Marketers and product developers focus too much on customer profiles and on correlations unearthed in data, and not enough on what customers are trying to achieve in a particular circumstance. Innovation success rates are shockingly low worldwide, and have been for decades. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. They’re never simply about function they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for something else to solve the problem. If it does the job well, we hire it again. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. Some jobs are little (pass the time) some are big (find a more fulfilling career). To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss.

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