How To Transform Ordinary Teams Into Breakthrough Innovators
“There’s no such thing as a creative or uncreative person or team; only people who are trained in creativity or untrained.” (Inspired by Jim Kwik’s insight on memory training)
I hear leaders bemoan two common innovation struggles that, in reality, have the same root cause.
First, some leaders tell me they struggle to come up with “good” ideas. They’ll brainstorm, generate a list, but when they review it, most ideas are just incremental improvements to what they’re already doing. They think they have a creativity problem. But in fact, it’s a clarity problem – specifically, clarity about which of their target customers’ needs remain unmet.
Other leaders share that they have too many ideas and can’t vet them quickly enough. They often conclude they need to improve their testing and iteration process, to fail faster and determine which ideas matter most to customers. But that’s not really the problem, either. Iterating and testing can be a huge waste of time if you don’t first have clarity about which customer needs are unmet – needs that are important to customers but not being satisfied well by the market.
The truth is, a “good” idea is only good if it addresses an important, unsatisfied customer need(s). We need to stop pretending that “every idea is a good idea.” While this approach encourages people to share their ideas freely, ultimately it leads to bottlenecks in the innovation pipeline, preventing the team from focusing on the real opportunities and stalling their effectiveness.
I’ve seen entire product teams get stuck, endlessly iterating on bad ideas, only to be shut down. Not because they didn’t iterate fast enough, but because they failed to identify and rank the unmet needs in the first place. Without this information, they didn’t know where to focus, what truly mattered to customers.
The way to generate only good ideas – and eliminate or quickly kill bad ideas – is to first understand what your customers are trying to get done, how they measure success, and where their needs remain unmet. Their metrics for success are your metrics for success when generating or evaluating ideas.
While iteration and testing are important in the innovation process, they are most effective after you’ve identified and prioritized the unmet needs and selected those that are most attractive to your firm to pursue. Even in processes focused on delivering only incremental value, whether through Agile or traditional methods, iterations are most effective when grounded in clarity about customer needs. Without understanding what customers truly want and need, testing and iteration risk becoming a waste of time, solving problems that don’t matter or addressing needs that aren’t critical. Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs were highly disciplined about this sequencing: first, understand the customers’ unmet needs, then test and iterate your solution ideas.
This is where Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) can change the game. Based on the insight that people “hire” products and services to get their jobs done, JTBD naturally decouples customer needs from solutions – such as the difference between a drill and the hole. The drill is one solution, but it could be a drill, a pick, a laser, or even some yet-to-be-invented tool. Regardless, the true need at a high level is the job to “make a hole.”
Notice how this job statement – “make a hole” – doesn’t mention any specific product or service. This ensures that companies won’t be constrained by current products and are more likely to generate breakthrough innovation. But there’s much more.
By decoupling needs from solutions, JTBD empowers teams to do what was never possible before:
Obtain a comprehensive set of the target customers’ needs in virtually any market.
Prioritize needs according to how “unmet” they are – i.e., important and unsatisfied. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation it presents.
With a prioritized list of unmet needs, the team can evaluate each opportunity for its attractiveness, given the firm’s unique strengths, and respond in whatever way makes sense – well beyond just new or improved products. Other effective ways to create new value and drive growth include crafting new and improved messaging and positioning, aligning operations with customers’ JTBD, and/or exploring mergers, acquisitions, or partnerships.
When customer need statements are captured in the JTBD word format pioneered by Strategyn, they provide clear instructions about where to focus and what to do to create unique value.
For example, one client—a non-profit focused on eliminating fire and safety hazards by establishing and selling their codes and standards—identified the unmet needs of its three target customers:
1) Architects/engineers who design fire systems to code.
2) Contractors who install fire systems to code.
3) Municipal inspectors who inspect/enforce fire systems to code.
When we interviewed architects/engineers to uncover their unmet needs when “designing systems to code,” for example, we found that they wanted to:
Minimize the likelihood that a code can be interpreted differently by different people.
Minimize the likelihood of interpreting a code incorrectly.
Minimize the time it takes to determine how the local inspector interprets a code.
After obtaining a comprehensive set of needs like these related to “designing a system to code,” we deployed a survey to a statistically valid sample of target architects/engineers to rate each need on two questions:
How important is it to you to do X?
How satisfied are you with your ability to do X?
This enabled the organization to identify and rank the opportunities in their market with statistical validity, evaluate and select those that were most attractive to pursue, and then generate ideas that they knew in advance had a high degree of product/market fit. Boom! Drop the mic. Is there anything more you could ask of your team at this stage in the process? Give them a raise!
Do you see how obtaining this level of precision and clarity about where to focus and what to do dramatically increases success rates, quickens time to market, and gives firms a reliable way to drive innovation and growth as a repeatable business process?
Creativity isn’t the problem, and neither is failing faster. The problem is companies have not invested in learning how to identify and rank the unmet needs in their market first.
JTBD not only dramatically increases your likelihood of success. It dramatically reduces your risk of failure by ensuring your team is focused on the right opportunities.
Note: The methodology and framework discussed in this article are heavily influenced by the pioneering work of Strategyn. For more information about Strategyn’s contributions to JTBD, visit their website at the link below.
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