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Is it possible to know for a fact how successful a new product will be before you take it to market? According to business academic Clayton Christensen, the answer is yes. In Competing Against Luck, Christensen offers a conceptual framework for analyzing consumer demand and guiding product innovation. He explains that every time consumers make a purchase, they’re trying to accomplish one specific task. Knowing this, you can design and sell a product that can’t possibly fail because it fits that task perfectly.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Christensen’s framework to create profitable innovations and make savvier business decisions. We’ll discuss how to glean valuable insights from customer interviews and inspire workers to make better decisions without direct oversight. We’ll include product design tips from books like Inspired and All Marketers Are Liars. We’ll also offer counterpoints to Christensen’s ideas from books like High Output Management and First, Break All the Rules.

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Analogies: Intuitive Paths to Ideal Abstraction

If you’re struggling to come up with not-too-detailed, not-too-specific unique ideas by defining a consumer task, try using an analogy. To use an analogy to solve a problem, think of a problem that’s similar in complexity and detail to your desired business idea and translate the solutions to fit your situation.

For example, use an analogy to come up with an innovation for your fishing rod company: Fish are like bugs in that people like to hunt and catch them. People often use nets to catch bugs—perhaps adding a fishing net would be a profitable innovation.

Characteristic #3: Tasks Involve Both Physical and Emotional Factors

Finally, Christensen emphasizes the need to take emotional factors into account when defining tasks. Customers buy products not only to improve physical conditions in their lives but also to spark positive emotions and resolve negative ones. In particular, consumers are concerned about how the products they use will make those around them feel—especially how others feel about them. If you focus your innovation solely on the practical solutions that your product offers, you may be ignoring an emotional cost of using your product that could dissuade customers from buying it.

For example, if a company invents a winter coat that retains significantly more heat than anything else on the market, but it’s so enormously puffy and colorful that people feel embarrassed wearing it, it probably won’t sell well. The company should have anticipated this emotional factor while designing it.

(Shortform note: In Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne explain that how much weight you give physical and emotional factors while developing your product will depend on your industry. For instance, fashion designers cater more to emotions, while refrigerator designers cater more to physical functionality. However, they also argue that going against the traditional focus of your industry may be a promising direction for innovation—since fewer people have tapped into the functionality of fashion, or the emotions involved in using refrigerators, doing so in a new way could be profitable.)

How to Identify Your Customers’ Tasks

Now that we’ve defined what a consumer task is, let’s discuss how to use this information to generate profitable business innovations. The first step of innovation is to identify the task you’re trying to resolve with your product. Let’s discuss two of Christensen’s suggestions for how to do this effectively.

Strategy #1: Interview Customers

One of the most reliable ways to identify tasks is to talk with customers, contends Christensen. Because tasks are so situation-dependent, you need a detailed picture of the customer’s life to fully understand the task that motivated them to make the purchase. A one-on-one conversation is the best way to uncover this level of detail.

(Shortform note: In The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick warns that the fatal flaw of one-on-one conversations with customers is that they’ll instinctively tell you what they think you want to hear—typically, that they like your product and would buy it. As a result, most customer feedback actively pushes you toward failure by convincing you that bad product ideas are good. To avoid this, keep your conversation grounded in facts about the customer’s life that they can’t twist to make you feel better. For example, instead of asking a customer if they would buy and use your new smoothie blender, ask them about their recent eating habits to see if they would actually want an easier way to eat more fruits and vegetables.)

To identify a task associated with a purchase in sufficient detail to inspire innovation, you need all the context from the customer’s life that’s relevant to that purchase. For any purchase that a customer makes, there are encouraging factors influencing them to buy it and opposing, discouraging factors influencing them not to buy it. The encouraging factors include the problems causing them pain and the attractive benefits of the new product. The discouraging factors are the existing, habitual ways the customer solves their problems and their doubts and fears about the new product (that it’ll be a waste of money or make their life worse).

Christensen recommends asking customers to tell you the story of their life leading up to a specific purchase and identifying the encouraging and discouraging factors at play, as they’re all components of the task driving the purchase.

For example, a customer might describe the last time he bought a winter coat: He was planning to take a trip to Canada to go camping with some friends. He thought about buying a warm, puffy winter coat. However, he worried that his friends would make fun of him, so he decided to buy a thin coat instead and ended up suffering through the bitter cold. Stories like this illuminate the encouraging factors (I want to be warm) and discouraging factors (I don’t want my friends to make fun of me) customers consider when making a purchase.

With this story, you could set out to design a coat that solves the following task: “Keep me warm in the cold outdoors without drawing too much attention to how I look.”

Applying Christensen’s Interview Techniques to Sales

You can also use Christensen’s strategy here to enhance your ability to make direct sales. This is one of the main ideas behind Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling, which is about increasing the encouraging factors in a customer’s mind until they’re greater than the discouraging factors while making a sale.

Rackham recommends achieving this by asking the customer questions that get them to talk themselves into making the purchase. He recommends using four types of questions in a specific order to accomplish this, represented by the acronym “SPIN.”

  • S - Situation Questions: investigating the customer’s life to help you understand what questions you’ll need to ask next

  • P - Problem Questions: discovering the problems and frustrations in the customer’s life, which are the encouraging factors pushing them to make a purchase

  • I - Implication Questions: asking the customer to consider how the consequences of their problems are worse than they assume, intensifying one major encouraging factor

  • N - Need-Payoff Questions: asking the customer to consider how your product would improve their life by resolving their problems, intensifying the other major encouraging factor

Here’s an example of a sales pitch using these four types of questions: Imagine you’re trying to sell a moped. First, ask “If you had to get to the other side of town right now, how would you get there?” (Situation). Then, ask “What is your biggest gripe with this city’s public transportation system?” (Problem). Continue by asking “How would you say the time you waste riding the bus makes your life worse?” (Implication). Finally, ask “What good could you do with the time you save by owning your own transportation?” (Need-Payoff).

Strategy #2: Study the Tasks Around You

Christensen maintains that as you go about your daily business, you’ll naturally encounter tasks that aren’t being done well. Every consistently difficult task in life is an opportunity for innovation, so keep your eyes open. Whenever you or someone around you encounters something frustrating or has tried and failed to resolve a specific task for an extended period of time, there’s a task that the market is failing to address.

(Shortform note: While you’re noticing difficult tasks around you, how do you know which are worth turning into products or services? In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau advises only starting a business to solve a problem if you’re passionate about the problem and think you would enjoy working to solve it—even if it requires a lot of administrative work.)

In particular, Christensen recommends taking note if someone around you gets creative and devises a unique solution to a problem they have. People who invent DIY solutions are trying to resolve a task that no one has designed a product for yet, making it a golden opportunity for you to fill a gap in the market. For instance, if you see someone taping blankets over their windows to block out sunlight, you could design easy-to-install window blinds that stick directly to a window frame.

(Shortform note: The DIY solutions that those around you invent may be better than anything available on the market because frustrating circumstances frequently push people into “creative desperation.” When we’re in a stressful situation and need a solution, we scramble to make connections that we otherwise wouldn’t have, leading us to develop genius workarounds for our own use. In contrast, research and development teams in major companies are unlikely to be in this state of creative desperation, since they’re not personally frustrated by the problem they’re trying to solve.)

Similarly, pay attention if you see someone using a product to resolve a task that its designers didn’t intend, argues Christensen. Such mismatches often indicate that a version of the product designed for that task would be in high demand. For example, if you work for a sunglasses company and see someone using your sunglasses to block out blue light while working on a computer, it might be an opportunity to create a blue-light-blocking line of sunglasses.

(Shortform note: To discover new consumer tasks in this way, Marty Cagan (Inspired) recommends that product designers intentionally incorporate flexibility into their products so that users can use them in unexpected ways. For example, the founders of eBay intentionally created an “everything else” category so users could sell things online that the founders couldn’t have predicted with the other categories. This paid off when eBay discovered that many of its users were selling used cars through the service, prompting them to further develop the car-selling function of their website.)

How to Design a Product to Solve a Task

Once you’ve defined a consumer task in detail, design a product that accomplishes that task in a satisfying way. According to Christensen, the key to innovative design is to focus on selling a full experience, not just a product. Since every task is tied intrinsically to a specific situation, you can directly work to improve the experience of that specific time and place rather than focusing on features you can add to the product. This may involve extending your focus beyond the core functionality of your product and instead innovating the entire process of purchasing and using your product.

For example, perhaps you sell barbeque grills, and you’ve identified that customers buy your grills to accomplish the task of “help me host outdoor events and serve great food.” You can then innovate to make this entire experience as fulfilling as possible: Offer free delivery and setup, and throw in a free book of recipes. This way, customers don’t have to deal with the potentially frustrating experiences of setting up the grill or researching what to cook on it.

The Experience May Matter More Than the Product

In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin takes this idea further, arguing that the experience surrounding your product is what the customer is really buying. Since customers experience your product from a subjective point of view, changing the conditions in which you present your product can radically change the product itself (from the customer’s perspective). Even if you don’t have a unique product to sell, look past its core functionality and craft a unique experience around it. In doing so, you give value to the customer that they can’t get anywhere else.

For instance, if you create an intricately decorated goth-themed café and give your drinks names like Wretched Tears and Decaying Dread, customers will believe that the drinks taste different and special, even if they’re materially the same as those you could get anywhere else.

How to Center an Organization Around Consumer Tasks

Now that we’ve covered how to identify a task and design a product that solves one, we’ll explain how to build an effective organization by centering all its operations around the idea of the consumer task. Here are three task-oriented strategies organizations can use to thrive.

Strategy #1: Establish Repeatable Procedures to Accomplish a Consumer Task

Christensen argues that the end goal of all organizations should be to accomplish a specific customer task as well as possible. This includes designing an effective product and doing everything necessary to ensure that it satisfies the customers who buy it.

To that end, Christensen recommends identifying a series of procedures that, when completed, always result in a product that gets the customer’s task done satisfactorily. Then, repeat these procedures. Consistent procedures mean that even if individual members of your organization come and go, the result stays the same, guaranteeing customer satisfaction.

For example, if you’re selling a video game that solves the task “give me a thrilling, immersive second life I can escape to,” you must establish a procedure for how you’ll resolve bugs that could ruin the immersive experience. This procedure might be: First, identify and record the bug; then, create a solution and run it on test servers; and finally, upload it to the game and publish an announcement to the players. Following these instructions ensures that the team achieves consistent results every time.

Counterpoint: Establish Goals, Not Procedures

In First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman argue that establishing repeatable procedures for your employees to follow is a mistake. Different employees have different talents and weaknesses, and insisting that they all work in the same way may hinder their productivity.

Instead, they advise simply establishing goals—in Christensen’s terms, this would involve identifying a consumer task and then trusting your employees to discover for themselves the best way to accomplish it. Although this goal-oriented management means that you have to rely more on individual employees, running the risk of disrupting the work if they leave the team, Buckingham and Coffman would argue that this reliance is worth it. They maintain that strategic investment in employees is the number one factor in an organization’s success, resulting in increased productivity, profitability, employee retention, and customer satisfaction.

Christensen offers two tips for using repeatable procedures to increase your company’s chances of success:

Tip #1: Use Repeatable Procedures to Determine Organizational Structure

Rather than defaulting to what you assume an organization like yours should look like, define the procedures necessary to accomplish a consumer task and create a corporate structure to match them, argues Christensen. This is necessary because if your organizational structure doesn’t match your task-focused procedures, you may end up with workers whose procedures are all productive in theory, but in reality work against each other.

For example, if you’re trying to sell fashionable winter coats, you might have a full research and development team trying to create warmer coats as well as a design team trying to create slimmer and more flattering coats. If you keep these teams separate, they might work against each other—the development team creating unflattering coats and the design team trying to strip away the parts making it warm. Instead, ensure no efforts are wasted by combining these two teams into a single design team attempting to resolve the consumer task of a warm coat that looks good.

Counterpoint: Avoiding Collaboration Can Be Efficient

The idea to communicate and collaborate across parts of your organization may seem obvious, but in High Output Management, Andrew Grove explains that there are valid reasons why companies choose to create more siloed organizational structures. Organizations in which each business unit tunnel-visions on their own procedures allow employees to specialize in the narrow set of procedures they’re most equipped to accomplish. As a result, employees worry less about the supplementary tasks needed to connect their work to the consumer task. When managers can successfully coordinate the work of separate business units to accomplish the consumer task, this kind of structure can be incredibly productive.

For example, imagine you manage an ad agency that’s producing several television commercials at the same time. If you divide your employees into collaborative teams that each include a copywriter, a production crew, and an editor, it may be less productive than if you divided your employees into a copywriting team, a video production team, and an editing team. In the latter structure, each employee can focus on the one task they’re best at and work more efficiently.

Tip #2: Acknowledge That Repeatable Procedures Can Change Over Time

Although the strength of organizational procedures is that they provide consistent results when you repeat them, Christensen notes that sometimes, you’ll have to change these procedures over time, adapting to changing circumstances. Tying procedures to the consumer task makes this possible: Even if you completely overhaul your company’s procedures, if the new procedures still match the consumer task, you haven’t compromised the organization’s success.

For example, a movie theater focused on the consumer task of “entertain groups of friends and family when they’re looking to do something out of the house” might adapt to the rise of on-demand streaming by updating their procedures to give viewers a theater experience they can’t get at home. The theater could hire an event coordinator to throw unique social movie nights. Since these new events are directly serving the consumer task, they’ll help your business succeed.

(Shortform note: How specifically can you adapt your organization to changing circumstances? According to Jerry I. Porras and Jim Collins in Built to Last, companies that successfully evolve over time do so by allowing their employees more autonomy. This gives them opportunities to experiment at work and discover new, better ways to fulfill the consumer task. Additionally, these companies offer incentives that reward successful experimentation over repeating what’s worked in the past. Whereas Christensen recommends keeping procedures largely static—only changing in response to new circumstances—Porras and Collins maintain that the most forward-thinking and successful businesses make changes in advance of these trends.)

Strategy #2: Assess Your Procedures With the Right Data

According to Christensen, tracking the right data is essential for ensuring that your organization consistently satisfies a consumer task. Although the wrong data can easily lead you astray (as we discussed earlier), metrics that are directly tied to a consumer task are necessary to assess whether your organization is successfully executing its procedures.

Helpful task-centric metrics are typically external rather than internal—that is, they directly reflect the results you deliver to the customer, rather than employee efforts. External metrics directly represent how well you’re satisfying the consumer task, while internal metrics are distanced from the consumer task and may paint a misleading picture of how well you operate.

For instance, imagine you’re a wedding caterer solving the consumer task of “make our wedding run smoothly by serving great food.” Rather than tracking internal metrics like how quickly you can cook the food or the percentage of full plates you can compose in half an hour, track external metrics like what percentage of wedding guests you serve within half an hour or what percentage of the food you serve is still warm.

Avoid All Vanity Metrics

Ineffective metrics are called “vanity metrics” because tracking them makes your organization look good upon review. However, in reality, these metrics have no connection to how effective your procedures are. In other words, they only fuel your vanity.

Internal metrics that track employee efforts rather than customer results are one type of vanity metric (as Christensen notes). For instance, a wedding caterer could boast the internal metric of “we finish cooking dinner within 30 minutes 100% of the time,” but if that food doesn’t get delivered on time due to careless waitstaff, it’s just a vanity metric masking the organization’s failure.

Christensen states that external, task-centered metrics are effective, but in The Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that external metrics are sometimes vanity metrics, too. External metrics that reflect your total customer results over all time—for instance, the total number of weddings you’ve catered—are vanity metrics because they’ll increase over time no matter how effective your procedures are.

In contrast, external metrics that compare customer results across different spans of time are effective because they’ll only increase if your procedures are getting better. For example, the number of weddings that your company caters to in a given week is a valid metric for assessing the effectiveness of your marketing.

Strategy #3: Use the Consumer Task to Guide All Employees

Once you’ve identified the consumer task your organization is trying to resolve, Christensen contends that you can use that task as the rationale for every decision anyone in your organization makes. As long as a worker knows the task they’re trying to resolve, they’ll be able to weigh the pros and cons of any decision and act productively in complex situations. Rather than worrying about what they’re “supposed” to be doing, they can see for themselves what decisions would best satisfy the consumer and act accordingly. This allows managers to be more hands-off in directing their subordinates.

By contrast, other companies try to empower and inspire their workers with mission statements that are too vague for them to realistically use while making decisions on the job.

For instance, imagine you own a restaurant. If a group of diners is being too loud, workers following a vague mission statement of “the customer is always right” might ignore them. If workers were instead told to prioritize the consumer task of “help me relax on a night out,” they would confront the disruptive customers. They’d recognize that the disruption is preventing them from solving this task for all the other patrons.

(Shortform note: In The Dichotomy of Leadership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin also argue that leaders should identify the organization’s specific unifying purpose (the consumer task, in a business context) and publicize it so every team member can use it to guide their decisions. However, Willink and Babin warn against taking this idea too far; being too hands-off can be just as harmful as micromanagement. As a leader, you shouldn’t tell your subordinates exactly what to do, but it’s your responsibility to make sure that what they choose to do works. Make an effort to be vaguely aware of everything that’s going on in your organization so you’re not caught off guard by poor choices that your subordinates make.)

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