Customers hire products to make progress, not to acquire features

Christensen reframes purchasing decisions around the idea that people don't fundamentally want a product's attributes — they want to make specific progress in a specific circumstance, and they 'hire' whatever product or service seems best equipped to deliver that progress. A drill isn't bought for its own sake; it's hired to make a hole, and if a better way to make that hole appeared, the drill would be fired without hesitation.

This reframing shifts the unit of analysis away from the product itself and onto the underlying struggle the customer is experiencing, which Christensen argues is a far more stable and predictable thing to design around than shifting feature preferences or demographic profiles.

Takeaway: understanding what progress your customer is trying to make matters more than understanding what your product technically does.