How to Fix Innovation with 5 Growth Strategies and 6 Questions

Many innovation failures happen not because teams lack skill or resources – but because they act on assumptions that feel true but aren’t.

While innovation can fail for many reasons — including misaligned incentives, poor timing, or internal friction — one of the most preventable causes is overconfidence in what we think customers need.

A 2022 Journal of Management review synthesized 118 studies on executive confidence. The pattern was clear: overconfident executives tend to overinvest, take bigger risks, and commit to innovation strategies with unverified assumptions.

One critical blind spot? A tendency to assume we already understand what customers need — and to act on that assumption without checking.

These aren’t failures of competence. They’re failures of cognitive bias.

When paired with sound discovery habits and checks against bias, confidence can drive bold innovation. The danger lies in unquestioned confidence — when conviction isn’t rooted in clear insight.

Our blind spots hide our customers’ unmet needs. We think we already understand their needs but, in fact, we’re just not seeing things clearly.

Three Mental Traps That Sabotage Innovation

These predictable biases work against even the smartest teams:

The Curse of Knowledge: Deep product expertise makes it harder to see through a beginner’s eyes. What feels obvious to us might be incomprehensible to our customers.
Proximity Bias: Constant exposure to customers and products can create false confidence. We mistake familiarity for understanding.
False Consensus Effect: We project our priorities onto others. We assume customers want what we value — when in reality, they may be after something else entirely.

These biases shape how we interpret feedback, conduct interviews, and define value. Unless we actively counter them, we risk solving the wrong problems.

Why Feedback Can Mislead

Companies measure engagement, track usage, and analyze satisfaction scores. But these metrics typically only tell us what customers are doing – not why they’re doing them.

It’s like measuring how often someone uses a hammer without asking if the picture ever got hung — or if hanging it was the job in the first place.

When customers say “higher quality,” do they mean durable? Or “makes me look good in front of others”? There may be literally dozens of discrete concrete desired outcomes that they mean by “high quality.” If we don’t ask the right questions to tease them out, we will very likely miss the mark.

JTBD Reframes the Problem

One client – a private jet company – knew there was a B2B market with different needs from their traditional high-net-worth clientele. But they didn’t know how to gain access to C-level executives who travel frequently for work, or what to ask them if they did. With Lean JTBD OS, they redefined the market not by industry or title but by the jobs these executives were trying to get done on a private jet.

What emerged was a nuanced picture: executives sought to preserve energy, maintain discretion for sensitive deals, and control their schedules – among dozens of other distinct jobs. Because the company’s core platform (private jet service) could be tailored for different markets, this insight enabled them to design a differentiated, business-focused service with premium pricing – optimized around the unique jobs and priorities of this segment.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) helps surface unmet needs – i.e., jobs and desired outcomes – from existing products, whether you’re entering a new market, growing a core market, or seeking to improve the customer experience to increase retention. When seeking to drive core market growth, the key question becomes:

“How satisfied are you with your ability to get the job done?”

This shift moves the benchmark from customerexpectations to customer objectives, and thereby reveals unmet needs that were previously believed to be “latent unarticulated” needs – needs that they cannot articulate. In fact, the only reason the needs were latent and unarticulated is because no one asked them the right questions – until now.

Five Growth Strategies

Not all growth strategies are alike. Before you assume the six questions apply universally, it helps to know what kind of growth strategy you’re pursuing.

With Lean JTBD OS™, every growth strategy falls into one of five categories:

Core Market Growth: Help current customers get a core job done better
Adjacent Market – New Customers: Help new customers get the same core job done
Adjacent Market – New Jobs: Help current customers get more jobs done
Totally New Market: Help a new customer get a completely new job done
Consumption Chain Strategy: Reduce churn by removing barriers to success across the customer journey

Strategy #4 – entering a totally new market – is usually only attractive when a firm has developed a new technology or capability and is searching for a viable market where it creates distinct value. In this case, job discovery isn’t just helpful – it’s essential. Instead of guessing which market to pursue, teams can use JTBD to identify which group of people is struggling to get an important job done and whether they’d be willing to pay for a better solution.

Lean JTBD OS™ helps in all five cases – by revealing what your customer is really trying to accomplish and where they struggle.

Six Questions That Reveal Hidden Unmet Needs

These six questions form a diagnostic for understanding what customers are trying to accomplish:

Who is your target customer? The group you serve (or want to serve) by helping them get jobs done.
What job are they trying to accomplish? Identify the main job and any related emotional or social jobs.
When, where, and why does this job arise?Pinpoint the context that makes the job important.
What are the steps required to get the job done – independent of your solution?
Where do they still struggle? These friction points are unmet needs.
What are the consequences if the job goes unmet? Understand what’s at stake: financially, emotionally, socially.

Together, these questions create a Customer Needs Blueprint™ – a clear, structured view of what your customers really need and where to focus your innovation.

When Job Discovery Is Essential

Deep job discovery is critical when:

Growth is flat despite new features
Customer segments want contradictory things
You’re building something truly new
Feedback doesn’t make sense

It’s less critical when:

The job is well understood
Feedback is specific and convergent
You’re refining execution, not strategy

Before we close, consider this:

The companies that consistently win with innovation aren’t just executing faster – they’re starting from a clearer understanding of what matters most to their customers. That clarity is what turns discovery into a repeatable process and innovation into a reliable growth engine.

Join Me Live on July 2: Product-Market Fit at Concept Creation

If you want to stop guessing what customers want – and start creating offerings that win – don’t miss this session.

You’ll learn how to uncover the real customer needs that matter before you build – using six deceptively simple questions that work across any innovation strategy.

Register now (choose July 2)Bonus for Attendees:
All attendees will receive the Customer Needs Blueprint™ Worksheet – a practical tool to apply the six questions to your own target market.
It will be delivered free after the event.

P.S. I’ll briefly touch on how AI can support this approach — but only if you start with a clear view of the customer’s job and how success is defined.

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