The Clayton Christensen
Framework
Disruption & Jobs to Be Done
Clayton Christensen represents one of the most distinctive thinking patterns in their field. Clayton Christensen's approach, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The disruption & jobs to be done framework distils Clayton Christensen's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Clayton Christensen made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Clayton Christensen's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Clayton Christensen's thinking.
Customers do not buy products. They hire them to do a specific job in their lives, and understanding that job, with all its functional, social, and emotional dimensions, is the only reliable foundation for innovation. Disruption is not a synonym for breakthrough. It is a precise mechanism by which entrants serving overlooked or non-consuming markets gradually redefine the performance criteria incumbents are optimizing for, until the incumbents' advantages become irrelevant. The most dangerous competitive threats are the ones that look, by every metric you currently measure, like they are not competing with you at all.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
What job is the customer hiring this product to do, and what were they firing when they hired it?
4 more questions in Clayton Christensen's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Clayton Christensen actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Clayton Christensen's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Clayton Christensen, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →clayton-christensen.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →clayton-christensen-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Watch where your resources go. My position: don't take this client unless you can answer one question first, which is what job you would be hired to do for them, and whether it is the same job your best existing customers hire you for.
Large, difficult clients are dangerous for a founder because of how resources actually get allocated. Nobody decides to bend the company around them. It happens through a thousand small, rational choices: your best engineer gets pulled onto their escalations, your roadmap bends toward their feature requests, your pricing and terms soften because the revenue is so visible. Within a year, your strategy is whatever this client's procurement team wants, and you never voted on it.
The difficulty itself is the signal. If they are hard because they ask for things your product already does badly, you have found a real gap and the revenue may be worth the pain. If they are hard because they want custom work, special integrations, and exceptions to your model, they are hiring you for a different job than the market is, and that work will quietly starve the product the other customers are paying for.
Concrete next move: before negotiating price, write down the three things this client will ask for in their first ninety days, then check each against your existing customers' top requests. If fewer than two overlap, either decline or price it as a services engagement with a ring-fenced team, so the core roadmap never competes with them for resources.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Clayton Christensen. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.