Product leaders face a common challenge: they’re not growing fast enough. 

Despite having ambitious goals, they find themselves consistently falling short, struggling to differentiate in crowded markets, and unable to overtake competitors.

The solution isn’t to obsess over growth numbers directly—it’s to focus on the controllable inputs that drive those outcomes. As Jeff Bezos wisely observed, “If you focus on the controllable inputs to your business instead of the outputs, in the long term you get better results.”

Working Backward from Outputs to Inputs

When product leaders come to Strategyn with growth challenges, they often describe symptoms—lack of resources, inability to differentiate, consistently trailing market leaders, failed products —rather than root causes. The key is to shift focus from these symptoms to the inputs that can be controlled and improved.

The outcome these leaders want is predictable, sustainable organic growth—creating products and services that succeed in the market consistently without depending on acquisitions. According to research, 80-90% of new product investments fail. This isn’t a matter of lack of ideas or effort, but rather a fundamental misunderstanding of what drives success.

To achieve predictable organic growth, you can’t focus directly on the growth numbers. Instead, you must identify and optimize the core inputs that lead to those outcomes.

This approach mirrors Bezos’s philosophy of starting with the desired output and then working backward until you reach controllable factors as inputs. For Amazon, this meant working backward from stock price to free cash flow to operational efficiency—ending with specific, manageable improvements like optimizing warehouse picking algorithms.

The Seven Critical Inputs for Organic Growth

Our research has concluded that to achieve the organic growth that product leaders seek, there are seven fundamental inputs.

1. Define Your Market Around the Job-to-be-Done

The foundation of successful innovation is correctly defining your market. Rather than thinking in terms of products or solutions, define your market as “a job executor getting a job done.” This definition is universal and timeless, providing a stable anchor for your innovation efforts.

Many companies mistakenly define their markets too narrowly or focus on their own capabilities rather than customer needs. By properly defining the market around the customer’s job-to-be-done, you create a strong foundation for growth.

2. Understand the Metrics of Success (Customer Outcomes)

Every product or service exists to help customers get a job done better, faster, and cheaper. To create value, you must understand the metrics customers use to evaluate success.

These metrics, called “desired outcomes”, are the specific criteria customers use to measure success when executing a job. 

These outcome statements are fundamentally different from traditional “needs” statements because they’re measurable, stable over time, solution-agnostic, and precise enough to drive innovation decisions. 

They describe how customers measure value, not what features they want.

Our research shows there are typically 75-125 specific outcome statements that define the perfect execution of a job. Getting these right is critical—they become the blueprint for all your innovation efforts, now and in the future..

3. Make Your Product Easy to Use

After addressing functional needs, ease of consumption becomes critical to adoption and satisfaction. This means examining every aspect of how customers interact with your product or service throughout its lifecycle. Companies often focus exclusively on functionality while neglecting the consumption experience, creating products that solve problems but frustrate users in the process.

Effective consumption design requires understanding the entire consumption chain—installation, setup, learning, interface, maintenance, upgrades, and disposal. Every step should be evaluated against specific customer metrics.

For example, customers might want to “minimize the time required to learn new features” or “minimize the likelihood of making errors during setup.” By addressing these consumption metrics, you remove barriers to adoption and increase the perceived value of your offering.

4. Design Your Product or Service

Design is where functional capabilities, consumption experience, and emotional appeal converge into a cohesive solution. While many leaders prioritize aesthetics, truly effective design starts with functional excellence and builds from there. As the saying goes, “form follows function”—a beautifully designed product that fails to satisfy the customer’s job-to-be-done will ultimately fail.

Good design involves making intentional tradeoffs based on the priority of customer needs. It requires understanding which outcomes matter most to customers and designing specifically to address those priorities.

This might mean sacrificing certain features to optimize for the most important outcomes, or strategically emphasizing certain aspects of the user experience. The key is that these decisions are driven by customer metrics rather than internal preferences or industry trends.

5. Optimize the Purchase Experience

This encompasses everything from how customers discover your product to how they evaluate options, make purchase decisions, and complete transactions. The buying process itself represents a distinct job-to-be-done with its own set of success metrics.

Optimizing this input means designing business processes that align with how customers want to buy. This might involve subscription models that reduce upfront costs, freemium approaches that allow customers to try before they buy, or streamlined purchasing processes that eliminate friction. Companies that excel at this input create buying experiences that feel natural and effortless, removing obstacles between customer interest and purchase completion.

6. Launch Effectively

A successful launch bridges the gap between your value creation and customer perception. Too often, companies talk about product features rather than the value those features deliver. The launch should clearly articulate how your product helps customers get their job done better, faster, and cheaper along specific dimensions they care about (desired outcomes).

This involves creating a clear, compelling value proposition that speaks directly to the underserved outcomes you’ve identified. It means training your sales team to communicate this value effectively, developing marketing materials that emphasize job-focused benefits, and ensuring that every customer touchpoint reinforces your unique ability to address specific customer needs. An effective launch doesn’t just announce a product—it connects your solution directly to the customer’s most important unmet needs.

7. Market with the Job in Mind

Marketing with the job in mind means organizing your entire go-to-market strategy around how you help customers achieve their goals rather than around your product’s features or specifications. This approach transforms everything from your website content to your sales presentations to your advertising campaigns.

When marketing with the job in mind, you lead with the outcomes customers are trying to achieve and the metrics they use to measure success. You connect directly with their struggles and aspirations before explaining how your solution addresses them.

This might mean organizing your website around different segments with unique outcome priorities, developing case studies that highlight specific outcome improvements, or creating sales tools that help match customers to the right solution based on their specific challenges. By speaking the language of customer outcomes, you create immediate resonance and differentiation in the market.

The power of starting with inputs in practice

Case Study: Kroll Ontrack’s Electronic Discovery Success

Kroll Ontrack provides a perfect illustration of how focusing on the right inputs transforms results. The company had specialized in recovering data from damaged hard drives and had developed powerful search technology that could scan drives for specific information. Seeing opportunity in the emerging legal electronic discovery market, they attempted to enter it twice—and failed both times.

Their fundamental mistake? Defining the market incorrectly. Kroll initially approached the market through the lens of their existing capabilities, assuming their customers were IT professionals (who they traditionally served for hard drive recovery). This led them to create offerings that emphasized technical capabilities but missed what customers truly valued.

When Kroll partnered with Strategyn to apply Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, they redefined the market around the actual job executor—attorneys who needed to find evidence to support or refute legal claims. This shift in the first critical input (market definition) changed everything.

With the market properly defined, Kroll could now gather accurate data on the second critical input—customer metrics for success. They discovered that attorneys had approximately 100 outcomes they used to measure success when performing electronic discovery. Many of these outcomes were both important and poorly satisfied by existing solutions:

• “Minimize the likelihood that relevant documents are excluded from capture”
• “Minimize the likelihood that information is inadvertently altered or destroyed while data is being captured”
• “Minimize the likelihood of making coding errors”
• “Minimize the time it takes to obtain all information relating to a specific subject”

Armed with these precise inputs, Kroll completely reimagined their approach. They developed a solution specifically addressing attorneys’ unmet needs, including innovative clustering algorithms that could find relevant documents even when specific keywords weren’t present—directly addressing one of the attorneys’ most critical outcomes.

The results were transformative. By focusing on the right inputs—particularly the first two (market definition and customer metrics)—Kroll leapfrogged established competitors and led the electronic discovery market for more than a decade. Their sustained leadership wasn’t luck or superior resources; it stemmed directly from having the right inputs that allowed them to continuously innovate in directions that delivered genuine customer value.

This case demonstrates why focusing on inputs rather than outputs is so powerful. Had Kroll continued to chase market share directly (an output), they would likely have made incremental improvements to their failed approach. By instead focusing on the controllable inputs of market definition and customer metrics, they transformed their entire strategy and achieved breakthrough results.

The Power of Input-Driven Growth

While many companies embrace the “fail fast” model in their quest for organic growth, It accepts high failure rates as inevitable rather than addressing the fundamental issue: companies are making major investment decisions without the right inputs to guide them.

The seven critical inputs for organic growth—market definition, customer metrics, consumption experience, purchase experience, product design, launch strategy, and market approach—provide a comprehensive framework that transforms innovation from guesswork into a predictable process. 

When companies invest in obtaining accurate, customer-centered data for these inputs, particularly the first two, they create a foundation for sustained organic growth.

Consider the stark contrast in approaches:

Output-focused approach: Start with ideas, launch them quickly, see what resonates, and pivot if they fail. This approach accepts high failure rates and wastes resources on solutions that never had a chance to succeed.

Input-focused approach: Define your market around the job-to-be-done, understand the metrics customers use to measure success, identify which metrics are underserved, and then create solutions that address those specific opportunities. This approach dramatically increases success rates by ensuring you’re solving the right problems.

In a business landscape where competitive advantage is increasingly difficult to maintain, mastering the seven inputs for organic growth doesn’t just improve your odds of success—it fundamentally changes the game, enabling you to create sustained value while competitors continue to guess and pivot.