Founder’s Story

The insight that drives my work came long before I entered the innovation field.

It started when I was trying to quit smoking in my early twenties. I failed probably a dozen times with every method I could find. The problem was all those methods were focused on offering me generic solutions to replace my cigarettes rather than helping me understand what I was trying to accomplish with cigarettes in the first place.

Eventually, I gave up even trying to quit because I didn’t have anything else to try, except one thing. I gave myself permission to smoke as much as I wanted on the condition that I would observe what was going on in and around me when I felt the urge to light up.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t really want cigarettes. I wanted to connect with people, manage difficult emotions, and address other needs that I had not articulated before.

Once I understood what I was trying to accomplish with each cigarette, it wasn’t hard to find a better, more satisfying solution, and I quit without willpower or cravings. I was amazed. And I knew there were millions of people still trapped who desperately wanted to quit but didn’t know how.

That got me excited about creating a new, better smoking cessation program. I started researching and presenting wherever I could get feedback. That’s when I found a program called Smokenders, probably the one program I had never tried, which was built on the same principle I had discovered. Independent studies showed it was twice as effective as the next best program. I secured a licensing agreement, rebranded it as a corporate healthcare cost containment measure, and it took off. After a year, with the business model validated, the corporate owners expanded it into twenty-two additional U.S. cities over the following eighteen months.

Years later, doing Voice-of-the-Customer research at a strategy consulting firm, I kept hitting the same wall. VoC did a good job helping companies improve existing products by getting feedback on them. But even the best methods have a natural boundary, and VoC wasn’t designed to discover opportunities for new offerings. Then I read Tony Ulwick’s work on Outcome-Driven Innovation and recognized he had formalized the same insight I’d discovered years earlier: people don’t want products, they want to accomplish something.

I spent seven years working with Tony and the team at Strategyn helping Fortune 1000 companies apply this methodology. I’m grateful for that experience and for Tony’s foundational work.

Today, through Lean JTBD OS™, I help companies reveal their customers’ unmet needs before they invest. The primary reason new offerings fail is that companies focus on solutions without first understanding what customers are trying to accomplish. They waste millions iterating without clear direction because they’re in the same trap I was in. The gap is structural and industry-wide. Most teams have never been shown another way. I wasn’t.

Revealing customers’ unmet needs before investing is what changes innovation from gamble to discipline. Unlike creative genius, clarity scales.

I’m developing an ISO-certified online course with the Global Innovation Management Institute (GIMI), launching Spring 2026. I also write about how companies can systematically reveal customers’ unmet needs to guide innovation and growth in my newsletter, Innovation Revelations. Sign up here: https://revealgrowth.com/get-innovation-revelations/.