Key Principle
Collected heuristics and decision rules from across Competing Against Luck, organized into categories for quick reference. Each rule is distilled from case evidence in the text.
Why This Matters
Quick decision rules prevent the most common mistakes in applying Jobs to Be Done. These are the patterns that experienced practitioners internalize so they can catch errors early -- before a product launches to indifference or an organization drifts from the job it once understood.
Discovery Rules
- Look for compensating behaviors first. Whenever people jury-rig workarounds, a job exists and current solutions fail. (Ch. 4)
- Your biggest competitor is often nonconsumption -- people hiring nothing at all. Size the market by what people are NOT doing, not by existing category sales. (Ch. 3)
- Negative jobs (what people desperately want to avoid) are often the best innovation opportunities. CVS MinuteClinic was built on the job of not wanting to see the doctor. (Ch. 4)
- Collect a huge number of data points from a smaller sample, not a handful of data points from a huge sample. Depth beats breadth for uncovering causation. (Ch. 5)
- Reconstruct the full timeline leading to a hiring decision. An apparent impulse purchase usually has a long backstory of mounting frustration. (Ch. 5)
- Always ask "What had to get fired for this product to get hired?" The firing reveals the real competitive set. (Ch. 5)
- Apply the Adjective/Adverb Test: if your job is described in adjectives ("convenient," "fast"), it is not yet a valid job. Valid jobs use verbs and nouns. (Ch. 10)
Design Rules
- Design complete experiences, not feature bundles. A product becomes a service when it removes every obstacle between the customer and their desired progress. (Ch. 3, Ch. 6)
- Address all three dimensions -- functional, social, emotional -- simultaneously. Companies overwhelmingly design for function alone; customers evaluate all three. (Ch. 2)
- Reducing opposing forces (habit and anxiety) is often more effective than increasing pull. ING Direct opened physical cafes solely to reduce anxiety about virtual banking. (Ch. 5)
- Apply the Product Category Test: if every candidate solution comes from the same product class, you are at the wrong level of abstraction. A valid job draws candidates from different categories. (Ch. 10)
- Track the Little Hire (actual use), not just the Big Hire (purchase). Sales data captures only the purchase; repeated use is the true signal the job is being resolved. (Ch. 5)
- Premium pricing earned through job resolution generates gratitude. Forced premium pricing on captive needs breeds resentment. (Ch. 6)
- A scrappy solution that nails the job beats a polished product that misses it. QuickBooks won with "half the functionality at twice the price" because it addressed the real job. (Ch. 3)
Organization Rules
- Use the job as commander's intent: it tells employees both what to pursue and what NOT to pursue. The "not" side eliminates wasted deliberation. (Ch. 9)
- When one organization serves two different jobs, it needs two physically separate operating units with different processes, metrics, and culture. SNHU moved its online team to separate offices. (Ch. 3, Ch. 9)
- Measure whether the customer is making progress, not what is easy to measure. SNHU's critical metric: would graduates do it all over again? (Ch. 9)
- Watch for organizational drift: as companies grow, the organizing unit silently shifts from the customer's job to internal products, processes, and efficiency metrics. Efficiency is only valuable when serving a process that fulfills the job. (Ch. 9)
Warning Signs
- You are surveying customers for desired features and getting expansive wish lists with no way to prioritize. This means you lack a shared job spec. (Ch. 9)
- Your data is organized around customer attributes and product features (correlations) rather than circumstances of struggle. More data organized around the wrong unit produces more precise irrelevance. (Intro)
- You are designing for the "average customer." The Air Force cockpit study found zero pilots out of 4,000+ matched the average on all dimensions. The average matches no one. (Intro)
- Internal metrics are all green but customer loyalty is flat or declining. The company has drifted from the job to optimizing internal processes. (Ch. 9)
- Your brand is being extended into adjacent jobs where it has no earned authority. Volvo lost its way under Ford when it tried to compete as a luxury brand rather than the safety job it owned. (Ch. 6)
- You are measuring "all the stuff that was easy to measure because it rolled off our servers" rather than "whether we were improving customers' lives." (Ch. 9)
- Every proposed innovation is benchmarked against competitors' features rather than against the customer's full struggle. You are optimizing within a category instead of resolving a job. (Intro, Ch. 2)
Key Quotes
"Correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation -- the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution." (Introduction)
"Companies don't think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired?" (Ch. 5)
"We got into feature chase. Too often we'd go look at what customers were asking for and build it." -- Scott Cook (Ch. 9)
"The insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic." (Ch. 5)
"Efficiency is only value creating when it is in the performance of a process that is creating customer value by fulfilling a high-priority job." (Ch. 9)
Related References
- core framework - Theory behind the rules
- Implementation Playbook - Full implementation process
- What Makes a Valid Job - Valid job definitions