Review

This book challenges conventional product development thinking. While Jobs to be Done (JTBD) and Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) are now commonly linked, they evolved separately. Ulwick developed ODI before Christensen popularised JTBD, though both focus on understanding deep customer needs rather than surface features.

Ulwick's main insight was systematising how to identify and measure customer outcomes. While this book offers a solid overview, his "Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice" book provides the implementation details. When you read that, you’ll learn the process can be cumbersome - so consider using this approach as inspiration rather than following it strictly.

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Jobs To Be Done

At any moment, I have a short queue of product books I want to read. I try to follow long books with shorter ones, so I don't lose momentum. I naively thought this book would be a quick read, but it isn't. It's insight-dense and concise, making it hard to get through.

andrewclark.co.uk

When Coffee and Kale Compete

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a promising framework, but there is disagreement on how to apply it within the product community. If this disagreement is not resolved, the longevity of this theory may be in question. Personally, I have read three books on JTBD and I'm uncertain if I have gained any substantial benefit from them.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: The Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "The Jobs To Be Done Playbook" by Jim Kalbach, the product management and design thinking expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for using the jobs-to-be-done framework to drive innovation and customer-centered product development.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

Companies often fail in innovation because they spend years and millions of dollars creating technology-driven offerings that never truly resonate with customers. Traditional R&D approaches rely on guesswork and incremental improvements, leading to extended development cycles and failure rates that hover around 90%. Such trial-and-error methods not only drain resources but also fail to uncover what truly matters to customers. Many organisations have tried to solve this by embracing the “customer-driven” movement, hoping that talking more with customers, conducting interviews, focus groups, and performing conjoint analysis would yield the breakthrough insights needed. Yet despite all these efforts, results remain unsatisfactory. Customer requirements often derail these approaches because customers, when asked directly, rarely articulate their needs in a way that leads to successful products. Conventional voice-of-customer data—lists of features, vague benefits, and personal opinions—seldom translate cleanly into new offerings that create real value.

A radically different perspective has emerged: an outcome-driven approach. This method starts by recognising that customers buy products and services to get specific jobs done. People measure success not by vague attributes or trendy features but by how well their chosen solution improves their ability to accomplish a task. At the core are “desired outcomes,” the metrics customers use to judge if their job is being executed successfully. These outcomes are stable criteria that define what “better” really means. Identifying 50-150 such outcomes for a given job may sound complex, but doing so unlocks the ability to systematically prioritize opportunities. By ranking which outcomes are most important and least satisfied, it is possible to pinpoint exactly where a market is ripe for improvement and where innovation can deliver meaningful gains.

In this new approach, innovation strategy is formulated by first understanding what jobs customers are trying to get done. Once these jobs are clear, the goal becomes to discover which outcomes matter and how well current solutions fulfilll them. Gathering customer inputs shifts from asking, “What features do you want?” to asking, “How do you measure success when performing this job?” and “Where are you struggling?” By translating these answers into quantitative importance and satisfaction ratings, companies can apply a predictable formula to reveal opportunities. The algorithm combining importance and satisfaction data highlights which outcomes remain underserved. Rather than relying on gut feel, intuition, or guesswork, the entire innovation effort becomes grounded in data that aligns with customers’ actual measures of value.

The process does not end at identifying unmet needs. Once these outcomes are known and prioritised, companies can segment their markets in a completely new way. Traditional segmentation might rely on demographics, behaviours, risk profiles, or other arbitrary factors that do little to reveal why one group of customers is underserved. By focusing on outcomes instead, it’s possible to segment customers based on how they rate the importance and satisfaction of each outcome. This outcome-based segmentation reveals pockets of customers who share a common set of unmet needs. These customers may otherwise appear diverse, but they align around a core struggle or a series of outcomes they can’t achieve to their desired level. With this insight, companies discover untapped segments that value improvements no one else has yet delivered.

Identifying these segments and underserved outcomes leads naturally to better targeting strategies. Instead of guessing which improvements to pursue or simply following existing competencies and resource allocations, companies make informed decisions. If a small number of outcomes are glaringly underserved and affect a large portion of the market, that becomes the logical entry point for new development. If, on the other hand, segments emerge that need a niche set of outcomes addressed, a more tailored solution may be introduced at a premium price. One might also find over-served outcomes—areas where products deliver far more than needed, inflating cost without adding value—allowing companies to strip away unnecessary features, reduce complexity, and improve margin. By using this systematic, data-driven targeting approach, growth options multiply. Companies can choose to improve existing offerings, create solutions for entirely new markets, refine internal processes for efficiency gains, or even explore disruptive moves that leverage emerging technologies to attack over-served customers or uncover new markets altogether.

With a clear set of priorities and a segmented understanding of the market, messaging and branding also improve. Traditional marketing fails when it relies on imprecise language that touts vague benefits like “faster” or “easier,” leaving customers to guess how a product might truly help them. By anchoring messaging in actual underserved outcomes, communication can highlight a product’s strengths in a way customers immediately understand. Instead of “This tool is easy to use,” a company can say, “This feature reduces the time it takes to achieve X outcome by 40%.” This precision eliminates confusion and ensures customers see the direct link between a product’s benefits and their own success criteria.

Some industries emphasise emotional branding over function, believing that tapping into customers’ feelings or identities is key. While emotional appeal can be effective in markets with low functional complexity, it is risky and often misguided in environments where customers care deeply about functional performance. High-function products and services must meet the functional outcomes first. Only when core outcomes are nearly fully met does it make sense to add an emotional layer to differentiate. Attempting to build brand loyalty on emotional messaging alone, without first ensuring the product performs its intended jobs reliably, is a common cause of marketing missteps.

The sales force also benefits from an outcome-driven approach. Equipped with detailed knowledge of which outcomes matter most to each market segment, sales teams can quickly identify a prospect’s primary struggles and tailor their pitch to highlight relevant features. This reduces guesswork, shortens sales cycles, and increases the chance of closing deals, as sales personnel can pinpoint how their solution targets specific underserved outcomes known to matter.

After aligning strategy, customer research, segmentation, targeting, and messaging, attention turns to the development pipeline. Many companies suffer from having too many projects and no objective way to rank them. Without a clear tie to underserved outcomes, projects persist because of internal politics, sunk-cost biases, or subjective hunches. The outcome-driven approach provides a method for evaluating each initiative by how well it addresses prioritised opportunities. Projects that promise to improve customer satisfaction along important but underserved outcomes rise to the top. Those that fail to move the needle are culled, freeing resources to invest in more promising ideas. This data-driven prioritisation avoids spreading teams too thin and ensures a lean, focused pipeline that consistently produces offerings customers will value.

Bringing it all together, the final piece is generating and evaluating breakthrough concepts. Traditional brainstorming often results in a flood of random ideas that do not necessarily solve any significant problem. Unbounded ideation sessions frequently measure success by the quantity of ideas rather than their quality. This is wasteful. With an outcome-driven model, brainstorming becomes “focused brainstorming.” Teams now have a clear target: the top underserved outcomes. Their goal is to find a small set of solutions that dramatically improve satisfaction in these areas. Constraints can be applied—such as cost, feasibility, or sustainability—to direct creativity toward practical solutions. Bad ideas are dismissed quickly, and the best ideas are refined until they deliver truly meaningful improvements.

To evaluate these concepts, the “customer scorecard” is introduced. This scorecard, based on the outcomes and their opportunity scores, allows team members (not customers) to objectively judge how well each proposed concept will satisfy every targeted outcome. No longer are people guessing at value; they can quantify it. For example, if a concept significantly improves performance on several high-importance, low-satisfaction outcomes, the scorecard reveals a large jump in overall value. Concepts that fail to deliver measurable gains are abandoned before costly development. Concepts that excel can be confidently advanced into the pipeline, armed with hard evidence of their potential impact. This transforms idea evaluation from guesswork into a predictive, quantifiable exercise.

R&D also becomes more strategic. Instead of toiling on technology projects without knowing if customers will care, R&D teams receive explicit targets. They know which outcomes they must improve and can choose the best technological paths to achieve that. If no existing technology can solve the identified problem, R&D can focus efforts on developing or acquiring the right solutions. This prevents wasting resources on science projects that solve no pressing customer problem and ensures a tight coupling between technical exploration and market needs.

Overall, the outcome-driven approach creates a chain of value from strategy to execution. It starts by understanding that customers judge products by how well they help get jobs done. By defining a set of outcomes and quantifying their importance and satisfaction, companies gain a reliable compass for innovation. Using that compass, it becomes straightforward to identify opportunities, segment the market in meaningful ways, decide where to invest, craft clear messaging, allocate development resources efficiently, and confidently generate breakthrough concepts. This integrated system replaces chaos and guesswork with a methodical, fact-based process that can dramatically increase the odds of innovation success.

The ultimate promise of the outcome-driven approach is to transform innovation from an unpredictable gamble into a disciplined business process. Instead of betting millions on products that may fail, organisations now have the tools to understand customer demands at a granular level, build offerings that align with those demands, and measure success before a product ever reaches the market. By systematically meeting the right outcomes, companies deliver the products and services customers are eager to buy, leading to consistent growth, reduced time-to-market, and far fewer costly failures.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Introduction

Being technology-driven isn’t enough, traditional R&D labs struggle to produce products customers want, costing companies millions on failures. Trial-and-error is too costly, failure rates are near 90% and lead times are long.

Companies adopted the ideas and principles of the customer-driven movement…

• Understand what customers want before investing in new products/services
• Conduct customer interviews and act on their feedback
• Perform qualitative and quantitative research to test concepts with users
• Use tools like focus groups, customer visits, conjoint analysis, needs-based segmentation, lead-user analysis

Ironically customer requirements derail the customer-driven approach, customer requirements don’t translate into product success. Asking the customer what they want solicits the wrong inputs.

The key to product innovation is know in advance what criteria customers are going to use to judge a product’s value - and design a product so those criteria are met.

The outcome-driven method is a new way to think about innovation with three key tenets:

1. Customers buy products and services to help them get jobs done. Companies who focus on helping customers get a job done faster, more conveniently and less expensively than before are more likely to be successful.
2. Customers use a set of metrics to judge how well a job is getting done and how a product performs. Only when all metrics are satisfied can a job be executed perfectly. BUT they’re seldom understood. We call these metrics desired outcomes.
3. Desired outcome metrics make possible systematic, predictable innovation. Companies can improve their ability to meet customer needs, communicate value, measure satisfaction. Companies should figure out which 50-150 outcomes for a given job are important and unsatisfied and then device a few ideas that will better satisfy those underserved outcomes.

Only after you know what jobs customers are trying to get done, and what outcomes they are trying to achieve can you figure out what customers want.

Innovation is the process of creating a product or service that delivers significant new customer value.

Eight steps to Outcome-Driven Innovation:

1. Formulate innovation strategy
2. Capture customer inputs
3. Identify opportunities
4. Segment the market
5. Define targeting strategy
6. Position current offerings
7. Prioritise development pipeline
8. Define breakthrough concepts

Now Outcome-driven approach differs:

Chapter 1: Formulating the Innovation Strategy

Who is the target of value creation and how should it be achieved?

The four types of innovation:

• Product or service innovation: enhances existing offerings to better address the outcomes customers care about.
• New-market innovation: identifies unsatisfied jobs that current products don’t solve and develops new offerings to help people get these jobs done.
• Operational innovation: improves internal processes to reduce costs, increase speed, and streamline workflow.
• Disruptive innovation: uses new technologies or approaches to upend established markets by targeting over-served customers or untapped non-consumers.
• Unlike other innovation types that start with customer needs, disruptive innovation begins with existing technology and seeks suitable markets.

Four growth options, each offering unique strategic directions:

• Help existing customers get a current job done better
• Help existing customers accomplish new related jobs
• Help new customers do an existing job
• Help new customers do new jobs

Selecting where in the value chain to focus is critical. Understand all stakeholders—end users, buyers, influencers, and internal constituents—to ensure no valuable insights are missed.

Mistakes to avoid:

• Not considering the end users directly (focusing just on the buyer)
• Not considering all the relevant customers (throughout the value chain)
• Letting one customer speak for another (e.g. speaking for the rest of the value chain)

Handling multiple stakeholders may reveal conflicting outcomes, but it also uncovers the richest set of opportunities. Gather and analyse the outcomes needed by all relevant parties, then prioritise. This ensures you build solutions that deliver maximum value across the entire ecosystem.

Chapter 2: Capturing Customer Inputs - Jobs, Outcomes and Constraints

Companies gather customer requirements to understand exactly what customers aim to achieve, the outcomes they value, and the barriers limiting success. Traditional voice-of-customer efforts often struggle because they elicit abstract requests or opinions rather than concrete metrics. Instead of asking customers what they want shift your focus to learning what customers are trying to get done and how they measure progress.

The issue with traditional customer-centric requirements gathers, is that companies think they’re collecting the right information from customers but they aren’t. Often they take too literally customer requests. Companies commonly collect various inputs from customers, such as recommended solutions, desired product features, and general benefits. These are insufficient in isolation because they do not reveal what truly matters.

A better approach involves clarifying three types of inputs:

• Jobs customers are trying to get done (tasks / activities they’re trying to carry out)
• Outcomes customers are trying to achieve (metrics they use to define successful execution of a job)
• Constraints that prevent customers from adopting a new service.

Customers are often trying to perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

The different types of jobs:

• Functional Jobs: the tasks people seek to accomplish
• Emotional Jobs:
• Personal: the way people want to feel in a given circumstance
• Social: how people want to be perceived by others

To drive meaningful innovation, it is crucial to obtain a set of customer inputs that represent how people define success in getting their jobs done. Identifying the job to be done focuses on what customers are actually trying to accomplish rather than on any specific product. Desired outcomes then translate vague requests into quantifiable measures of success. Understanding constraints surfaces growth opportunities by addressing what currently stands in the way.

Desired outcomes:

• Customers want to get more jobs done. BUT they also want to be able to do specific tasks faster, better or cheaper than they can currently.
• We must capture from customers the set of metrics or measures of value that they care about.
• A desired outcome typically has a direction, unit of measure and desired outcome.
• Direction: minimise (usually minimise or increase)
• Unit of measure: the time it takes
• Outcome desired: to wash the car

Companies can gather these insights using interviews, observations, and ethnographic approaches. Rather than relying solely on traditional focus groups or direct questioning, these methods encourage deep exploration of customers’ actual behaviour, context, and decision-making processes. The goal is to prompt customers to articulate precisely which metrics they use to judge success and what gets in their way.

Constraints:

• Customers need help overcoming the constraints that prevent them from getting a job done altogether or under certain circumstances. They are often physical, regulatory or environmental.

Determining which inputs to capture—jobs, outcomes, or constraints—depends on the innovation goal. If the aim is to improve or create solutions, start by understanding the job. Once the job is clear, define outcomes to quantify what success looks like. Then identify constraints that limit progress. By aligning inputs in this sequence, the collected data ensures that any new offering will meet true customer-defined criteria rather than guesswork or vague promises. The result is a clear framework to guide development teams toward delivering value customers can measure and appreciate.

Chapter 3: Identifying Opportunities

Opportunities are defined as outcomes, jobs, or constraints that remain unmet or unsatisfactorily served by current offerings. Many struggle to define or recognise these gaps, confusing new features or technology with meaningful improvements.

Common mistakes when prioritising opportunities include: • Enhancing outcomes that are already well served • Making changes to outcomes that lack importance • Implementing improvements that negatively affect other important outcomes

Prioritising opportunities begins by capturing a set of jobs, outcomes, and constraints and then quantifying their importance and current satisfaction. This identifies where gaps exist and reveals the biggest opportunities for improvement. The process is grounded in assessing unmet needs, so it measures significance rather than relying on guesses or superficial feedback.

Underserved markets emerge when outcomes remain important but not well satisfied. Over-served markets arise when outcomes are satisfied beyond their importance level. Detecting these imbalances helps guide resource allocation and product decisions.

Value migrates as different outcomes become well served over time. Once an outcome is adequately addressed, effort shifts to other outcomes not yet satisfied. Continual tracking ensures timely response to changing priorities.

The outcome-driven approach to competitive analysis relies on understanding how well each outcome is addressed relative to importance. Comparing solutions based on the metrics that matter to customers reveals strengths, weaknesses, and areas for strategic advantage.

Framework steps:

1. Create a set of job, outcome, and constraint statements from customer inputs.
2. Survey a representative sample of the target population.
3. Ask participants to rate importance and satisfaction for each statement.
4. Apply an algorithm (importance minus satisfaction) to reveal opportunity scores.
5. Identify which outcomes, jobs, and constraints are underserved or over served based on these scores.

Chapter 4: Segmenting the Market - Using Outcome-Driven Segmentation to Discover Segments of Opportunity

Segmentation helps divide a market into groups with different unmet needs. Over time, segmentation evolved from demographic and psychographic methods to approaches that consider what customers are trying to achieve and where they struggle.

Traditional segmentation fails for innovation because it groups customers in arbitrary ways that don't reveal where opportunities lie. It doesn't show which outcomes matter or where customers remain underserved.

Outcome-based segmentation identifies customer groups based on the outcomes they want to achieve but currently find unsatisfactory. Instead of focusing on demographics or solutions, it groups people by shared unmet outcomes. This reveals opportunities for meaningful improvements.

Steps to perform outcome-based segmentation:

1. Collect required data: Gather a comprehensive list of customers' desired outcomes. Collect their importance and satisfaction ratings.
2. Choose segmentation criteria: Select the outcomes that show the greatest variation in how well they're satisfied.
3. Conduct cluster analysis. Use statistical tools to group respondents based on their ratings of these key outcomes.
4. Profile the clusters: Determine what sets each cluster apart in terms of their desired outcomes and current satisfaction levels.

Outcome-based segmentation helps address development and marketing challenges by pinpointing precisely which outcomes matter, revealing underserved groups in mature markets, and identifying overlooked customer segments that may value solutions differently. It uncovers segments willing to pay more for enhanced solutions by showing which outcomes they highly value and find unsatisfied. It also highlights segments with significant growth potential by identifying areas where current offerings fail to meet important needs.

When companies are trying to discover new markets to pursue, they often turn to job-based segmentation. How do the two types of segmentation differ? Outcome-based segmentation is used to discover segments of opportunity in a specific market of interest. Job-based segmentation is used to discover entirely new markets—a job or a group of jobs that are underserved. The steps taken to execute each segmentation method are exactly the same with one exception: job-based segmentation uses jobs, not outcomes, as the basis for segmentation.

Job-based segmentation is best used when identifying entirely new markets or uncovering fundamental tasks people struggle to complete, rather than refining solutions for existing markets.

Chapter 5: Targeting Opportunities for Growth - Deciding Where to Focus the Value Creation Effort

Targeting for innovation differs from traditional targeting by focusing on underserved and over-served outcomes rather than demographic or customer segments. Identifying these outcomes enables precise decisions on where to add or reduce performance and cost.

Broad-market opportunities involve addressing areas of the market where multiple customers share similar unmet needs. They can emerge from patterns of related outcomes or from a range of unrelated gaps spread across the market. They may be addressed by introducing a new product that supports existing solutions, by removing costly overserved features to create more efficient offerings, or by developing new technology to tackle long-term challenges. Pursuing these opportunities first often leads to larger revenue gains because they are broadly appealing, impacting a significant share of the customer population.

5 broad-market opportunities:

• Related outcomes that form a thematic focus: Concentrate on a set of linked unmet needs that point to a coherent improvement theme.
• Unrelated opportunities that represent growth avenues: Even if no thematic link exists, improving multiple distinct underserved outcomes can collectively enhance a product’s appeal.
• A single, large opportunity addressed by an ancillary product: Sometimes one huge unmet need stands out, justifying a new, complementary offering instead of simply adjusting the existing product.
• Overserved outcomes that inflate cost: Trimming unnecessary features reduces complexity and expense without affecting customer satisfaction.
• Opportunities requiring new technology for long-term growth: Some needs cannot be met right away. Identifying these allows for R&D investments that shape future solutions.

Segment-specific targeting strategies begin after broad-market opportunities are addressed. They revolve around refining offerings for particular groups identified by their unique sets of underserved outcomes. By balancing common improvements with segment-focused enhancements, companies can meet distinct needs efficiently, step-by-step. This may mean starting with the least challenging segments, leveraging features that cut across multiple groups, and using different price points to serve multiple targets profitably.\

4 segment-specific strategies:

• Identify opportunities that span multiple segments: Find common unmet needs across distinct groups so a single solution platform can serve many.
• Build one platform for multiple segment solutions: Create a base product that addresses shared needs and add specialised features for each group.
• Pursue the least-challenging segments first: Start where fewer improvements are needed, then build on that foundation to address more demanding segments over time.
• Target segments that represent different price points: Match varying levels of performance and complexity with appropriate pricing tiers.

A solid targeting strategy results in a unique, valued position by addressing the most significant unmet needs. Clear, data-driven insights enable differentiation that competitors do not replicate.

Companies fail to target key opportunities when they disregard validated data, resist changing competencies, or fear negative implications for their roles. This often leads to ignoring genuine prospects for growth.

Chapter 6: Positioning Current Products - Connecting Opportunities with Valued Product Features

Messaging often fails to communicate a product’s true value because companies do not know which customer outcomes are underserved, use vague benefit statements, and continue using outdated messages that no longer resonate.

Reasons why messaging fails:

• Lack of awareness of which outcomes are underserved, making it impossible to connect product strengths to what customers actually want.
• Vague claims like "fast" or "reliable" that force customers to infer the benefit themselves.
• Outdated value propositions that no longer target current opportunities.

Prerequisites for an effective messaging strategy:

• Know exactly which outcomes are underserved.
• Have a product that truly addresses those underserved outcomes.
• Identify the specific product features that deliver on those outcomes.
• Confirm where current messaging is misaligned with actual value.

Messaging is most effective when it directly connects product features to a known underserved outcome or when several related underserved outcomes are combined into a single theme. Attaching a message to a focused outcome or a unifying theme reduces ambiguity and helps customers quickly understand the product’s unique value.

Choosing between emotional or functional messaging depends on the complexity of the product. For simple, low-function items, emotional branding can work because functional differences are limited. For complex, high-function products, emphasising functional improvements usually matters more. Emotional branding only makes sense after functional needs are thoroughly met. High-function products that try to lead with emotional messaging risk failing because customers still expect better performance, reliability, or efficiency before caring about how the brand makes them feel.

A sales force armed with clear information on which outcomes matter can immediately offer customers solutions that address their specific needs. By identifying the segment a customer falls into, sales teams can highlight features that solve known problems and close deals faster.

An outcome-based brand links the product directly to the job it does. This helps customers instantly understand its purpose, making purchase decisions easier and strengthening brand recognition and loyalty.

Chapter 7: Prioritising Projects in the Development Pipeline - Separating Winners from Losers

Companies often have too many initiatives in their pipelines, making it difficult to identify which ones will address true market opportunities. Lacking clear insight into what customers want, companies hesitate to kill weak ideas and end up spreading resources too thin.

A method that works involves first understanding customer outcomes, figuring out which are both important and underserved, and then evaluating each project’s ability to improve satisfaction in those areas.

Efforts deserving top priority are those that directly address targeted underserved outcomes, leading to clear customer value and revenue potential. Projects that fail to meet these criteria are either downgraded or eliminated.

Other factors influencing prioritisation include cost, risk, the competitive landscape, and potential internal benefits like faster market entry or improved current product sales. Evaluating initiatives against a well-defined set of desired outcomes enables a leaner, more profitable portfolio.

Chapter 8: Devising Breakthrough Concepts - Using Focused Brainstorming and the Customer Scorecard to create customer value

Traditional brainstorming often fails because it lacks a precise target, produces hundreds of irrelevant ideas, and relies on subjective criteria for evaluation. Many ideas are generated at random without knowing which customer outcomes truly need improvement. Without a method to identify underserved outcomes, there is no way to recognise high-value ideas amidst the noise.

Breakthrough concepts emerge by first identifying the most underserved customer outcomes and then generating solutions that address these specific targets. Instead of random idea generation, teams aim for a few strong concepts that deliver substantial improvements where it matters most. With everyone aligned on which outcomes to improve, the organisation’s creative energies become focused and productive.

Focused brainstorming follows a simple framework:

1. Stay locked on top-priority outcomes.
2. Strive for significant leaps in satisfaction rather than incremental gains.
3. Use constraints to guide creativity and prevent impractical solutions.
4. Quickly discard ideas that do not meaningfully impact the outcomes.
5. Optimise the most promising ideas for cost, effort, risk, and sustainability.

Traditional concept-evaluation methods fail because they rely on limited, often random criteria and feedback from customers who are unaware of all relevant outcomes. Subjective opinions, limited focus groups, or internal politics that cannot accurately predict market success.

The customer scorecard solves this by quantifying how well each concept improves all targeted outcomes. It reveals the total value delivered, making it possible to compare solutions against current and competitive offerings, and shows whether a proposed idea can deliver a strong improvement in customer satisfaction.

Example Customer Scorecard for Concept Evaluations:

Take a weighted opportunity score (importance + (importance - satisfaction) for each outcome for each solution. Then sum up for each solution.

Example Idea Scoring / Each idea improves satisfaction from baseline (50):

In practice, this approach involves identifying target outcomes, generating a small number of powerful ideas, and using the scorecard to confirm that each idea delivers measurable value. R&D then receives clear targets for technology development, ensuring efforts address genuine market needs and avoiding waste on features customers do not value. The result is a streamlined, predictable innovation process that consistently yields offerings customers want to buy.