Podcast · about 35 minutes

The Jobs to Be Done Theory of Innovation

Clayton Christensen · HBR IdeaCast 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.

  • 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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The question it answers

  1. What are the questions that quietly ruin an interview by leading the person to the answer I want?

Read with it

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  5. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
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