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Anthony W. Ulwick
Review
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.
The author has created and trademarked a product innovation process that he claims has an 86% success rate. That's great news for us right? Well. Hold on. The catch is it seems impractical to do, and it's trademarked, so you'll need to hire his consultancy to do it with you.
I love this book. The author critiques and discards much of what is standard in the industry. It's difficult to read as it will challenge some of your beliefs. I'd love to try the full 84-step process one day, but I think I'll need to be in the C-suite to actually implement it.
For now, I'll use parts of the process in a less rigorous way, despite the author's advice against it.
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Key Takeaways
The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.
Jobs To Be Done · Anthony W. Ulwick 2016
Traditional innovation processes have a poor success rate at 17%, while Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) can reach 86%. ODI focuses on the metrics customers use to measure success and the value they get from getting a job done. If you understand those metrics, you can create solutions that address unmet needs and dramatically improve your odds of success.
Many companies start with an “ideas-first” approach, generating lots of concepts and quickly filtering them out. But this is like prescribing medicine without diagnosing symptoms—if you don’t know what customers really need, you’re bound to miss the best solution. Customers often can’t reliably and accurately articulate exactly what they want. The “needs-first” approach sounds better, but many organisations fail to uncover most of those needs in the first place, don’t define what a “need” is, or rely only on customers’ own words, resulting in incomplete or misleading insights.
Jobs-to-be-done theory provides a framework for categorising, defining, capturing and organising all of your customer’s needs. Tying customer-defined performance metrics (in the form of desired outcome statements) to the Job-to-be-done.
Knowing the customers needs allows you to unlock better strategy by revealing hidden segments of opportunity and determining which needs are underserved or over served.Remember: People are more loyal to getting a job done than they are to any brand.
Identifying these “jobs” can help reveal underserved or overserved needs in the market. You look at core functional jobs, related jobs, emotional jobs, consumption chain jobs, and financial outcomes.
Jobs-to-be-done Needs Framework
We must consider different types of customer needs: The core functional job, related jobs, emotional jobs, consumption chain jobs and financial outcome jobs.
- Job: the overall task the customer is trying to execute
- Outcome: the metric the customer uses to measure success and value while executing a job
Customer need statements should be mutually exclusive and defined independently of each other. A complete set of customer needs should be collectively exhaustive.
The goal of innovation is to devise solutions that address unmet customer needs. So we need to… know the needs, know which are unmet and understand segments of customers with different unmet needs.
You’re looking for a segment of customers with unmet needs you can serve - that make up a big enough % of the market to make it attractive
The core functional job is stable, solution-agnostic, and unbounded by geography, and the real key is to pinpoint the desired outcome statements that reflect how customers define success and value each step of the way.
Armed with that understanding, you can help customers get the job done either better or more cheaply. Incremental improvements won’t cut it; you typically need something significantly better or cheaper… small changes won’t have the same effect.
Uber example:
- Uber Lux → charging significantly more for significantly better
- UberX → charging less for better
- UberPool → charging significantly less for worse
Imagine trying to launch a differentiated strategy in a market that was over-served… there would be nobody looking to spend more as they’re already satisfied. You’d fail. This is the power of JTBD to select macro strategy.
Outcome Driven-Innovation
ODI is a comprehensive, data-driven innovation process built on JTBD. It links a company’s value-creation efforts to the performance metrics customers actually care about. It breaks down into these 10 steps:
- Define the customer
- Define the Jobs-to-be-Done
- Define the job statement in the correct format
- Job statement = verb + object of the verb (noun) + context clarifier
- E.g. Listen to music whilst on the go
- Uncover customer needs
- Outcome Statement = Direction of Improvement + performance metric + object of control + contextual clarifier
- Find segments of opportunity
- Differences in needs don’t come from demographics or psychographics
- To discover segments of customers with unmet needs, you need to segment the market around unmet needs
- Define the value proposition
- know where customers are underserved
- secure the value proposition that communicates to customers that their needs can be satisfied
- do everything to satisfy the unmeet needs better that competition
- Conduct the Competitive Analysis
- Knowing how customers measure value, and how the competition stack up enables an organisation to create products and services that get the job done better or more cheaply
- Formulate the innovation strategy
- Target hidden growth opportunities
- Opportunity Score = outcome importance + (outcome importance - outcome satisfaction)
- Formulate the market strategy
- Formulate the product strategy
Implementing the complete ODI is complex, it has 6 phases and 84 steps 😖
- Initiate an ODI project (15 steps)
- Uncover the customer’s needs (18 steps)
- Gather quantitative data (18 steps)
- Discover hidden opportunities for growth (10 steps)
- Formulate the market strategy (12 steps)
- Formulate the product strategy (10 steps)
It’s usually best managed by a small, well-trained team, leaving everyone else to build the solutions once unmet needs and strategic directions are clear. You can roll it out in three phases:
- Understand the jobs to be done
- Discover hidden opportunities in your market
- Use those insights to drive growth.
By staying focused on what customers actually need, you’ll unlock more successful innovations and outpace traditional approaches.
Deep Summary
Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.
Foreward
- 72% of all new product & service introductions fail to live up to expectations
- Tools and process drive efficiency and create a framework for conversations
- This research led Alex Osterwalder to create the Value Proposition Canvas
- Tony’s approach takes the guesswork out of the innovation process
- A tested model for innovation management that increases your chance of success
- Improve your innovation toolbox
Introduction: The Failure That Led to Success
- Author was embarrassed by an early product failure. Giving him motivation to…
- Identify the metrics that customers use to judge the value of newly released products early on in the product planning process.
- Author first studied: Six sigma, quality function deployment, TRIZ, voice of the customer.
- GOAL: Apply Six Sigma and process control principles to innovation.
- Key Challenge: How to uncover the metrics that customers use to measure success and value
- He tried the process out, and increased the market share of a company from 1% to 20%.