Tony Ulwick
Measure Customer Progress Using A Proven Jobs-To-Be-Done Methodology
New product success becomes predictable once you know the metrics customers use to measure progress when trying to get a job done. People often choose to switch from one product to another when a new product helps them “make progress in a given circumstance”. This terminology...
Avoid These Common Jobs-To-Be-Done Fails
Defining the customer’s job-to-be-done correctly is fundamental to a company’s success. Don’t let these two common mistakes derail your innovation efforts. “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” This quote, which was made popular by Theodore Levitt, forms the foundation for…
Outcome-Driven Innovation Brings Deep Insights To Hardware And Software Development
While customer insights have driven hardware and software development for years, Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) takes customer-centered innovation to the next level. Whether a company is investing in the creation of a product, service or software solution, there are 4 key activities that must be executed effectively...
The Critical Role of a “Product Oversight Team” in Innovation Success
Acknowledging who is ultimately responsible for product innovation — and ensuring they have the tools to succeed — can dramatically improve a company’s innovation success rate. When it comes to introducing new products, companies excel: they introduce thousands of new products every year. Unfortunately, most of...
Replace Luck With a Predictable Innovation Process
Companies should stop behaving as if innovation is an art. It’s a predictable science. The real question is: why are they so slow to change? Any company can master innovation and create products and services that will consistently and predictably win in the marketplace. The process...
The Fundamentals of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory
With decades of scrutiny and validation in both academic and practitioner settings, the fundamentals of Jobs Theory have withstood the test of time. After being introduced to Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) in 1999, Clayton Christensen went on to popularize the underlying ODI theory in his best seller,...
Reinventing Market Research for Innovation
Research methods designed to quantify solution preferences are standing in the way of achieving predictable innovation. Innovation is the process of devising solutions that address unmet customer needs. For decades companies pursued an “ideas-first” approach to innovation—they encouraged brainstorming to yield many alternative solutions and...
Jobs-to-be-Done Case Study: Beware of Lead Users
For nearly a decade a global medical diagnostics company focused on its lead users—specialists in the field that were the most advanced. The company worked hard to understand the needs of these lead users...
10 Characteristics of The “Perfect” Customer Need Statement
Innovation is the process of devising a solution that addresses unmet customer needs. To win at innovation, a company must be able to uncover all the customers’ needs, figure out which are unmet and...
Jobs Theory in Practice: Discovering a Hidden $150M Segment of Opportunity
A global company recently engaged the Strategyn team to help it segment a core market in a new way. The company, a recognized leader in the space, came to us with a hypothesis: they...
Solving The Innovation Equation
Innovation is analogous to a complex mathematical equation. Identifying the constants in the equation is the key to solving it. ...
Bring Predictability to Innovation
By controlling the causal factors that bring randomness to the innovation process, companies can bring predictability to innovation. Innovation appears to be a random, inherently unpredictable process. But what if we could understand the causal...
Applying Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to Micro-Moments
Here’s a relatively new concept that is sweeping across the radar of brand managers across the marketing world: micro-moments. Introduced to us by Google’s Sridhar Ramaswamy, micro-moments are the moments or instances when we turn...
Demystifying Jobs-to-be-Done: Four Applications
Newcomers to “Jobs-to-be-Done” are getting confused. With all that has been written on the subject recently, those just getting introduced to the theory are wondering: Do multiple versions of the theory exist? Why do ...
Why The “Job Story” May End Badly. Don’t Apply New Theory Through an Old...
Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, when applied effectively, makes innovation 5-times more predictable. Our 25-year track record applying the theory with our Outcome-Driven Innovation process offers...
The Jobs-To-Be-Done Growth Strategy Matrix
Over the past 24 years, we have studied the dynamics of product and service innovation while producing successful innovation strategies in hundreds of markets for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Over the course of these engagements, we...
Defining the Customer’s Core Functional Job-To-Be-Done
Making the core functional job the unit of analysis is the cornerstone of successful innovation. The core functional job is the stable, long-term focal point around which all other needs are defined and around which value creation should be centered. (See...
Formulating a Customer-Centric Product Strategy: 7 Key Actions
An effective product portfolio strategy will guide the company in (a) improving its products to better serve the unmet needs of customers in each targeted outcome-based segment, and (b) will offer a solution that eventually gets the...
Formulate a Market Strategy Around Underserved Segments and Needs
Strategyn’s Outcome-Driven Innovation process includes qualitative research methods that are used to discover the job customers are trying to get done and their desired outcomes (a special form of need statement) as they try to get the...
What Unmet Needs Should Be Targeted For Growth?
The objective of the innovation process is to find ways to help the customer get a job done better and/or more cheaply by addressing desired outcomes that the customer cannot currently achieve—these are their unmet needs. Not...