As a product developer, manager, and innovator, your objective is to uncover the jobs or tasks customers want to accomplish and what’s stopping them from doing so.

Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and father of Disruptive Innovation, is one of many authors who discuss innovation in terms of creating a product that accomplishes a job.

“What job was your product hired to do?”

Christensen coined this phrase, which conveys the valuable intersection of product requirements and customer experience. If you understand what job the customer has, making improvements to products becomes simple.

Assessing how your product accomplishes a job for the customer is a helpful way to think about product innovation. In the video Christensen answers the question, “What job were milkshakes hired to do?”