Author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen writes in his book Competing Against Luck that most companies don’t know how to innovate because they’re asking the wrong question.

Don’t ask: How can I get people to buy my product?

His “Jobs to Be Done” theory of innovation says that customers hire products or services to perform particular jobs. Some of those jobs might be small (e.g., pass the time while waiting in line), while others are more significant (e.g., find a more fulfilling career).  

Once you know the real job that your product or service does, you can align product development and marketing around that job. 

For example, when Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 in a crowded market of MP3 players, the company didn’t copy the marketing jargon used by its competitors, which focused on gigabytes and other technical features.

Instead, Steve Jobs positioned the iPod as “1,000 songs in your pocket.” 

He understood the real job that customers were hiring the iPod to do: allowing you to carry your music collection around with you.

You can also use the Jobs to Be Done framework outside the context of creating products. 

As an employee, you can  look beyond your job description and ask yourself: What are they really hiring me to do?

It’s even applicable outside of business. In the context of any personal connection, ask yourself: What does this person really want out of this relationship?

Marketing guru Seth Godin asks on his blog: “This project you’re working on, the new business or offering, what sort of value does it create?”

For Godin, focusing your solution makes it more likely that it will find the traction it needs. 

He offers the following value-creation checklist for guidance: 

What’s your marketing and sales strategy? 

Author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers writes in a blog post that when you’re making important life decisions, you should always consider the following three factors:

As Sivers points out, you’ll know you’re on the right path when your decision is at the intersection of all three.

The problem is that we tend to forget at least one of these factors, as illustrated by the below profiles.

This is the stereotype of the strict parent who says:

The smart and useful approach is rational, like a machine.

But if you don’t have happiness acting as the oil, “the friction kills the engine.”

This person is always learning, and is obsessively focused on how to be happy and create a perfect life.

For Sivers, the problem is that becoming fulfilled and successful isn’t a solo exercise: “Ultimately you must be lifted by those around you.”

After graduating from an expensive university, this person spends years “flying to exotic impoverished places to dig wells and thatch roofs.”

But if their time could be worth $200 per hour, and they’re doing work that the locals themselves could be do better for $10 per hour, then their actions are actually a disservice to others.

They have wonderful intentions but poor strategies, resulting in “wasted effort and unused potential.”

For this person, being happy is all that matters.

But there are two downsides:

“Between 1865 and 1905 … schooling was increasingly sold to the people … that these kids have to be reprocessed away from people aiming for an independent livelihood, to people who are addicted to stuff, addicted to praise, and willing to think of life as someone else giving you a “good job.”

Rather than finding a use for yourself. 

I think when you think about finding a use for yourself, the answers are infinite. It’s hard at first, but once answers start coming, they never stop coming. You wake up in the middle of the night, you fill notebooks. You realize in a 100 lifetimes you couldn’t do all the worthwhile things that’ll make you a good livelihood.

Because we all have these abundant needs.”

- Educator and historian John Taylor Gatto in a 2005 talk