What We Do – Overview
We help organizations drive growth through innovation by creating unique value for their target customers using the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) innovation approach.
It’s estimated that 70-90% of all new products and services fail.
Most organizations have resigned to high failure rates because “innovation is inherently risky and messy.”
And yet, after 15 years of helping a wide variety of organizations innovate and grow, I have found that innovation is risky and messy due to how it is being executed, not innovation itself.
Innovation and growth should never be a guessing game. You deserve to know exactly what your customers want.
Virtually any organization that knows what type of customer information to obtain, how to get it, and how to use it can turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process.
That’s why I started Reveal Growth Consultants, to provide organizations with the highly flexible and reliable jobs-to-be-done process to consistently get results.
If you want to deliver compelling new value to your target customers, then you must find and address their compelling unmet needs. As Steve Jobs said,
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
What is “Jobs-to-be-Done” (JTBD)?
The JTBD innovation process was pioneered most notably by Anthony Ulwick, CEO and Founder of Strategyn (where Urko worked for seven years) and the late Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton M. Christensen.
In “Jobs Theory,” customer “needs” are defined as the jobs they want to get done (functionally, emotionally, and socially) and the criteria (outcomes) they use to measure success. This is based on the insight that people “hire” products and services to get their jobs done.
Theodore Levitt illustrated this well when he said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole!” This quote is important for two reasons:
- First, it reveals that people’s needs are separate and distinct from solutions. That is, making a ¼” hole is the need, (i.e., the job to be done), and the ¼” drill is a solution. Other solutions might be a pick, a punch, a laser, or some still-to-be-invented tool. Regardless, solutions are always separate and distinct from needs.
- Second, if we can keep this distinction in mind – that needs are separate and distinct from solutions – then we can turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process.
How does JTBD turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process?
- By obtaining a comprehensive set of the target members’ needs separate and distinct from solutions in virtually any market.
- And then deploying an online survey to a representative sample of target customers to have them rate each “need” according to its importance to get done and their satisfaction with their ability to get it done given their current solution. Important unsatisfied needs are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents.
In this manner, JTBD enables organizations to identify and rank the biggest opportunities (important unsatisfied needs) in their market, with statistical validity, before generating ideas. Knowing where to focus your creativity makes all the difference in the world.
JTBD precedes, complements, and enhances all other downstream processes such as Design Thinking, Lean, Agile, and Stage Gate.
One point of difference that makes JTBD so highly effective is that it explains why people buy which makes it highly predictive. In other words, if you know you can help your target customers get an important unsatisfied job done better than other competitive options, then you can be confident that they will value your new offering, i.e., they will consider it to be valuable and unique.
The Innovation Roadmap: 7 Steps to Making Innovation a Repeatable Business Process
- Determine your growth objectives.
- Select the market in which you wish to grow, i.e., the target customer and the job(s) they’re trying to accomplish with your offering(s).
- Identify what type of customer information (jobs and criteria) that must be obtained to achieve your objectives.
- Interview a representative sample of target customers to discover their needs (jobs and criteria).
- Survey a representative sample of target customers to determine which of their needs are important and unsatisfied. These are opportunities for innovation and growth.
- Determine which of the market opportunities are most attractive to pursue.
- Focus your ideation on the most attractive opportunities.
We can help you make it happen.