy and consequently their market success. When seeking to gain insights through questioning, observation, and immersion, the objective should be principally to understand the job the customer is trying to achieve from his point of view. The focus should be primarily on the why (i.e., the contextual situation, associated motivations, and expected outcomes) and not on the what (i.e., the solution, its features, and characteristics). The customer job, not the customer should be the key object of study.

When asked what they want, customers tend to talk about things they’re already familiar with, that most likely the competition is already doing. However, when identifying where and why customers are struggling to get their jobs done, as well as grasping the surrounding context in which they perform these jobs in their lives, a whole new and broader set of opportunities would open.

“The critical unit of analysis is the circumstance
and not the customer.” — Clayton Christensen (2)

Customer jobs are persistent while solutions are transient

Customer jobs stay the same and remain valid over long periods of time, while solutions change over time due to technology advances and market evolutions. The solution does not create the job but enables it.

For example, listening to music while working out has gone through several innovations from portable cassettes players, CD players, MiniDisc, MP3 and now, streaming music players. This job has not really changed, but the solution has significantly evolved. The customer job is a stable focal point around which to create customer value.

“The job exists independently from the market for
products and services that might be hired to do it”
— Clayton Christensen (4)

Customers don’t care about solutions, they only care about their jobs and expected outcomes. Customers switch when they find a solution that better satisfies their jobs. Customer loyalty goes first to their job… and possibly to the brand that best enables it.

Most people don’t want to mow their lawn, they want it to look beautiful by being well-cut. This is why lawn-care services, synthetic grass turf, and robot lawn mowers have been invented. They enable to achieve the intended outcome without spending the usual time and effort for it.

Innovation is understanding customer jobs’ requirements and find a way to fulfill them better than others.

Using Job Stories to accurately describe jobs

Understanding a customer job is to capture and explain the underlying situation, the associated motivation, and the expected outcome. A good template for writing a Job Story is: When <situation>, I want to <motivation>, so I can <outcome>. For example, when I jog outside or workout at the gym, I want to listen to music while training, so that I keep myself motivated throughout the entire session.

• The situation is a specific context for the customer
• The motivation is what the customer wants to accomplish and the barriers the customer wishes to overcome
• The outcome is the specific results that the customer seeks to achieve while performing its job

“Customers hire products to get jobs done – to
achieve required outcomes.” — Clayton
Christensen (1)

Since customers know their jobs very well, and better than anyone else, they also know the qualitative and quantitative criteria they use to assess the success with achieving their jobs. It is important to ask them to describe precisely and accurately, in their own terms, what these criteria are.

Companies that invest in establishing the repository of customer jobs they serve or intend to serve, will find themselves better equipped to find relevant innovations that succeed on the market.

Segmenting around jobs importance and satisfaction

Customer job prioritization should drive innovation decisions. Every job has a certain level of importance and a certain level of actual satisfaction/dissatisfaction for customers. Mapping the jobs along these two dimensions allows to segment the market based on the jobs to make wise innovation decisions for each segment.

“The jobs that customers are trying to get done or
the outcomes that they are trying to achieve
constitute a circumstance-based categorization of
markets.” — Clayton Christensen (2)

Such prioritization helps to identify where to play and how to win: which customer job segments should be addressed and what relevant solution should be offered to customers to enable their jobs better than competitors. Successful innovation is nothing more than finding a way to better serve a customer job in order to enable a customer to achieve the desired results and remove the barriers usually encountered while executing the job.

There are 4 distinct types of customer segments that drive the innovation strategy.

When the importance is very high and the dissatisfaction is very high, this is a highly underserved market. New solutions should be created to enable customers to get their jobs done significantly better through breakthrough innovation.

When the importance is high and the dissatisfaction exists but is not high, this is an underserved market. The current solution’s performance should be improved to enable customers to get their jobs done better through sustaining innovation.

When the importance is high and the satisfaction is high, this is a well-served market. Complementary solutions should be provided to enable customers to get underperforming related jobs done better through adjacent innovation.

When the importance is high and the satisfaction is high, this is an overserved market. Lower cost, low-end solutions should be offered to over‐served or non-customers to get jobs done worse for much less through disruptive innovation.

The Nile Crocodile and the Egyptian Plover

The Nile crocodile is the second-largest extant reptile in the world with an average weight of 500 kg (~1,100 lbs.) and a size of 4.5 m (~15 ft) for an adult male. Its jaw, filled with 66 sharply pointed, cone-shaped teeth, is the most powerful on earth and can exert tremendous biting pressures of up to 3,500 pounds per square inch. This fierce apex predator kills opportunistically almost any animal that comes within its range, even bigger than itself, like buffaloes and zebras.

The Egyptian plover is a small but smart fellow. Looking at this dreadful killing machine, the plover bird has understood that the crocodile has, in fact, two problems that it cannot solve by itself. Food residues that get stuck in its mouth may cause infection, and leeches living in the warm, muddy waters where the crocodile hunts, get attach to its gums and suck its blood. The crocodile is unable to remove them, but the plover can offer the crocodile a special dental and mouth cleaning in exchange for a free scrumptious meal.

It is very risky and counterintuitive for a bird to enter a deadly crocodile’s mouth. The plover, though, knows that the crocodile understands too well the value of this nice cleaning service to gobble it. When a crocodile lies on the shore with its mouth opened, the plover bird is invited into it to feed on decaying meat lodged between the crocodile’s teeth and parasites that infest its mouth.

The Egyptian plover is an astute and resourceful little bird. But first and foremost, it understands the true needs of the Nile crocodile in its hunting job. The crocodile is not mistaken and retains its service to stay in good health and get rid of annoying parasites.

To go further on the customer job approach to innovation

If you want to learn more from the customer job approach to innovation, I would recommend the following books and articles from Clayton Christensen cited in this article:

(1) Christensen, C. M., Sundahl, D. (2001). Getting the Innovation Job Done: Matching the Right New Product With the Right Market, Harvard Business School, working paper 02-025.

(2) Christensen, C., Raynor, M. (2003). The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Harvard Business School Press.

(3) Christensen, C. M., Anthony, S. D. Berstell, G. and Nitterhouse, D. (2007). Finding the Right Job For Your Product, MIT Sloan Management Review 48, no. 3 (Spring 2007).

(4) Christensen, C., Day L. (2010). Integrating Around the Job to Be Done, Harvard Business School Module Note 611-004, August 2010. (Revised May 2016.)

(5) Christensen, Clayton M., Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan (2016). Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, New York: HarperBusiness.