01 / The Canon
Christensen: Better technology is not always better for the market that matters next.
Read the two-page section "The Impact of Technological Change" from Chapter 1 of Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. It separates changes that extend an established performance trajectory from changes that reset what performance means - and shows why the second kind can unseat well-managed incumbents.
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Chapter Reader
Read once for the reversal: the pace and difficulty of change are not the cause of leaders' failure. Read again to identify the hidden measurement choice: which performance trajectory defines success, and whose use case does it leave out?
Christensen tests the intuitive story that leaders lose because technology moves too fast for them to keep up. His disk-drive evidence leads elsewhere: the established firms were not simply passive, arrogant, or unable to execute. The speed and difficulty of change did not explain the pattern.
That is the useful discipline in this opening. Do not accept a flattering or easy diagnosis merely because it explains a failure in familiar language. Locate the measurement that would distinguish lack of effort from a system that rewards the wrong response.
Some technologies sustain the trajectory customers already value. They can be incremental or radical, but they make the existing product better by the established measure. In the disk-drive industry, incumbents routinely led these changes because their customers wanted more of the performance they already recognised.
A disruptive technology works differently. It changes or redefines the performance trajectory, often serving a different use case at first. Asking whether it is simply better than the current product misses the decision: better for whom, on which dimension, and at what stage of adoption?
The section sets up the central tension: an entrant can initially look inferior on the incumbent's metric while being the beginning of a new trajectory. Leaders may then make locally sensible choices - investing in what current customers reward - while becoming less able to see the new market's logic.
For commercial work, this is a guardrail against both panic and complacency. Do not call every novelty disruptive. But when a smaller, simpler, or apparently weaker offer is winning a distinct job, investigate the new performance dimension before comparing feature lists.
technology mudslide hypothesis
neither the pace nor the difficulty
sustained the industry's rate of improvement
disrupted or redefined performance trajectories
established firms
Close Reading Sequence
- What evidence does Christensen use to reject the claim that leaders failed because technological change was simply too fast or difficult?
- In your own words, distinguish a sustaining technology from a disruptive one without using the words incremental, radical, better, or worse.
- Name one metric your team treats as the definition of product progress. Which customer or use case might that metric fail to represent?
- Find a product that looked weaker on the incumbent's main measure when it entered. What alternate performance trajectory made it useful to its first users?
- What observation would tell you that a new offer is merely a novelty rather than the start of a distinct performance trajectory?
02 / The Principle
A performance metric is a map, not the territory.
Customer evidence is indispensable for sustaining work, but it cannot reveal a market that has not yet learned how to ask. When a new offer underperforms on the established measure, inspect the job and trajectory before deciding it has no future.
A design team keeps increasing an analytics product's number of dashboards because power users ask for more control. A lightweight daily briefing looks weak beside that suite. But if managers adopt it because it replaces a 20-minute morning scan with one clear decision, the comparison is not dashboard count; it is time-to-orientation.
Choose one emerging competitor, workflow, or customer workaround. Make two columns: the established performance measure and the possible new trajectory. For each, write the user, the job, what initially looks worse, and the smallest interview or usage observation that could test whether the new trajectory is real.
03 / Field Notes
Three signals that the old measure can conceal the next customer decision.
Kraft Heinz adds nearly $100M to marketing as it seeks a turnaround
What happened: Kraft Heinz said it is putting nearly $100 million more into marketing, with executives pointing to higher-impact media partnerships and stronger creative as early positive signs for its U.S. brands. Why it matters: The spend is not the lesson by itself. In Christensen's terms, it is a sustaining move: improve the effectiveness of the system customers already recognise. The useful question is whether the company is also testing a different route to relevance, not merely making the existing route louder. Watch: Whether the extra investment produces a repeatable audience or channel advantage, rather than only a temporary lift on established brand measures.
Read sourceClaire's refreshes the piercing service, not just the merchandise
What happened: Claire's is rolling out updated training, store displays, earrings, and related changes as part of a broader upgrade to its in-store piercing service. Why it matters: A retailer can be judged on assortment and price while the customer is actually choosing a confidence-bearing service moment. The redesign is a reminder to inspect the job and performance dimension that the current category metrics may leave out. Watch: Whether the upgraded experience changes first-time conversion, repeat visits, or recommendation more meaningfully than the product-level changes alone.
Read sourceOpenAI's reported speaker price puts the AI-device test in a familiar category
What happened: TechCrunch reports that OpenAI's forthcoming AI device could be a smart-speaker-like product priced between $300 and $400, adding a consumer price anchor to a still indistinct hardware proposition. Why it matters: New hardware often looks weak when compared feature-for-feature with the incumbent category. A price and form factor make the real test clearer: can the device earn a distinct recurring job, rather than be evaluated only as another speaker? Watch: Whether the eventual product is explained through a concrete daily use case that justifies a separate performance trajectory from conventional voice assistants.
Read source04 / Collected Fragments
Two fragments on the work a new trajectory makes visible.
Slack began as an internal tool with a different market ahead of it
This retelling of Slack's pivot makes Christensen's question practical: an internal communication tool could look peripheral to a game studio, then become the product that fit a different customer and market trajectory.
.@bhorowitz on how a game studio turned it's last $6 million into Slack: "Stewart calls me. He says, 'Ben, I've got $6 million left. I have no way to raise money because I've made really no progress. So I've got three choices. I can pray for rain and try and finish it, I can shut down the company and give you your $6 million back, or we built this tool that we use in our engineering team to communicate with each other, and I could just put that out as a product.'" "I'm like, 'What? You just built some tool to talk to each other and you want to put that out as a product? And you're a consumer guy, and you want to become an enterprise software guy?'" "$6 million is not gonna make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea, go ahead." Ben Horowitz Talks Honesty, Failure, and Secrets at UC Berkeley (2016)
Open on X
Intentional rule-breaking resists an average aesthetic
Figma CEO Dylan Field's Brat-cover example is a useful design analogue for disruptive trajectories: the answer that optimises existing aesthetic norms can miss a deliberate signal whose power comes from changing the evaluation frame.
Figma's @zoink explains how the Brat album cover is a great example of how 'intentionally bad' design can actually be super effective: "AI will never generate that." "Let's say we had the perfect aesthetic model. It's not going to give you Brat's album cover." "It breaks the rules." "There's a great talk from Config this year on the Brat album cover. And what was really cool about that talk – it basically goes into all of the process behind that cover, and how they got there." "It's a really, really well-done talk, and it shows the level of intentionality that was brought — and how much work was done — to arrive at something so simple that breaks the rules just perfectly."
Open on X
05 / The Practice
Find the measure that makes the newcomer look weak.
After reading, produce a short trajectory audit: the incumbent metric, the emerging use case, and one observation that would show whether the newcomer is building a different performance curve rather than merely trailing on the old one.