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Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Clayton M. Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan · 2 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice" by Clayton M. Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, David S. Duncan.
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Amazon Summary
The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights. After years of research, Christensen and his co-authors have come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim--that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation--is wrong. Customers don't buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world's most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes--it's about predicting new ones. Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan contend that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they'll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts. This book carefully lays down the authors' provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world--and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
So I can kind of see what you are trying to get at with your product. There are 3 books I recommend you read to help you further:

1. "Competing Against Luck" by Clay Christensen https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...

This book will teach you how to look at the market from a jobs-to-be-done perspective. People don't want products, they want progress. They will hire a product to do a job for them towards that progress. It will help you understand where your product fits in ie. you should be able to answer the questions "what job can my product be hired to do?", "what progress does it help make? and for whom?"

2. Obviously Awesome https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning...

This is a book on Positioning by April Dunford. It's absolutely fabulous! It will help you understand how to position your product in the market and how to clearly communicate your benefits to them.

3. Demand-side Sales by Bob Moesta https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progr...

This is a sales book that explores things from a jobs-to-be-done perspectives. I have found his frameworks extremely helpful.

These 3 books taken together will help you understand your market better, communicate with them more clearly and position your product in a way that the market gets it. More importantly, working with your target market in this way will help you reshape the product towards something they will eventually want to buy.

Hope this helps!

Jul 21, 2020 · bluehatbrit on Invert, always, invert
This seems to line up really nicely with "Jobs-to-be-Done Theory" proposed by Clayton Christensen and Co [1]. This inversion approach seems like a great technique to help move from thinking about products and think about the jobs that need doing.

[1] - Competing Against Luck - https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...

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