"Competing Against Luck" by Clayton M. Christensen

I’ve wanted to learn about the “Jobs to be Done” theory and how to applies to design for a long time. As usual these days I follow Naval’s advise and go to the source, Clayton Christensen’s book Competing Against Luck. I want to love this book, I really do. But it’s a typical American paperback; over-stuffed with examples and anecdotes. This could have been an article, and probably more gripping if it had been.

If you’re interested in “Jobs to be Done”, by all means pick it up. But only read a third of it. At most. Skim the rest.

“After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?”

— Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck

“One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need—and this interview illustrates—is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.”

— Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck