Competing Against Luck

I've read quite a few books on building products and businesses. After the first few chapters of Clayton Christensen's Competing Against Luck, I thought I was reading another variation on familiar advice: understand your customers, solve their problems, and build something useful. And, in many ways, I was. But Christensen brought that familiar advice into focus with a simple question: Why do we hire, and why do we fire?

What Jobs Am I Being Hired to Do?

I'm a software developer. My clients hire me to launch businesses, automate workflows, and solve problems for them. AI is making the coding part increasingly cheap. But rather than worrying about being replaced, I'm asking how I can help my clients use AI to accomplish far more than I could deliver through software development alone.

What Jobs Are My Products Being Hired to Do?

As a developer, I have no shortage of ideas for software I'd like to build. But it's easy to get caught up in features and lose sight of the most important question: why would someone fire an existing product and hire mine instead?

What Jobs Am I Hiring Others to Do?

The same principle applies when I'm the customer. Consider going out to lunch. I'm not just satisfying hunger; I might want a break from work, a healthy meal, or some social interaction. Yet I often make these decisions out of habit. Thinking in terms of jobs helps me be more deliberate about what I'm doing and find better ways to accomplish my goals.

What Jobs Can I Hire AI to Do?

AI agents offer an opportunity to build businesses differently. Rather than simply delegating tasks, I can design jobs the business needs done. For example, I could hire an agent not just to write marketing emails, but to find prospective customers and understand the problems they're trying to solve. Like designing software, this requires clear responsibilities, well-defined goals, and ways to measure success.

Conclusion

Competing Against Luck didn't fundamentally change how I think. Much of its advice was familiar, but the Jobs to Be Done framework is a useful way to ask better questions. What job really needs to be done, and what's the best way to accomplish it?