When a brilliant new idea is not enough to make it big
“Never tell me the odds”
Han Solo, Star Wars Episode IV
When Captain Solo barked these famous words at C-3PO, he was about to try and fly the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field, harboring an escaped princess in a very questionable vehicle and being chased by imperial troops. He needed all the luck he could get on top of all the skill he could muster. What three Harvard-educated industry leaders had in mind when they authored Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice was a more terrestrial sort of battle, though potentially just as stressful.
From the get-go, the book dispels the idea that success with customers has as much to do with good luck as with product innovation. The predictability of customer behavior, and the subsequent profit or lack thereof, centers on thinking “about progress, not products.” The key to this is the Jobs Theory. At first glance, placed as it is at the heart of a how-to guide on successful and lucrative product innovation, this might appear to be an homage to Steve Jobs. His progressive vision is one of the primary factors behind the mega-success of Apple and the iPhone. However, the Jobs Theory of Competing Against Luck involves actual jobs — not Jobs. Nevertheless, by focusing on just three of the main tenets of Competing Against Luck, you can see how this theory could very well be attributed to Steve Jobs.
1. Customer needs = jobs to be filled by product
The primary concept of the Jobs Theory is that success is based upon the ability to identify and understand an unsatisfied customer need. Once this is understood, the new product designed for that need must be “hired” by the customer to fill that job. The most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that the “job” is the customer’s way of achieving progress in life. If the customer achieves progress, the product keeps the job. If not, the product is fired.
Let’s look at iTunes, released for the first time in 2001. Even though there were already music apps available, Steve Jobs considered them all too complicated for the average user. The job that Jobs identified as “hiring” was thus for a free, user-friendly way to collect, store, and listen to music on a computer. iTunes was the product created to fulfill this need and help the customer progress with what Walter Isaacson identified as their “digital lifestyle” in his 2011 biography of Jobs.
2. Each job has complex factors to consider
Competing Against Luck emphasizes that another important factor of the Jobs Theory is the complexity of each specific job. Every job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions that can make or break the product. Considering a customer’s emotional or social anxieties is key when innovating the new product and considering when, how, or where the customer might want to use it.
The iPod is a perfect example of this (also highlighted in the book itself). As other products began to emerge to compete with the iPod, they had little success. The explanation? Jobs’s obsessive focus on aesthetics had worked so well with the iPod that just having one changed what people expected or wanted out of their music player. The sleek design was the new, cool, must-have thing, stomping down any competition because of the emotional and social considerations of customers.
3. Focus on the Little Hires, not just the Big Hire
These terms, Big Hire and Little Hire, refer to the customer’s interaction with the product. While many companies focus only on the moment when a customer decides to use the product for the first time (the Big Hire), it is more important to focus on the smaller moments when a customer sticks with the product, recommends it to friends, or promotes it in some other way (the Little Hires).
This goes back once again to Jobs’s focus on the aesthetics of Apple products. The design is constantly updated in minor ways, but the main principle of sleek, simple, slim products remains. And so do the customers. They not only remain but eagerly await new updates and product releases; they are ready to give the company more and more Little Hires.
Competing Against Luck details several more aspects of the Jobs Theory. The reader can see in each of them how Steve Jobs is the perfect example of its effectiveness, and therefore easily confused as the namesake of its mandates. One last one, before we go, might even have been said by Jobs at one point or another throughout his career: the customer is NOT always right. But to be fair, he probably would have used much more colorful language…
Happy Monday, Instareaders.
Team Instaread
Never Stop Learning
