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HBR IdeaCast

2 resources from HBR IdeaCast we point founders to, and the questions each answers.

🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Christensen tells the milkshake story himself: McDonald's asked customers directly how to improve the milkshake and got useless answers, until they asked what job people were hiring the milkshake to do on their commute. It is the clearest illustration available of why the right question about the past beats a direct question about preferences.

The Jobs to Be Done Theory of Innovation

On HBR IdeaCast by Clayton Christensen about 35 minutes

  • Asking people to rate or improve a product only gets you surface level opinions
  • Asking what job a product was hired to do surfaces the real reason behind a purchase
  • The milkshake case is a rare example of the same company running both the bad and the good version of the question
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Answers What are the questions that quietly ruin an interview by leading the person to the answer I want?
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

A deeper follow-up conversation on the same theory, with more of the reasoning behind why circumstance matters more than customer category. Good second listen once you already know the milkshake story and want the mechanics behind it.

Revisiting Jobs to Be Done with Clayton Christensen

On HBR IdeaCast by Clayton Christensen ~25 min

  • Segment by circumstance and struggle, not by who the customer is on paper.
  • The same person can be a completely different customer in a different circumstance.
  • Innovation failures usually trace back to profiling the wrong thing.
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Answers How do I build customer personas that are actually useful and not fiction?
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