Anthony W. Ulwick

Employing a Dominant Strategy

A dominant strategy is always the most appealing approach for a new market entrant to take because incumbents cannot defend against it. Our experience suggests that companies can win with a dominant strategy if they introduce a product or service that gets the job done (addresses the customer’s unmet desired outcomes) at least 20% better and at least 20% more cheaply. This can be measured with high precision and probability when evaluating a proposed concept against a complete set of desired outcome statements.

Netflix’s streaming services, for example, offered greater convenience than traditional rental stores such as Blockbuster by making it easier to find, obtain, and consume movies. In addition, they reduced the cost of watching a movie by eliminating the annoying late-return fees and enabling customers to watch more content for a low monthly subscription rate.

We helped Kroll Ontrack enter the electronic evidence discovery market with a dominant strategy. While traditional competitors in this field gathered evidence manually, Kroll Ontrack created a solution that enabled legal teams to get the job done significantly better and more cheaply through the use of digital technology. This strategy led them to immediate success and market leadership that they have sustained for over a decade.

In any market, an incumbent or a new market entrant can win with a product or service that gets the job done significantly better and more cheaply. Incumbents are less likely to create such a product or service because it could dramatically cut their margins and may require an investment in a new product platform, capabilities, and resources.

Employing a Disruptive Strategy

The Jobs-to-be-Done Growth Strategy Matrix confirms that Clayton Christensen, who coined the term disruptive innovation, was correct: companies can win in overserved segments with products that enable customers to get a job done more cheaply, but not as well as competing solutions. Based on our model, we also agree with Christensen that a disruptive strategy successfully serves two customer segments: highly overserved customers (like users of Microsoft Word who switched to Google Docs) and
nonconsumers—people who do not buy currently available products.

A disruptive strategy works in both situations, but for different reasons. It works for current consumers who are overserved, as Christensen’s theory suggests, and are willing to make some sacrifices to get the job done more cheaply.

Nonconsumers, on the other hand, are underserved: they simply can’t afford any of the solutions that are currently available. If a product comes along that they can afford, it will allow them to get the job done better than they can currently.

Christensen also correctly identified another phenomenon that occurs in the marketplace when he described disruptive innovation as “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” Seen through the Job-to-be-Done lens, the “process of disruption” is best described as the introduction of a series of products, the first of which employs a disruptive strategy that gets the job done worse and more cheaply, followed by a series of products that build on that technology platform, with more and more features, until the newest offerings get the job done better and more cheaply (figure on next page).

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