The question Clayton Christensen said was most underexplored in innovation research: “What workarounds have people invented?”

His reasoning was straightforward. When customers are struggling to get something done by cobbling together workarounds — using spreadsheets as a database, duct-taping two services together, building internal tools to compensate for gaps in yours — they are probably deeply unhappy with the available solutions and therefore a promising base of new business.

The workaround is market intelligence you didn’t have to ask for. It’s more honest than survey data, more specific than focus groups, and more actionable than most strategic planning exercises. It tells you not just what customers want but what they want badly enough to do something inconvenient to get.

Most companies have access to this intelligence. Almost none of them have built the organizational process to collect it systematically, interpret it correctly, and act on what it reveals.

What Workarounds Actually Reveal

A customer workaround is any behavior where a customer is working around your product or service rather than through it. It shows up in several forms:

Adjacent tool adoption. Customers using a different product alongside yours to accomplish something your product should be able to do. When enterprise software users build shadow Excel spreadsheets to do the reporting that the expensive enterprise system should produce, that’s a workaround. When marketing teams use consumer-grade tools because the enterprise tools are too slow or complex for the task at hand, that’s a workaround.

Internal custom development. Customers building internal tools to bridge gaps in yours. This is one of the most significant workaround signals because it represents a revealed willingness to invest — in engineering time, project management, ongoing maintenance — to solve a problem that the existing solution doesn’t adequately address. When customers are building around you rather than with you, the gap is large enough that they’ve made a capital allocation decision to address it themselves.

Compensating behaviors. Customers changing how they work to avoid the friction points in your product. If customers consistently don’t use a feature because the workflow to reach it is too complex, the workaround is workflow simplification — they’ve redesigned their process to avoid the product’s limitations. This is harder to see in usage data because it looks like non-adoption rather than active workaround.

Creative repurposing. Customers using your product for something you didn’t design it for. Christensen called these “surprising uses” and identified them as one of the highest-signal indicators in consumer packaged goods innovation. When customers are using your product for an unintended purpose and getting significant value from it, they’re revealing a job to be done that you hadn’t identified.

The Jobs Theory Framework

The most useful lens for interpreting customer workarounds comes from Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, developed with colleagues at Harvard Business School and operationalized through Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation methodology.

The core insight is deceptively simple: customers don’t buy products or services. They “hire” products or services to accomplish specific jobs in specific circumstances. When the available solutions don’t adequately serve the job, customers improvise.

Intuit discovered through JTBD research that small business owners weren’t hiring accounting software primarily for bookkeeping features. They were hiring it to achieve “peace of mind about tax season” — to reduce the anxiety of financial uncertainty and the cognitive overhead of staying compliant. The workarounds small business owners were building — the spreadsheets, the folders full of receipts, the accountant visits that happened too late to be preventative — were all attempts to solve the peace-of-mind job with tools designed for something adjacent to it.

That insight changed what Intuit built. Products designed around “bookkeeping features” look different from products designed around “peace of mind about financial uncertainty.” The latter set of features — proactive alerts, simplified tax preparation integration, cash flow forecasting — emerged directly from understanding what the workarounds were compensating for.

Building the Collection System

Most companies don’t have a systematic way to collect workaround intelligence. Support tickets get triaged and resolved without being mined for patterns. Sales calls surface product gaps that get added to a backlog without being connected to business model implications. Customer success managers develop intuitions about what customers do around the product that never make it into structured analysis.

Building the collection system requires three things:

Permission to look. Customer success teams, sales teams, and support teams need explicit direction that workaround identification is part of their job — not just solving the immediate problem, but surfacing the pattern. This requires making the question explicit: “What are customers doing to work around this limitation?” and “What are customers using alongside this product?” should be standing questions in customer conversations.

A pattern recognition layer. Individual workarounds are interesting; patterns are actionable. The collection system needs a way to aggregate across customers, identify which workarounds are widespread versus isolated, and connect them to specific jobs-to-be-done. This is where the business model intelligence actually lives — not in any individual workaround but in what it looks like when many customers are solving for the same unmet job in the same approximate way.

Connection to strategic decision-making. The intelligence is worthless if it doesn’t reach the people who make product and business model decisions. In most organizations, there’s a significant attenuation between what customer-facing teams know and what product and strategy teams decide. Building the workaround intelligence system requires closing that gap — creating channels and rhythms through which field intelligence consistently reaches decision-makers.

The Operating Cadence That Makes This Real

A collection system without a rhythm is just a box things fall into. The organizations that act effectively on workaround intelligence run a specific operating cadence that keeps the signal from getting buried.

Monthly: a 60-minute cross-functional review where sales, customer success, and support each bring their top three workaround observations from the past four weeks. Not problems — workarounds. The distinction matters. A problem is “customer X is unhappy with Y.” A workaround is “customer X built a Zapier integration to connect our tool to their analytics stack because our native reporting doesn’t let them segment by the variable they care most about.” The specificity is where the intelligence lives.

Quarterly: a pattern synthesis session where the past three months of workaround observations are reviewed as a set, grouped by the underlying job each is addressing, and evaluated for frequency and severity. Frequency tells you how widespread the unmet need is. Severity tells you how bad the gap feels to the people experiencing it. The intersection of high frequency and high severity is where the highest-priority opportunities sit.

Annually: an assessment of which workaround patterns have produced product or business model responses, and which have not — and an honest accounting of why the ones that haven’t were deprioritized. This last step is the most important and most commonly skipped. Organizations that collect workaround intelligence but don’t act on it develop a cynicism in the customer-facing teams doing the collection: “Why are we documenting this if nothing ever happens with it?” That cynicism kills the system. The annual review creates accountability for the loop closing.

From Workaround to Opportunity

The progression from workaround identification to business model opportunity follows a consistent pattern.

First, the workaround reveals an unserved or underserved job. Not a feature request — a job: a specific outcome a customer is trying to achieve in specific circumstances that the current product doesn’t adequately serve.

Second, the pattern across workarounds reveals the magnitude of the opportunity. A workaround that’s isolated to one customer segment is interesting. A workaround that’s consistent across many customers in different contexts reveals a structural gap — something the current model systematically fails to address.

Third, the workaround often suggests the solution. The way customers have improvised to solve the job contains clues about what a designed solution would look like. Instagram’s founders noticed users were predominantly using Burbn’s photo feature. The workaround — using the app for something it wasn’t primarily designed for — revealed both the job and the solution. They didn’t have to invent photo-sharing; they had to remove everything else.

Fourth, the competitive context of the workaround reveals the opportunity window. When customers are building their own solutions — writing custom integrations, building internal tools — they’ve made the determination that the market hasn’t offered an adequate solution. That’s typically an open competitive window: the customers have defined the job precisely enough to act on it, the existing solutions are inadequate, and the willingness to invest is proven. The company that shows up with a designed solution that adequately serves the job has a motivated, already-frustrated customer base ready to convert.

The Business Model Implication

The most important workaround intelligence isn’t about product features. It’s about business model gaps — places where the current model creates friction that customers work around rather than through.

When enterprise software customers export data to Excel for analysis, they’re not just revealing a product gap. They’re revealing that the existing model — licensed annual contracts with fixed feature sets — doesn’t serve the job of “getting analysis done quickly in the way I want to do it.” The workaround is telling you something about pricing, delivery, and interaction model, not just functionality.

When subscription box customers photograph the items they receive and share them on social media before unboxing them, they’re not just being enthusiastic. They’re revealing that the ritual of receiving and unboxing is a job they’re hiring the subscription for — a job that could be designed for explicitly rather than happening accidentally.

The translation from workaround pattern to business model decision runs through a specific question: Is the customer working around a product limitation, or working around a structural feature of how we do business? The first category produces a product roadmap item. The second produces a business model question.

When Keurig noticed that office workers were boiling kettles and using pour-over methods to get specialty coffee at work — despite the Keurig being available and faster — the workaround wasn’t about product performance. It was about taste and ritual. The pod coffee model, by definition, optimizes for speed and consistency at the expense of quality and craft. The workaround was telling Keurig that a segment of its users had a different job: not “get caffeine quickly” but “have a real coffee moment.” That’s a business model question, not a feature question. It raises the possibility of a different offer, priced and positioned differently, serving a fundamentally different version of the job.

The businesses that consistently identify these business model questions — before the workaround pattern has grown large enough to attract a focused competitor who builds specifically for the unserved job — are the ones that maintain the market position their initial innovation earned them. The ones that treat all workarounds as product feedback, and route them to the product team, slowly accumulate a roster of unserved jobs that eventually become the competitive opportunity someone else captures.