Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”

Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do.

by

and

David S. Duncan

by

and

David S. Duncan

From the Magazine (September 2016) · Long read

Blue Landscape (charcoal, ink, marker, and pencil on paper) Marijah Bac Cam

Summary.

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done.

Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem.

Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off.

The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

Idea in Brief

What’s Wrong

Innovation success rates are shockingly low worldwide, and have been for decades.

What’s Needed

Marketers and product developers focus too much on customer profiles and on correlations unearthed in data, and not enough on what customers are trying to achieve in a particular circumstance.

What’s Effective

Successful innovators identify poorly performed “jobs” in customers’ lives—and then design products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

For as long as we can remember, innovation has been a top priority—and a top frustration—for leaders. In a recent McKinsey poll, 84% of global executives reported that innovation was extremely important to their growth strategies, but a staggering 94% were dissatisfied with their organizations’ innovation performance. Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions.

A version of this article appeared in the September 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Clayton M. Christensen was the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review.
Taddy Hall is a principal with the Cambridge Group and the leader of Nielsen’s Breakthrough Innovation Project. He is a coauthor of Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (Harper Business, October 2016).
Karen Dillon is a former editor of Harvard Business Review and coauthor of The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems — and What to Do About It (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023). She is also coauthor of three books with Clayton Christensen, including the New York Times best-seller How Will You Measure Your Life?
David S. Duncan is the author of The Secret Life of Customers (Public Affairs, May 2021). He formerly was a senior partner at the growth strategy consulting firm Innosight.

Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”

Idea in Brief

What’s Wrong

What’s Needed

What’s Effective

Partner Center

Explore HBR

HBR Store

About HBR

Manage My Account

Follow HBR