Title: Competing Against Luck

Recommendation: 8.5/10

Summary: 

Summary: 

Conventional wisdom is wrong.

Understanding your customers is not the best way to drive innovation.

Understanding customer jobs, their day-to-day, predictably reveals opportunities to remove friction and innovate. 

In a world obsessed with data to better understand customers, this is a great reminder that data doesn’t tell you why a customer bought your product. You need to go talk to them and understand what job they “hired” your product to do.

Highlights:

A well-defined job is multi-layered and complex, which is good. If you solve it, you get a competitive advantage.

Perfectly satisfying someone’s job likely requires not just a product, but creating and delivering a whole set of experiences.

A job is defined as, “progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.”

The best solution arises when you have a job to be done but no easy solution for it.

Companies, particularly established ones, can get into bad habits of defining themselves by the products they sell (8-inch drills) instead of the job they do (drill 8-inch holes).

Ask, what has to be fired for my product to be hired?