How to Create New and Improved Offerings that Win
Have you noticed a popular post floating around on LinkedIn proclaiming that “Your startup (or new product) idea is worthless!”
It’s accompanied by a video clip of Steve Jobs in 1995 essentially saying the same thing. The argument is that “ideas are worthless; it’s the execution that makes them valuable.”
Yet this is NOT necessarily true. We’re not living in 1995 anymore. New research capabilities have been developed that change this.
Why are some ideas valuable while others are not? Here’s the key:
The difference between a valuable and a worthless product idea is determined by how much market and company intelligence is baked into it at concept creation.
The reason most new product ideas are not valuable is because they’re generated with incomplete and/or faulty information about:
- The target customer, what they’re trying to accomplish, and where they struggle
- The attractiveness of the market opportunity to the company, e.g., the revenue opportunity it presents, its strategic fit with the company, etc.
Hence, people attempt to gain this knowledge through building the product, “failing faster,” and iterating.
A chief impediment to companies obtaining the relevant market and company intelligence upfront is due to the prevailing misbelief that “customers cannot tell us what they want.”
This statement is only half true. It’s true that customers cannot tell us what solutions they want just as patients cannot tell the doctor what treatment they want. Neither customers nor patients are qualified to come up with solutions.
But customers and patients can tell us what they want if we ask them what they want to accomplish rather than asking them for product or service (or treatment) specifications. It’s up to us as suppliers to conduct an effective “customer diagnosis” to inform the development of an effective “treatment plan.”
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach makes this possible by pinpointing the customers’ pain points. It changes the game of innovation by recognizing that customer needs are separate and distinct from product and service solutions (i.e., the drill is not the hole), and consequently, companies can:
- Obtain a comprehensive set of customer needs in virtually any market
- Identify and rank the biggest opportunities, i.e., important unsatisfied needs
- Determine which opportunities are attractive for the company to pursue
So that product teams can devise ideas that are:
- Highly aligned with market needs
- Attractive to the company
…at concept creation, before development.
JTBD enables companies to obtain all the relevant market and company intelligence upfront so they can bake it into their ideas at concept creation. That makes these ideas highly valuable. Motorola, for example, was able to license ideas generated in this manner for millions of dollars – without a prototype.
This is the power of the JTBD approach. It precedes and enhances Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile processes. It accelerate learning by enabling firms to test only their solutions’ efficacy rather than confounding experiments by trying to also test customer needs at the same time. It accelerates learning, quickens time to money, and increases success rates by nailing what customers want upfront.
Did you know that Thomas Edison only conducted experiments AFTER he validated an attractive market need? (See https://revealgrowth.com/failing-faster-the-edison-way-only-after-needs-are-validated/). He learned early on in his career that it pays to identify and size the target customers’ unmet needs before attempting to generate or test solution ideas.
Tired of guessing how to differentiate and grow?
Download the free PDF Rethinking Innovation: How JTBD Delivers Dramatically Better Results.
If your customers have complex functional needs and you want to innovate and grow without guesswork, reach out to me at [email protected] to talk about your business and explore how my firm can help you accomplish your objectives.
