Book · 288 pages

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan · HarperBusiness Paid Beginner

This is the book that put the language of functional, emotional, and social jobs into every product person's vocabulary. When you are trying to figure out whether someone is hiring your product to feel a certain way or to be seen a certain way, this is the source the whole idea traces back to. Read it as a starting point, then go run your own interviews.

  • A job is never only functional: it carries an emotional layer (how the person wants to feel) and a social layer (how they want to be seen), and those often outweigh the practical task.
  • People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance, so the circumstance is where the real job hides.
  • The milkshake and mattress cases show how a plain functional read of a purchase can miss the actual reason someone switched.
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The question it answers

  1. When is the job someone hires my product for actually an emotional or social one, not a functional one?

Read with it

  1. Once you know the three layers exist, you need to see them in real products, and this piece is concrete about it: a luxury... SIVO Insights Article · about 10 min read Understanding the Types of Jobs Consumers Hire Products For (Functional, Emotional, and Social) SIVO Insights
  2. Bob Moesta helped build the JTBD method alongside Christensen, and here he is specific about how to catch the non-functional... Inside Intercom Podcast · about 30 min Bob Moesta on Jobs-to-be-Done (Inside Intercom podcast) Bob Moesta with Intercom
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