Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Christensen's Jobs-To-Be-Done framework finally given book-length treatment — the argument that customers do not buy products, they "hire" them to make progress in their lives, and that understanding the job tells you more than any demographic or segmentation. The milkshake example (commuters hiring a milkshake for a boring morning drive) is probably the most famous concrete illustration of the idea in the literature. For product direction the book is a useful antidote to feature thinking: most product conversations are about what to build, while JTBD forces the prior question of what progress the customer is trying to make. Christensen's prose is characteristically measured. Read alongside Ulwick's What Customers Want for the operational companion.