Your competition is not who you think it is: it is what your customer hires instead of you

Contents

• In 1 minute
• Who is your product really competing against?
• What did Christensen propose, in two lines?
• Why doesn't knowing more about your customers tell you why they buy?
• What breaks in your systems when the product is designed by category?
• How far along is your company? A diagnostic with thresholds
• What does it look like in insurance and in a company's administration?
• Which mistakes cost the most?
• What should you bring to the meeting? The job sheet
• Where do you start on Monday?
• Key takeaways
• What Hábil does

Between 2014 and 2015, a Mexican airline went looking for customers in an unusual place for an airline: bus terminals.

There it exchanged bus tickets for trips of more than five hours for plane tickets, at no cost to the passenger. That came to 20,000 tickets in one year, according to what its CEO told El Financiero in August 2015 [10].

The airline was Volaris. It did not stop competing against other airlines. But it also went after the bus passenger [10].

That decision sums up the idea of this article: your competition is not the company that sells the same thing you do. It is what your customer hires when they do not hire you. Sometimes it is another company. Sometimes it is a bus, a spreadsheet or doing nothing.

One clarification before we start: Hábil did not take part in the cases mentioned here and has not worked with those companies. We tell them using what the companies themselves, the press, the authors of the model, INEGI (Mexico's national statistics institute), BBVA Research and the SAT published.

In 1 minute

• The risk: designing your product, your price and your systems by category ("we sell insurance," "we sell accounting software") and losing to something that does not even appear on your list of competitors.
• What the model says: customers do not buy products; they "hire" them to make progress in a specific circumstance. Clayton Christensen and three coauthors published it in 2016 [1][2].
• The case: besides competing with other airlines, Volaris went out to compete against the bus. Between 2006 and 2019 it went from 0.9 to 21.9 million booked passengers, domestic and international. That growth has several causes, according to the company and its CEO; the bus is one of them [9][10].
• What not acting costs: the hours your people spend each month by hand, in spreadsheets and emails, plus the sales you lose to "doing nothing" that nobody records today.
• Your decision for Monday: fill in the job sheet for your main product with ten real customers, measure how much of that job is done by hand or in another system, and give it a monthly cost and an owner.

Who is your product really competing against?

Volaris fought other airlines and, on top of that, the bus.

Volaris began flying in March 2006, with five routes and four aircraft [7][9]. That year it booked about 0.9 million passengers [8][9].

In the annual reports to the SEC that we reviewed (2013, 2014 and 2019), the company says the same thing: on domestic routes it also competes against the bus and the car [7][8][9]. And it gave the reason: with little passenger rail, the bus had been, for a large part of the population, the only cheap way to travel long distances [7].

And whom was it after? It said so itself: its advantage lay in low base fares and in three types of traveler, those visiting friends and relatives, leisure travelers and cost-conscious business travelers [9]. Its executive vice president and chief commercial officer, Holger Blankenstein, said in 2020 that between 40% and 50% of its demand came from the first group [11].

According to the federal motor transport authority cited by Volaris, buses carried more than 2.8 billion passengers in Mexico in 2013, counting short and long trips; only about 75 million of them traveled on executive or luxury service [7][8].

The sequence, with dates:

The table does not prove that the bus explains the growth. The annual report attributes it to the economy, to its low-cost model for people visiting family or traveling for leisure, to its service and to its brand [9]. In 2015, the CEO, Enrique Beltranena, gave four causes: the market, the brand, the routes and, in fourth place, the bus [10]. He also said that, in onboard surveys, between 5% and 6% of passengers had never flown before [10]. These are the executive's statements, not figures from an audited report.

What did it cost? Three things that can happen to you as well:

• A price tied to the substitute. If one rival is the bus, some promotional fares are set by looking at the bus ticket [7][9].
• A product split into pieces. Charging separately for baggage and other services requires each piece to have its own price, its own rule and its own charge. Average revenue that does not come from the ticket went from about 6.92 dollars per segment in 2009 to 28.2 in 2019 [9].
• A risk that moves with the economy. The company itself warns that, if the economy slows, its customers may switch to the bus [7][9].

The lesson is not "lower your prices." Our reading of the case is different: Volaris identified what job the bus did in the lives of many of its customers (getting far and cheaply, often to see family [9][11]) and aligned its price, its product and its advertising to do that job better.

What did Christensen propose, in two lines?

The model fits in two lines: people do not buy products, they hire them to move forward in a specific situation; and if the product does that job poorly, they fire it.

Clayton Christensen was a professor at Harvard Business School [1]. With Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan he published "Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'" in Harvard Business Review, in the September 2016 issue [1][2]. His book Competing Against Luck came out the same year (Harper Business, October 2016) [1][5][6].

The idea went back further. In December 2005, Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall had already laid it out in HBR with a famous example: a fast-food chain that wanted to sell more milkshakes [3].

The authors call a "job" the progress a person seeks in a given circumstance [1]. To apply the model, this guide breaks it down into four questions you can write on a single sheet (the breakdown is ours; the functional, social and emotional dimensions do come from the authors [1]):

Why doesn't knowing more about your customers tell you why they buy?

Knowing your customer's profile tells you who they are; it does not tell you why they buy. And what causes the purchase is the circumstance.

The most useful case in the 2016 article is that of a condominium builder near Detroit [1]:

• It sold to retirees and divorced parents leaving the family home, with prices from 120,000 to 200,000 dollars [1].
• Many visits, few sales. They added large windows because a focus group asked for them. Nothing changed [1].
• The consultant Bob Moesta interviewed people who had actually bought and asked them to draw the timeline of their decision. A clue appeared: the dining room table [1].

That table was the family. What held back the move was not a finish. It was the distress of leaving behind something so full of meaning [1].

Moesta summed it up this way: "we were in the business of moving lives" [1].

The builder changed the product around that job: it made room for the table, offered moving services, two years of storage and a room for deciding calmly what to throw away [1][4].

The result, according to the authors: it raised the price by 3,500 dollars, profitably covering the move and the storage. And in 2007, when industry sales had fallen 49%, its business grew 25% [1][4].

Notice whom it was competing against. Not other new condominiums: the option of not moving at all [1]. Your toughest competitor may be your customer doing nothing.

The same goes for the 2005 milkshake. A researcher saw that 40% were sold early in the morning, to people on their own who took them to the car [3]. Their job: making the commute less boring and lasting until lunch, with one hand free. It competed against the banana, the doughnut and the bagel, not against other milkshakes [3].

Why does it matter so much? Because very few new products take off. The authors cite a Nielsen report: of more than 20,000 new products assessed in its 2012–2016 report, only 92 sold more than 50 million dollars in their first year and kept up their sales in the second [1]. According to Nielsen, every one of those successes addressed a specific job that was being served badly [1]. That is the figure as the authors report it; one of them, Taddy Hall, led that report [1].

What breaks in your systems when the product is designed by category?

If your product was designed by category, so were your systems: each area sees its own piece and nobody sees the customer's whole job.

The authors say that understanding the job is only the beginning. Then the purchase and use experience has to be designed, and the processes of the whole company aligned to that job [1].

The example is Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), a US university, according to the case reported by the authors [1]:

• Its online program served adults around 30 years old, with jobs, families and sometimes debts. They were not looking for campus life: they wanted ease, good service, a degree and to finish soon [1].
• Its admissions process was built for 18-year-olds. When they drew it on a whiteboard, its president, Paul LeBlanc, compared it to the diagram of a nuclear submarine [1].
• They set the goal of calling a prospective student within eight and a half minutes: those people research at night, and a generic email the next day tended to arrive too late [1].
• Decisions on financial aid and transfer credits went from weeks or months to days [1].

The authors report that SNHU grew 34% a year, compounded, for six years and was nearing 535 million dollars in revenue at the close of its 2016 fiscal year [1]. That is their figure; there is no second source in this article.

Note what had to change: not the advertising, but response times between areas. That is a systems problem.

The second example is business-to-business, told by its cofounder in the same article. Intercom, which makes software for companies to talk with their customers, charged one price for its whole platform [1]. Bob Moesta's team interviewed customers who had just signed up and those who had left, and found four different jobs. Intercom rebuilt its offering into four services, with four teams, and its conversion rate went up [1].

Translated into your operations, this is what usually breaks:

The table is our judgment, not the model's. The model says what to align [1]; the table says where it usually fails.

How far along is your company? A diagnostic with thresholds

If more than half of the job your customer hires you for goes through a spreadsheet, an email or a WhatsApp message, you have a warning sign: find out which part of the job is still outside your product.

Use this table in your next meeting. The thresholds marked as guidelines are our judgment; the others carry their source. The last column says which decision to ask for when the signal comes out red.

How to count the steps (our judgment). Take a real case, from the customer's request to delivery. Write down each step and mark those that happen outside your system: a spreadsheet, an email, a WhatsApp message, double data entry. Divide the marked steps by the total. Repeat it with five cases and use the average.

A figure to gauge the size of "doing nothing." In 2024, only 22.9% of people aged 18 to 70 in Mexico had insurance, 1.9 points less than in 2015, according to the survey by INEGI and the CNBV [12]. BBVA Research confirms the 22.9%: 1.9 points above the 21.0% of 2021 and below the 25.4% of 2018 [13]. By subtraction, 77.1% reported none.

For an insurer, that 77.1% is not with the competition. It is what the authors call nonconsumption: people who hire no one [1]. Not all of it is an addressable market; it may be a nonconsumption signal worth segmenting. SNHU found in nonconsumption a market with huge untapped potential [1].

What does it look like in insurance and in a company's administration?

In insurance and in administration, part of the job the customer hires you for may still live in a spreadsheet nobody sees.

We did not find a public Mexican case, with figures and in order, of an insurer or a distributor that redesigned its product around the customer's job. That is why there are two scenarios here, marked as such.

Example scenario 1 (a fictitious insurer, built for this article; it does not describe any real insurer or any Hábil client; the figures are illustrative): an insurer sells medical expense insurance to SMEs through agents.

• The job the SME owner hires: keeping key people without a claim throwing the payroll off balance. And deciding it during the agent's visit, not in two weeks.
• What they hire today instead: nothing (they pay out of pocket when someone gets sick) or a loan.
• What is done by hand: the agent quotes in a personal spreadsheet. The new rate for SMEs with fewer than 15 people has been waiting four months for development. Every special quote goes to underwriting by email.
• What breaks: the agent promises a price the system cannot reproduce; the SME waits; the owner decides to do nothing.

Example scenario 2 (a fictitious company; the figures are illustrative): a distributor with 90 people and two legal entities that believes it needs "an accounting system."

• The job the controller hires: closing the month without losing a deduction or any creditable VAT, and knowing in time what is missing.
• What she hires today instead: an assistant who downloads invoices from the SAT portal one by one and matches them in Excel, 30 hours a month.
• What breaks: what is missing is discovered at the close, when it is too late to ask for it.

The volume shows the scale of that job: according to the SAT, more than 10.323 billion electronic invoices were issued in Mexico in 2023, an average of 327 per second [14][15].

It is the pattern the authors describe with Intuit: when they saw small businesses using Quicken, made for individuals, to keep their books, they understood there was a new market [1]. A workaround your customer invented is a sign of a job being served badly [1].

Which mistakes cost the most?

The costly mistake is deciding the product, the price and the systems by looking at the category.

1. Defining the market by product. Consequence: you fight for share against whoever sells the same thing and you do not see the substitute. The milkshake chain tried it thicker, more chocolatey or cheaper; the morning job was something else [3].
2. Believing that more customer data explains the purchase. Consequence: ever finer profiles and the same sales. The authors insist that correlation does not prove cause [1].
3. Asking what they want instead of what they did. Consequence: you add large windows nobody uses. The clue came from the timeline of real buyers, not from the focus group [1].
4. Leaving "doing nothing" out. Consequence: you miss a relevant nonconsumption signal. For an insurer, the 77.1% without insurance [12][13], which is worth segmenting before calling it a market.
5. One price for everything. Consequence: the customer pays for what they do not use and finds it expensive; Intercom went through this [1]. Or, the other way around, splitting the product into pieces without systems that charge for each piece with its rule.
6. Changing the advertising and not the processes. Consequence: you promise speed and answer in days. SNHU had to adjust hundreds of processes to its students' job, not just its ads [1].
7. Measuring only the sale. Consequence: the system says how much you sold, not why they hired you or why they fired you. Without that record, the next decision is a gamble again.

What should you bring to the meeting? The job sheet

Our recommendation: no product goes up for review without its job sheet, with cost, owner and decision requested.

This sheet is ours. It organizes what Christensen and his coauthors ask for (circumstance, progress, dimensions, obstacles and alternatives [1]) and adds what matters for your systems.

Fields 10 to 13 turn the sheet into a portfolio decision: they let you compare products by cost and risk, not by gut feeling.

Example scenario (illustrative figures, not from a real company): this is what the sheet for the insurer in scenario 1 would look like.

Fill in the sheet for your three main products with ten real customers for each one. Sort the sheets by monthly impact (field 10): that is your list of projects.

Where do you start on Monday?

Start by interviewing whoever just bought and whoever just left, not with a market study.

1. Pick one product, the one that worries you most.
2. Talk to ten customers: five who bought in the last three months and five who left or stopped using it. The number is our recommendation; the contrast between recent customers and customers who left is the one Moesta's team used with Intercom [1].
3. Ask them for the timeline: when they started looking, what they tried before, what almost stopped them. Do not ask them what they want [1].
4. Write down what they hired before you. If the most frequent answer is "nothing" or "a spreadsheet," there is a nonconsumption signal worth measuring.
5. Fill in the sheet and add up the hours in row 8. That number, times the cost per hour, is a first estimate of the cost of the manual steps. Check which ones should be eliminated, integrated or kept: some are necessary.

Key takeaways

Three questions for your next leadership committee:

1. What do our customers hire when they do not hire us, and do we have it measured?
2. What part of the job they hire us for is still done by hand, by email or in a spreadsheet, and how many hours a month is that?
3. How long does a change in price, rule or product take to reach the customer, and who is waiting for it?

What Hábil does

Hábil has built critical systems since 2006. Before proposing an implementation, we review with you the process, the systems, the people responsible and the first result worth solving. Then we configure and integrate systems to reduce manual steps within the agreed scope.

As far as this article goes, there are two products:

• Pauta, for insurers and financial companies. Pauta brings your products, rules and pricing together in one place. Your Product, Risk and Actuarial teams manage agreed changes, within the permissions and scope you define, without having to develop each adjustment from scratch. Every calculation returns its breakdown and a record of the rules applied. It connects through API with sales, ERP and CRM. Learn more at habil.mx/en/pauta.
• Cuadre, for the job of closing without losing deductions. Cuadre downloads your issued and received CFDIs (Mexican e-invoices) from the SAT, payment complements included, notifies you on WhatsApp when a new one arrives and reconciles on three fronts: payment complements against invoices, the SAT against your accounting system, and your bank against your CFDIs. Learn more at habil.mx/en/cuadre.

If you filled in the sheet and row 8 came out long, let's start there. Request your first conversation, at no cost. Tell us which product, rate or close weighs on you today; we will tell you which product makes sense to start with, or whether none of them does, and what the next step would be. Write to us on WhatsApp from habil.mx/en/products.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work for companies that sell to other companies?

Yes. The authors include the case of Intercom, which sells to companies, and say the job matters just as much in that kind of sale [1].

Does it replace segmentation by profile?

It does not throw it away. The authors say profiles and focus groups can be a good starting point, but that the purchase is explained by the circumstance [1].

Sources consulted on October 22, 2026. The paraphrases of the HBR articles are ours; the only verbatim quotation is a short excerpt, in English, from the 2016 article.