The butterfly effect for great products!

Many improvements have been made by… those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.

— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

More than 200 years ago, Adam Smith made the point that anyone can be a source of innovation. Over the past 20 years I’ve innovated together with my customers, creating products and implementing solutions. Knowing customers – their concerns, use cases, industries, and process restraints – excites me. Working together with them – makes me love what I do everyday. It all starts with recognizing those use cases, or more aptly, the “jobs to be done.” From there, it’s about leading with empathy so we can discover together how to improve both products and lives. 

It’s been my mission to improve the lives of customers with great products and solutions. On average more than 40% of product budgets are allocated to maintenance, security, and bug fixes. The remainder is split between company-specific priorities and "customer"-related innovation. As the number of customer requests grows and the time to implement shrinks, the question remains: how do you choose what is most important?

By the end of the 20th century, ideas-first thinking developed ways to generate and evaluate more and more ideas, faster and faster. Unfortunately many ideas generated are of low quality, because people are brainstorming these ideas without ever knowing customer needs. We know that in any given market a customer has 50 to 150 needs and that anywhere from 5 to 80 percent of those needs may be unmet. This makes addressing all the customers’ unmet needs and evaluating the efficacy of ideas against those needs difficult. Let’s remember what the evaluation and filtering process is supposed to do: separate useful ideas from useless ones. We want to choose the ideas that best address the customer’s unmet needs. And yet, this evaluation and filtering process is typically executed without knowing what the customer’s needs are. 

Current evaluation methods rely on customers to determine how well a proposed idea will address their unmet needs without truly knowing the solution and how it relates to those needs. Problems with this evaluation process include: a high chance that the best solution isn’t even in the consideration set, and customers not being able to make the connection between the technology and their needs. So it's not surprising that companies using the ideas-first approach to innovation struggle to achieve success rates greater than 10 to 20 percent.

Source: What is Jobs to be Done?

Given we all agree we want customers to get the product value they pay for, where should we start? In my experience, it’s critical to start by identifying customer needs. “Voice of the Customer'' programs, “Innovation Ideas” portals, and other tools have all been used to learn about and prioritize customer needs. Yet these mechanisms can create more problems than they solve. Too much input from all directions doesn’t help with prioritization. And we still have questions like, “Which customer should get attention? Will the feature help grow our revenue?  What will help us stay ahead of the competition?”

Clear definition of customer jobs, not more ideas are the key to success! What do I mean by “jobs''? I mean what your customer is really trying to get done. How can you possibly know this? Well, you probably already have clues from: support tickets, watching customers perform their work, customers suggestions, and customer complaints. Together these can generate ideas, helping you determine key jobs to be done by your customers. 

When we consider customer jobs and their requirements during our new product development, we increase the number of novel ideas and  the quality of innovation. Anthony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation states that customers buy products and services to get certain jobs done. The idea is that, while customers aren’t very good at coming up with the solutions to their problems, their feedback is very important. This feedback is what our product team uses to come up with the desired outcomes for a product or feature.

After you come up with a list of jobs and outcomes, you can then survey your customers to ask the following questions:

• How important is this outcome or feature? How would you rank them?
• How satisfied are you with existing solutions?

Plot these answers and prioritize high importance and low satisfaction activities for your next sprint.

Source: Outcome-Driven Innovation by Anthony Ulwick

This approach is centered around customer jobs and increasing the satisfaction of performing those jobs with the product.  When we work this way, the information contained in a long-term roadmap starts to reflect the current needs or problems of the customers and their business goals, instead of an unmanaged list of every possible solution. 

It’s time for you to define the jobs that your customers are doing and allow them to direct the products you create. Stay empathetic and start small - you can begin by simply defining a single, main job and break it into outcomes! Then, run a quick survey on the satisfaction and importance of that activity. Do it consistently for every product - this small change will lead to big outcomes in the long term! 

Download the free version of the “Jobs to be Done” book  by Anthony Ulwick