Product Strategy and Innovation Blog

Ron Johnson Didn’t Understand Apple

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Ron Johnson was recently ousted as the CEO of JC Penney after a series of failed experiments to drastically alter the consumer’s shopping experience. John Gruber (who we usually agree with completely) and others have commented that perhaps Johnson wasn’t given enough time to turn around JC Penney.

But we have a different view. We think Ron Johnson actually didn’t understand what makes Apple successful. This may seem difficult to believe given Apple’s retail success. But let’s look at what Ron Johnson has said … Read on

The iPhone, Still The Best Phone For The Job

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iPhone 5When Apple announced record sales of $54.5 billion its stock plummeted. Wall Street was upset that despite selling 75 million iOS devices in a quarter, Apple did not blow industry expectations out of the water. Many are questioning if Apple has reached its peak of innovation and whether or not it still has a future without Steve Jobs. As rumors abound about the next iPhone, bloggers and naysayers are undoubtedly already prepared to … Read on

Does Your Innovation Process Get The Job Done?

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We know that people buy products and services to get a “job” done. When looking at the innovation process through a jobs-to-be-done lens, it is clear that the goal of innovation is to create products and services that help customers get their jobs done better. So why do nearly 90 percent of all products that companies invest in fail to achieve this objective?

… Read on

An Innovation Strategy for Predictable Growth

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Innovation happens. In fact, it happens frequently enough to have resulted in the creation of tens of thousands of successful businesses. The problem is that most innovation happens randomly. It’s unpredictable. This is a problem, especially for large, public companies that have an obligation to their stockholders to grow each year at a respectable and predictable rate. A company that was able to make innovation predictable would be able to promise stockholders reliable growth–which would put it in a very special category: over a recent … Read on

What Jobs Will Apple’s Television Get Done?

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People have been buying televisions for years. But people don’t want televisions: they want to discover, organize and view content. These are their jobs-to-be-done. This is something that traditional players in this space just don’t understand. Incumbents like Samsung, Panasonic, Comcast, Netflix and others fail to address this job in its entirety, putting them all at risk. A Samsung product manager, for example, recently said, “TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. … Read on

Market Segmentation Is Soured by Milkshake Marketing

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milkshake marketingIn Clayton Christensen’s well-publicized milkshake marketing video and HBR article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” he proposes doing market segmentation differently: around the job-to-be-done.

We have the utmost respect for Christensen, who has been a steadfast advocate of jobs-to-be-done thinking for nigh on a decade. However, our own two decades of experience with jobs-to-be-done thinking compel us to point out that his milkshake marketing example … Read on

Reinventing the Innovation Process

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cogwheel

The goal of the innovation process is to come up with breakthrough ideas that address unmet customer needs. To execute this process, many companies have adopted a “failing fast” approach to innovation. Using this approach, companies generate lots of ideas and then work to quickly and inexpensively determine which ideas customers like best.

Unfortunately, failing fast is a high-risk guessing game that cannot be won. It is built around a gambling mentality that … Read on

The Jobs-to-Be-Done Language of Innovation

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A common language of innovation has the power to unite an organization in its effort to create new, breakthrough products. Most companies do not share such a language. In fact, the term innovation has become so overused that many companies see little meaning in it at all. In your company is there an agreed on definition of what innovation is? Of what a customer need is? Before companies can excel at creating new products, this has to change.

With the advent of … Read on

Innovation Starts by Targeting the Right Customer

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Who Is Your Customer

Nest took the thermostat market by storm this year as they capitalized on the fact that long-time players were focused on creating value for the wrong customer. While leading thermostat makers continued to strengthen their alliances with the contractors that sell and install their products, Nest bypassed that channel and focused on creating value for the customers that really matter: the homeowner.

So why didn’t the incumbent companies do … Read on

Why Outcome-Driven Innovation Works

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When looking through a jobs-to-be-done lens, it is easy to see that the goal of innovation is to create products and services that help customers get their jobs done better. Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is a product strategy and innovation process that was designed from the ground up with this end in mind.

ODI reinvents the entire innovation process around the jobs-to-be-done theory. This includes the way customers, markets, and needs are … Read on

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