[Check out the recent written interview with me by Jim Kalbach, author of The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Need. Jim is also the host of the “JTBD Untangled” monthly webinar where I presented separately about Lean JTBD™.]
How to Find High Conviction Ideas
You have a choice. You can place your new product bets on:
1) Many lukewarm ideas
2) A few high conviction ideas
“Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.” – Warren Buffett
Buffett’s strategy has often involved making large, concentrated bets on a few high-conviction investments. He’s not alone. Billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and others are known for focusing on a few high conviction ideas rather than diversifying.
What is “High Conviction?”
In both investment and innovation contexts, “high conviction” refers to the strong belief and confidence in the potential success of an idea, strategy, or investment. It is based on thorough research, deep understanding, and solid evidence, rather than on speculation or trend-following.
In the realm of innovation, high conviction ideas are those that are pursued with confidence because they are grounded in a superior understanding of market opportunities and customer needs. At a high level, there are only two ways to create high conviction ideas:
- Gain a superior understanding about an opportunity in your market
- Gain a superior understanding about how to address a well-known opportunity in your market
How to Find High-Conviction Ideas for New or Improved Offerings
The best way to create high conviction ideas for new or improved offerings is stop trying to find or create ideas until after you understand the “problem space” – i.e., the market’s unmet needs. Specifically, learn what your target customers are trying to accomplish, how they measure success, and where their needs remain unmet.
Once you understand these, you can marshal the necessary resources to address the most attractive opportunities in your market, whether through new or improved offerings, messaging and positioning, operational alignment, acquisitions, or partnerships.
Leveraging JTBD for High-Conviction Ideas
Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) enables firms to gain a superior understanding of your target customers’ unmet needs (i.e., opportunities) by redefining key concepts such as customer need, innovation, market, opportunity, and segmentation, and thereby identifying and ranking a comprehensive set of unmet needs in your market with precision.
Further, JTBD changes how we measure customer satisfaction. Instead of evaluating how well customers’ current products or services meet their “expectations,” JTBD measures customer satisfaction by assessing how well these products or services help customers get their jobs done. This reveals previously hidden, latent, and unarticulated needs. Do you think that might give you an edge?
By identifying and ranking your target customers’ important unsatisfied needs with precision (i.e., jobs and criteria), JTBD can consistently give you high conviction about where to focus and what to do to create unique value. This enables firms to achieve a high degree of product/market fit at concept creation, before development.
This is possible now because JTBD captures the relevant market intelligence and company criteria upfront so that your team can bake it into ideas at concept creation. The benefits of this are dramatically higher success rates, quicker time to money, and a repeatable way to drive innovation and revenue growth.
“The secret of business is to know something nobody else knows.” – Aristotle Onassis
Example: Franklin University
This approach is exemplified by Franklin University, which used JTBD to retain more students in their doctoral programs. One key finding from student interviews was that students were dropping out due to the unrelenting pace of the coursework caused by the requirement to take two overlapping courses each term.
To address this problem, Franklin changed all their doctoral courses from twelve weeks to eight weeks, thereby eliminating overlapping courses and making the course pace easier to maintain. This enabled students to take just one course at a time and still graduate in two years.
Students expressed deep satisfaction with this change, and Franklin’s faculty observed higher engagement and better performance due to the improved course scheduling format.
This is how you can create high conviction ideas, too.
Want to learn more
We help executives who are eager to drive innovation and revenue growth but frustrated with their results win by minimizing the guesswork. We do that by revealing the hidden opportunities in your market and helping you create unique value by addressing those needs, using the proven JTBD process, so you can set yourself apart from the competition and drive revenue growth in a repeatable process.
