Jobs-to-be-done is a powerful way to uncover the unmet needs of your customers. When you identify what they want and need, it’s easier to create solutions that will engage them with your brand. Outcome-driven innovation is about creating offerings that solve problems for people in their lives. This blog post discusses how applying the steps of this process can help you create innovative products for your business.
Defining your market around the jobs-to-be-done
Defining your market around a job and not just a group of products is the first step in the outcome-driven innovation process. When you know what jobs your customers want to get done, you can better identify what products might help them.
In order to do this, you need to understand your market as a group of people who have the same job that they need to be done rather than a group of people who are buying similar products.
Uncovering customers’ unmet needs
Once you have a better understanding of your market, it’s time to uncover what they actually need. The fact of the matter is that customers have over 100 abstract requirements for every product that they use. These requirements are needs, and they are used by the customer as metrics that measure how well the job was done.
This is often done by asking customers about the struggles that they face when trying to complete their job. Probing questions are an effective way for developing customer insights and finding out more information about how difficult or easy something is.
Quantifying outcomes that are unmet
Once you know the specific struggles of your customers, it’s time to quantify them. Customers have underserved and overserved outcomes that need to be understood with statistical certainty. If you have a clear understanding of which outcomes to target, you can better allocate your resources and save money once you reach the product development phase.
Discovering segments with hidden opportunity
Customers don’t agree on which outcomes aren’t met very often. In fact, they can often disagree on which outcomes are the most important. This is where uncovering hidden opportunity in your market comes into play. It’s not enough to know what outcomes need to be targeted; you also need to find the segments of customers who care about them the most.
Formulating and executing a product strategy
Now it’s time to put all of this information into a product strategy. This is the step where you take what you’ve learned about your customers and turn it into a plan for how to reach them with your product. It’s also where you need to identify which outcomes are most important to focus on, as well as how much money you’re willing to spend in order to reach them. This includes figuring out where to fill gaps in your portfolio by creating new products, adding onto or improving existing products, and strategically investing in R&D.
When you apply this process to your innovation, you can predictably create winning products because you’re solving real customer problems. And in a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out, that’s exactly what you need to do in order to stay ahead of your competition and continue serving your customers in the best way possible.