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In 1997, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published his first seminal paper, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which set out what he called “Disruptive Innovation”. It took a few years for the book to catch on, but eventually its well-founded, well-documented, and counterintuitive approach found deep resonance with innovators around the world.

Then something strange happened. As people discussed the concept in more depth, those who were only temporarily familiar with the concept began to use the term “disruptive innovation” in their own way. They used it to describe pretty much anything without using the clear definition set out in Christensen’s work: an innovation that belittles some existing performance dimensions in order to radically reduce the cost of a product or service, or to improve accessibility. The term “disruptive innovation” was used so often that it became almost meaningless to many.

We are now seeing the same dilution phenomenon in another legacy of Christensen’s work, Jobs to be Done. This concept provides that people are not trying to buy products or services, but rather to do certain jobs that arise in their lives. You go to Starbucks, for example, not just to have coffee, but also to pamper yourself, to spend a little while and to feel perky for the morning. Using the Jobs to be Done lens enables companies to open new avenues for innovation and to think much more three-dimensionally about their business models and customer experiences. Christensen (who served as my advisory mentor for nearly six years) first wrote about jobs in his 2003 book The Innovator’s Solution. It took the concept more than a decade to take root, but interest has grown steadily.

Simplifying the tasks to be done is done in two ways: 1) people position what they have been doing for decades as the hot new concept of jobs, trying, so to speak, to put old wine into new bottles, and 2) people working on the “Jobs to be Done” concept, do not do a thorough study of the methodology and believe that you can use it without this foundation.

Unfortunately, really powerful business ideas don’t work that way. The details are very important. I first learned this lesson after studying Market Segmentation during my MBA program. I thought I really got the subject, then at Bain & Company I started advising on some very sensitive issues and realized that the way you apply basic concepts makes all the difference.

There are five common misuses of jobs that need to be done:

1. Jobs are listed without context, fusing the wealth of individual experiences and details that can actually shed light on innovation opportunities. For example, it is important to know that a person who is alone in a bakery is more likely to indulge himself, for example with a pastry, than a nearby group of customers who are relying on the same place to do the other job Finding a place to gather and chat before a Sunday matinee.

2. Jobs are designed exclusively rationally and functionally. For example, one company I met believed their diabetes care products were chosen to help patients manage their blood sugar levels. This was partly true, but the company’s belief didn’t explain why patients still drank sugary sodas, didn’t bring their blood glucose data to their doctor’s appointments, and only intermittently tested their blood. Humans are not robots – whether it’s a business-to-consumer (B2C) or a business-to-business (B2B) market – and the mechanistic listing of stakeholder motivations can be terribly misleading .

3. Jobs are not organized in hierarchies or in relation to one another. By identifying 85 different tasks to be done, a company receives very little information. Companies would benefit from prioritizing their offers in simple constructs and formulating them to customers who find a response. There has to be a number of “whys” that hold jobs together in order to make the resulting insights coherent. For example, why is the foam of a cappuccino really important? Not only because the drink tastes lighter and is less filling, but also because foam means that the barista paid special attention to the drink order (and therefore the customer) and that the customer will enjoy an experience that will not happen at home .

4. There is no conflict to be resolved between jobs. Breakthrough products are usually unsuccessful because they do everything better at once. Rather, they are finding new ways to resolve tensions that people encounter when trying to achieve important goals. Starbucks, for example, has managed to pamper people while keeping service times relatively fast. It also delivered a personalized service in an extremely reliable way. Job tensions offer companies the opportunity to differentiate their products or services.

5. The questioning technique used by the researchers is incorrect. A long time ago I was involved in a project trying to understand customers’ priorities in a new car. We went straightforward and asked people to prioritize a large amount of things. The number one job that people said was important? Stop the car quickly. The number of people who actually buy a car based on its brakes? Near zero. Paint (for jobs related to self-expression and uniqueness) sells far more cars than brakes. We asked the wrong question wrong. When you ask people about their motivations, they tend to respond very reasonably, but the reality of life is often much more chaotic. Understanding the core impulses – tasks that need to be done – requires triangulation and weird questions for people to reveal their real thoughts and buying processes rather than turning them into convenient constructs that seem reasonable but the way decisions are made in the Practice taken, do not take into account.

Many of the errors listed above are obscured by the examples requested by jobs would-be practitioners. These case studies tend towards simple, very well understood, super-rational products like building hardware, while many of the most valuable innovations lie in complex, fuzzy areas like financial services, social media, and fashion. An endurance test of the Jobs methodology to be done should show how this approach works not only under simple, but also under challenging circumstances. If Jobs can help explain the intricate web of stakeholder priorities and decisions, the method is also geared towards being successful with the simple.

As with disruptive innovation and other major business concepts, there are right and wrong ways to provide jobs to be done. By keeping an eye on the list above, you can achieve complex but coherent results that do justice to the nuances of a market while also indicating where there are great opportunities.

For more information on this approach, see my book JOBS TO BE DONE: A Roadmap for Customer-centric Innovation.

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