Welcome to StartupRed.io, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German
startup scene with news, interviews and live events.
Hello and welcome, everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate.io,
your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany, Austria,
and Switzerland, bringing you today another episode in our series of entrepreneurship.
Therefore, I would like to welcome Anthony, who actually goes by the name of
Tony. Hey, how are you doing?
Joe, how's it going? I'm doing well. Thank you. I'm also doing good.
Glad to have you as a guest here. we'll talk
about innovation today for
the very simple reason you have quite a
history in working on innovation and innovation consulting you have published
in Harvard Business Reviews and you are the creator of outcome driven innovation
which is pretty cool but before that can you take us a little bit through your Civi,
what have you done in the past and how you arrived at the knowledge you want
to share with us today? Sure. I'd be happy to, Joe. Thank you.
Yeah. My career started back at IBM in the 1980s. I worked there for 10 years from 81 to 91.
And I have an engineering background, MBA.
I was working on a product called the PC Junior, if anyone's familiar with that.
The PC Junior was It was supposed to compete with Apple's home computer.
It was gonna change and revolutionize the way people view home computing.
But instead, the day after the product was introduced, the headlines in the
Wall Street Journal read, the PC Junior is a flop.
And, Joe, it was. It took us about a year to reconcile and come to grips with
the fact that it was a failed product.
And it cost IBM about a billion dollars.
Now, this was my first product I had worked on, and I didn't realize that that
kind of thing happened all the time.
I wondered how a company like IBM, with all its vast resources,
could make such a poor investment.
But I realized it wasn't just IBM. It was many companies. And it's oddly enough,
it's still not back in the 1980s, right?
It's still happening today where companies often create products that fail in the market.
And that really got my interest, especially the engineer in me to figure out
how can we create a process that's more predictable so that we know that the
products that we're creating will win in the market before we launch them.
In fact, ideally, before we even start developing them, we want to know that
they're going to win. So we're not creating products that will fail in the market.
And that led me down the path to create the outcome-driven innovation process.
I see, I see.
You said you are an engineer by training. Are you still running around in your house and fix stuff?
Yeah, in fact, I am. I see.
So basically, you were one of the IBM engineers trying to compete with Apple
home computer and in the very, very early days of the personal computer.
And you came up with theories, jobs to be done and outcome driven innovation.
Can you take us a little bit into this project, into this journey,
how you started developing those frameworks, and where are they different? Sure.
Well, back in the 1980s, when I started looking around to see,
well, what is available, that was back in the early days of voice of the customer,
the house of quality in QFD, conjoint analysis.
And I realized very quickly that there is no process or there was no process for innovation.
And I thought, well, let's go create it.
And what really occurred to me in that PC Junior failure was how the folks at
the Wall Street Journal knew the very next day that the product was a failure.
Clearly, they were using some set of metrics to judge the value of the product
that we did not use to build the product.
And the thought was, would it be possible to understand the metrics people are
going to use to judge the value of your product before you start creating it?
And that way I can say, hey, I know I'm creating a lot more value than my competing products.
And if I can prove that to myself, then I should feel much more confident that
the investments I'm making are
much lower risk and that I will create a product that people will want.
That was the basic thinking. Is that possible?
And I thought, well, it had to be possible, but it's been escaping people.
What really connected the dots for me was the quote from Theodore Leavitt.
People don't want the quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.
And I thought, well, this gives us an option, right? We don't have to study
how to create a better drill.
Why don't we study the underlying process of creating a quarter-inch hole?
Now we can go study a process because as an engineer, I love that, right? You can study.
I was on the manufacturing line studying the manufacturing process,
right, where you automate things and you eliminate variability and you reduce defects.
And I thought, if you could study what we eventually call the customer's job
to be done and break it down into its component parts and figure out how do
they measure success along each step of the way,
then we could create solutions that get the job done better.
And is the solution a quarter-inch drill? Maybe not. Maybe it's something else.
Let's not assume the solution up front.
Let's instead focus on what problems customers are trying to solve.
And again, the key there is viewing the problem as a process the customer is
trying to execute so that you can start applying Six Sigma thinking,
lean thinking, statistical process control thinking to solve the problem.
Okay, so basically your thought was….
You want to understand the customer and the process they are using to solve a problem.
So basically, then your product, the quarter-inch drill, would fit in. Is that about right?
It might fit in, right? Let's not assume that it will, right?
Let's study the job of creating a quarter-inch hole and figure out how do people
measure success when creating a quarter-inch hole?
Well, I want to start at the right location. You know, I want to make sure I
don't make the hole too big, too wide, too deep.
I want to make sure I don't hit it at an angle, right? I have to hit it at 90 degrees.
I want to minimize the likelihood that burrs occur, little wood spurs,
when I'm making the hole, right?
There's a whole bunch of metrics that you think about, and maybe there's a better solution.
Maybe it's a hole punch. Maybe it's a laser. Maybe it's something we haven't
even thought of yet from a technology standpoint.
Dynamite. Right? Maybe it's dynamite.
And a very controlled experiment. I can see what you did when you were a kid playing in the garage.
Don't tell anyone. I think I understood the idea.
Can you give us an example? Can we make up an example? Like really that so that
our audience starts to understand what is the framework all about and how could
I apply to an everyday problem to something different than a whole? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, the key thing to think here is that it goes back to the basic
reason why people buy products.
The way we say it now, people buy products to get a job done.
Right. What we want to know is, well, what is that job?
And then can we break it down into its component parts using what we call a job map?
And then go even a step lower and understand needs at this, we call it the outcome level.
So the example can be preparing a meal at home. We all do this, right? Or cook a meal.
And there's metrics you use to judge if it's going well or not.
Like you may all of a sudden say, oh, man, I just burnt part of the meal.
It got too hot on one side of the pot, right?
Well, the need is you want to minimize the likelihood of burning the meal, right?
More specific, I want to minimize the likelihood of overcooking the meal or
undercooking it. I want to minimize the likelihood that it's not cooked evenly.
I want to minimize the time it takes to portion out the meal.
I want to minimize selective over-portioning or under-portioning, right?
You can start laying all these metrics in place that say, hey,
if I had the right tool set, I can create a meal perfectly, right?
Where everything just comes out just fine, right?
And in most situations, there's 100 different metrics or more,
especially when you get to some more complicated things. preparing a meal is
somewhat complicated, oddly enough, but performing a surgical procedure is far more.
But uncovering what those metrics are is the first step.
All right, we want the list of 100 metrics. That tells us what the needs are.
Now, what we don't know yet is which needs are unmet, right?
So here we rely on quantitative research to go figure out from customers which
Each of these outcomes are really important and not well satisfied with today's solutions.
So we ask people, what solution are you using? And what is the importance level
of each outcome in the current satisfaction level?
And from there, we can figure out which needs are unmet.
The goal here at a high level, the goal here is we want to come up with a product
that's going to get the job done significantly better, meaning 15% to 20% or more.
That's the threshold we've determined really makes a difference.
And you can think about this, Joe. Like, would you ever switch from your favorite
brand if it's going to get the job done 1% better or 2% better?
Probably not, right? There's got to be some significant movement.
And we have to be able to prove that the concept that we're about to go develop
will address the top unmet needs significantly better than current solutions.
So we have to know what all those needs are, which ones are unmet,
and then systematically come up with solutions that will address those unmet needs.
That was actually the first question that popped into my mind going through
those steps in jobs to be done, understood.
It, where would be a place in this very big world here today for entrepreneurs
listening to this, speaking different languages,
where would you think there is like a big place where you can find jobs, problems to be solved?
Would you look on Reddit?
Well, you're asking a really important question, which is, which problem,
meaning which market, should I even go after?
I think that's what you're saying, right? I want to help the audience to guide
them to places where they find really important jobs, meaning places.
If they develop any kind of product, they'll very soon be able to make a living
from that because nobody...
Too many people care if you have a product that makes an annual revenue of $1,000.
But if you're talking like $10 million annual revenue, people are getting interested.
Plus, you can make a living from that. A very good one, by the way.
And that is something I want to help to guide our audience towards.
Well, you're on the right point. Because if you pick a market that's not attractive,
you're going to fail. even if you came up with a decent product, right?
So you need to pick a good market.
So how do we define a market? Some people define markets around a technology
or a product or a vertical or geography, a territory, but we're going to define
a market around the jobs we've done lens.
So we say, if people buy products and services to get a job done,
let's define a market as a group of people and the job they're trying to get done.
And my understanding would be if you have people with the same problem,
it doesn't make a lot of difference if you have the right product,
if they are located in San Francisco, in Shanghai, or in Stuttgart.
That's exactly right. That's the beauty of jobs to be done, right?
There's people around the globe who have the same problem, right?
Like parents, a group of people, right?
Trying to pass on life lessons to children.
That's a job to be done. That would be a market.
So as an entrepreneur, you could say, I can go after parents who are trying
to pass on life lessons to children, and that's the market I'm going to serve.
Or you could say, hey, I'm going to go after interventional cardiologists and
help them restore blood flow in an artery, and I'm going to create a product that does that.
Or I'm going to work with chefs and create products that will help them prepare a meal.
You pick, right? You can pick from thousands, tens of thousands of possible
markets. So which one's most attractive?
Well, first off, one in which you probably have the capability to go address.
That's probably key. If you have no skill set in that space,
you're going to be spending a lot of time,
experimenting and getting things wrong. So pick something in your bailiwick, right?
Second, what kind of job would you rather focus on?
One that's executed by 10,000 people around the globe or one that's executed
by 300 million people around the globe, right?
So understanding how many people are getting that job done is critical.
Understanding are they underserved? Understanding if they're willing to pay
more to get the job done better.
This helps you choose from all the possible markets to one that's going to be
attractive, which would be one that you have the capability to address.
It's large. A lot of people are trying to get the job done. They're underserved.
Today's solutions aren't serving the market as well as they could.
That would be a place to start. Trying to pick your brain here again.
Where would you personally go right now to find a job to be done?
For me personally, it would be some place where a lot of people are and writing about the problem.
That's why I, for example, threw in Reddit as an example.
We have like a few more places where you could find jobs to be done.
Maybe not necessarily the emergency room of a big hospital trying to avoid accidents or something.
Joe, any of those sources are great. Like you can use your imagination to say,
and I've been using AI for this.
You can ask AI with the right prompting.
Like we've created our own GPTs that have ODI thinking built into it.
And we can ask, you know, give me a list of the top 10 problems that product managers have.
I've created this list, right? And it comes up with that list of problems.
And you can help them solve one of them, two of them, or try to solve all of them.
But the key thing is pick your group of people first.
Because if you say, hey, I just want to pick a job to be done,
it could be for anybody. It's so broad.
What's often easier, especially if you want to go on Reddit,
you know, pick an audience.
Where are parents struggling? Where are parents with new children struggling to get the job done?
Or what jobs are they trying to get done? Now we're down to something.
Yeah you got that right trying to get to sleep at night and stay asleep at night that's a big deal.
And underserved right if you're a parent with young kids you know that um so it's,
it's narrowing it down right and that's that's the market selection part of
the process it's just choosing which problem do i want to help a group of people
solve and what will be the next step? You have a market, a group of people.
You have a problem, a job they need to be done. And how would you then approach the next steps?
We want to really understand that problem at a deep granular level.
So we wrote an article in the Harvard
Business Review back in 2008 that introduced what we call the job map.
The job map is not a process map. It's the opposite, right? A process map lays
out what people are doing in solution space.
A job map lays out what people are trying to do in problem space.
So it's devoid of the solution.
So a surgeon may be trying to remove an anatomical structure.
So they have to gain access to the vascular system. They have to find the pathway
to where they're going to go.
They have to navigate to get there. They have to close off the blood supply to the structure.
They have to remove the structure.
I'm not saying how they're doing any of that, right? But this is the process
they're going through. This is what they're trying to do to get the job done.
So this goes a long way because if you just create a job map,
and this can be done with a handful of interviews with customers,
If you can create that job map, you know right up front, are there parts of
the job where people are struggling more to get the job than others?
We find there's many markets, there's steps in the job that nobody's getting done.
We find that most products only get parts of jobs done.
So all this is great news for entrepreneurs who are saying, how am I going to win in the market?
Well, you're going to get more of the job done better than the competing solutions.
Those steps that they're ignoring, you're going to tackle.
Is it, would it be just rephrasing?
You go through a process, for example, the surgery you described,
and then interview a few of those surgeons, and they describe different problems, jobs to be done,
problems to be solved, and you basically make a list, map them on the process.
And the more people you have, the more you understand this is a big problem
for many, this is a big problem, this is a minor problem, this is just a problem
for one person. Would it be something like that?
Well, I'm going to caution you in the language that you're using there because
the hierarchy is not all jobs to be done, right?
There's only one job to be done, right? This is where people get confused, right?
Removing the anatomical structure, that's the job to be done, right?
Surgeons may try to, there's other jobs they try to get done,
but you have to pick the one that you're going to go focus on.
So removing the anatomical structure would be a great job. So that becomes the job to be done.
Then you break it down into job steps.
So we call these job steps, job steps, because they're not the job to be done, right?
The job is this big thing. The steps are gaining access to the vasculature.
Finding the pathway, navigating to the pathway, shutting off the blood supply.
Those are all part of removing an anatomical structure, right?
So we lay out that job map, and then we go a level lower, and we call these
the outcomes, the customer's desired outcomes.
These are the real needs. These are the granular level needs.
So as I'm trying to gain access to the structure, I want to minimize the likelihood
that I cause damage to surrounding tissue as I'm navigating through the vasculature.
I want to minimize the likelihood of bleeding when I'm transecting the vessels
that go to the structure that I'm trying to remove.
Again, there's 100 very specific granular outcomes or needs that surgeons are
trying to address when they're getting the job done.
We want that entire list. So
when we go talk to surgeons, we ask them to take us through the journey.
I like thinking about it like this, Joe. I ask them to go on this very slow,
slow motion journey with us to tell us what are these steps they go through.
And then for every step, what are the outcomes they're trying to solve?
What's the next thing they're trying to do? What are they trying to avoid?
And we build out this entire hierarchy of customer needs so we can understand the entire market.
Of removing the anatomical structure that gives us our basis of knowing what
all the needs are in the market right that's the first step the next step is
to figure out well which of those are unmet,
so the first step is putting putting the model together the beauty of this too
joe is once you put the model together it's valid for years to come right how
long have surgeons been trying and remove an anatomical structure?
Decades, centuries, right? Yep. And how are they measuring success?
They're using the same measures today that they used 20, 30 years ago.
What's different, the technologies that have come along to help them get the
job done better raises their satisfaction level on these outcomes.
And what we're trying to figure out at any given point in time is,
well, which of these outcomes are really important and poorly satisfied?
And we do that quantitatively. So we would take a survey, put it out to some
number of customers or potential customers, competitors, customers,
and ask them to tell us how important each outcome is and the level of satisfaction
using the solution they have today.
And from there, we can calculate it out. We use what we call the opportunity
algorithm. If an outcome is very important and the difference between the importance
of satisfaction is great, we say the need's unmet.
So, in other words, if 90% of the population says this is very or extremely
important and only 20% of the population saying this is very or extremely satisfied,
we're going to flag that as an unmet need.
And what we're looking for in the market at any given time is,
are there 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 unmet needs that we could potentially go better
address to get the job done better?
So we identify those needs, and then we work to come up with the solutions that address them.
And if we can do that successfully, we know we've created a product concept
that will get the job done significantly better when in the market.
All this is doable before I spend the first development dollar.
Because I'm proving on paper that the idea I have is going to move the needle
along all these important dimensions.
Just like in the IBM example, what were the metrics that those folks were using
to judge the value of the product?
Once I know them, I can just make sure I'm designing the product to address those metrics.
So that it's like you're stacking the odds in your favor. The way I like thinking about it is this.
What are the chances of a team randomly coming up with a solution that addresses
the top 15 unmet needs in the market if they don't know what those unmet needs are? I see.
About zero, right? But what are the chances of them coming up with a successful
product if they know and agree on the top 15 unmet needs in the market?
It goes up dramatically. And that's why the process we use has an 86% success
rate, because we can prove whether or not we should even enter the market.
If we don't come up with a concept that's going to get the job done better, then don't build it.
Yes, exactly. Unless you needed to build a whole package for Coin.
That would be a possibility, but then you wouldn't be a startup anymore.
No, that's right. You're growing from the core. at that point.
I see. And let us know that we understood a little bit jobs should be done.
That's basically a framework to analyze demands for your clients.
And how would you then proceed when you have jobs where the market potential is big enough?
When you say the job potential is big enough, meaning there's a large number
of people that are underserved.
Yes, exactly. Right. Well, that's what we just discovered in that quantitative
research analysis that I just described.
Right. We do that every one of those outcomes.
So we're getting data on 100 different outcomes. We know precisely which outcomes
are really important and not well satisfied.
So we know for every outcome, if we satisfy this, that will impact 5% of the market.
If we satisfy that one, that'll satisfy or impact 80% of the market. Let's do that one.
What we're looking for is what I call the most efficient path to growth.
You're trying to figure out which needs are underserved across the biggest population.
So if there's a need that's underserved across 90 or 100% of the population,
that's where you want to focus, right?
It's going to impact everybody. And if you can find 10 of those needs that are
cut across the entire customer population,
That's the path to growth. So discovering what those needs are that are unmet
across the largest population is the goal of the research.
And once you have the answer, you know where to go focus.
Again, we're flipping this around. Instead of hoping my product addresses the
top 15 limit needs, we're going to make sure they address the top 15 limit needs
because we know what they are.
I think I have a pretty good understanding, as well as our audience now,
of the jobs to be done theory.
I would be curious because you've been already talking about AI here.
We are maybe in the year where AI is really going to grow up to really solve problems.
How do you, your company, right now use AI for those steps for doing market
research and so on and so forth?
Yeah, it's a great question. We've been on this since November a couple of years
ago, so it's been over two years.
And I think like most people, our first view was how does AI help us do what
we currently do better, right?
And so we've been on that path. What we do is we encourage everybody in our
company to use AI for that purpose and experiment with it and try it out.
We've given them access to learning about AI.
In our monthly all-hands meetings, we call on people to give us examples of how they're using AI.
So we're really encouraging this from a cultural standpoint and getting people indoctrinated in it.
But in a more sophisticated way, we're trying to figure out,
well, can we collect a set of needs through AI, right? Can we program this in such a way?
Now, the interesting thing about our approach is that it's very rules-based.
Like our outcome statements have 28 different rules that they follow.
They've got to be stable over time. They can't contain adjectives.
There's a bunch of reasons behind every rule. But once we've programmed AI with
all the rules, we have our own GPT, like I said.
One for market definition, one for job mapping, one for outcome gathering.
And we query it. We see, can I come up with a set of need statements?
And it's pretty good.
But you wouldn't know it's pretty good unless you're an expert at collecting
these kinds of statements and know what to look for, right? So...
I think it'll clearly get better and better over time.
But where we're at with it right now is I feel the AI helps practitioners that
know how to do ODI, helps them get it done faster, more effectively.
But it doesn't replace it yet. So I think we're in pretty good shape from that
standpoint for a little bit.
But ultimately, what people want to do is to get answers to all the questions that ODI helps answer.
Like, how do I differentiate myself from my top competitor? Am I satisfying
the needs to a great enough degree to make a difference?
Is there a segment of people that nobody's targeting that I could go after?
Like, we found in the all-terrain vehicle manufacturing space,
for example, we found a segment that was about a quarter of the market that nobody was attacking.
They didn't know it existed from a needs perspective. This is why we do outcome-based
segmentation, you know, other
groups of people that struggle in different ways to get the job done.
We don't segment around demographics or psychographics or attitudes or behaviors
because those are all really just proxies for segmenting around unmet needs, right?
So instead, we just segment around the unmet needs because we know what they are.
And it gives us a whole insight into different opportunities that we could potentially go address.
So, you know, I think, you know, AI is going to be, it's going to take a while
before AI can do all that qualitative and quantitative work effectively.
So for now, it's a keen eye watching all this stuff, but we're making our tool
set and everything available to people so that they can start practicing and
coming up the learning curve.
And I think, you know, some of the entrepreneurs in the audience would like that.
We've built a certification site, training site that makes some of this stuff
possible. as a starting point.
Jobs-to-be-done approach. I think we now heard about it.
How would it help entrepreneurs to mitigate risk?
And do you believe also investors would appreciate a proven methodology to their approach? Yeah.
Well, we know on the latter question there, definitely, yes.
We know a number of companies who've taken the data and presented it to their
investors to help secure funding.
And they find it very impressive because they go in with the story of saying,
hey, we're going to beat this competitor along these dimensions.
Here's the top unmet needs.
Here's the data from the market that says we're going to get the job done 15%, 20% better or more.
So they can make that argument. So they're not investing in hope, right?
They're investing in something that they know is possible because they've mitigated the risk.
Do you make the AI tools you've been talking about, do you make them available
for people to use? We're going to.
We're still testing them. We're trying to put the right design in place to make it usable.
So we're getting there but what we do have already is we have all the rule sets
and everything that we use to create the the prompts and things like that that's all.
That's all part of our certification program. I see.
My next question would be, because everybody, especially if your startup scale
up, if you're not yet an established company, you always feel the competition.
How do you think startups can leverage the jobs we've done and outcome-driven
innovation for themselves to compete in the market?
Well, the very first thing they should do is make sure they define their market
as a group of people and a job to be done, and then co-create the job map.
Sit with customers. They can do this in a couple of days and lay out what job
they're trying to get done and what those steps are.
And even before you get to the
outcome level, you can see, are my products getting the entire job done?
Are there competing products getting the entire job done? Are people cobbling together solutions?
Is there a platform play?
Are we leading people to execute the process in an iterative order where they're
going to go back and iterate and waste time because we don't have the steps in the right order?
And oddly enough, we see that quite a bit, Joe, where products force people
to do things inefficiently, which we want to eliminate.
Job Maps help point that out as well. So just getting started with that is key.
But as an entrepreneur, and I'm an entrepreneur, I started Stratagion back in
91, and we've had different product sets since then.
The first thing I do is I go get the data set so we know where the unmet needs
are, and we can focus on the right segments, the right unmet needs.
So we know we're going to win in the market. And that's why we've been around
33, 34 years doing this type of work.
Every time I'm talking about tools, processes, what I always have in mind is
how can people make mistakes?
What are the most common mistakes here? Because I have seen pitch deck over
pitch deck over pitch deck.
And the people are addressing people, well-educated, higher income, 25 to 45. That's it.
And that's usually when I start scratching my head. Well, guys,
you got to do better than that.
What are the common mistakes you have seen people making with the jobs to be done theory so far?
Yeah, as they start applying it, they stumble at every step.
I'll just start by saying that.
And the very first step is to identify what's my market.
And again we define a market as a group of people and the job to be done,
this sounds like it should be easy it's not easy so for example you could be a kettle maker,
and you could say well i'm in the kettle market right and so you go to your
customers and say why do you use my kettle well i use it so i can heat water
great all right so then what happens Is it part of a bigger job?
Yeah, it is, actually. You know, I use that water and I combine it with some
coffee and put it in this cup and add some sugar and some cream.
And now I've created a hot beverage for consumption.
So as the kettle maker, now you have to decide, do I want to just make kettles
and get part of this bigger job done, or do I want to try to get the bigger job done?
Where do I want to define my level of abstraction?
Nespresso and Keurig, they get the entire job done, so you can create a hot
beverage for consumption.
But people still buy pots or kettles just to heat water very quickly because
maybe they're going to make soup or tea or something different.
So they have to decide amongst that level of abstraction where they want to play.
Now, what we always recommend to people is we say, it's okay to go beyond your core.
So if you're the kettle maker, it's okay to go beyond heating the water to the right temperature.
As long as you still include heating the water to the right temperature as part of that bigger job.
So if I eventually said, if I went all the way too far and said,
my job is to prepare dinner, then I'm not going to get the granular level of
detail on heating water to the right temperature.
I've gone too far. But if I stay with, you know, I want to create a hot beverage
for consumption, you're probably going to be safe.
And you could say, I don't want to go beyond the kettle market.
I just want to help people create, you know, get to the right temperature as
quickly as possible and stay there and cool down when they need it.
You know, and they could just get all the outcomes just on that very narrow focused job. Right.
And that's a choice. It's a strategic choice. Where do you want to go?
Do you have the capability to get the entire job done?
We know that solutions evolve to get the entire job done. Are you going to be
the platform play? Or are you going to be a feature on someone's platform?
So, tough questions. When you've been talking about that, I was wondering,
a lot of startups out there work in some form or derivative of agile development.
How could they integrate jobs to be done, outcome-driven innovation in this process?
Well, the way I think about it is jobs to be done in ODI make agile more agile.
Because to me, Agile more or less begins when you start developing the product, right?
You want to develop it in the most efficient way, but you have to be developing the right product.
Everything before Agile and everything before development is what I call the
innovation process, right?
The output of the innovation process is the concept that you know is going to
win in the market before you start developing it, right? That should be the output.
Then you take the concept, you put it in development. That's when you apply Agile.
And the beauty here is you're not iterating on what the product does anymore
because you already defined that up front.
So the only thing you're iterating on is the design, right?
So how do I make sure it's easy to install and set up and interface with and
clean and maintain and upgrade, right? So you're focused on what we call the
consumption chain jobs, right?
And so instead of iterating on what the product does while you're developing
it, you've quit that step. And that's huge, right?
Yeah, it is. Right? And I know like in Lean Startup, for example,
they often say, go ahead and hypothesize the market, the product,
and the needs all at once.
It's like trying to solve a very complex simultaneous equation,
extremely difficult to solve.
Unless you use some mathematical principles to say, let's just solve one piece at a time.
Let's make the market a, not a variable, but let's make it a constant. Let's pick the market.
It's parents trying to pass on life lessons to children. All right,
so now that's a constant.
So now let's come up with the needs, right?
So we can study all the needs associated with passing on life lessons.
Now that becomes a constant.
Now let's come up with the solution. We know the needs, we know which are unmet.
And now we can solve the equation. Now we can achieve product market fit, right?
Now the thing that we're creating we know is going to address the unmet needs in the market, right?
That's the beauty of the approach. And it just brings a little science to the
process and helps mitigate risk.
I have only two more questions for you, but one of them, I would need a job
to be done because the startups have then, if they decide to use the framework,
a job to measure the success of the implementation of jobs to be done,
outcome-driven innovation.
How would they do it?
Yeah. Well, you can measure the success along a number of different ways.
You can measure success early on, saying, you know, is the market I've chosen
an attractive market? That would be a measure.
Do I understand the entire job the customer is trying to get done?
That could be a metric. Do I have all the needs associated with the market?
Do I know which ones are unmet?
Do I know if there's segments of people with different unmet needs?
And are my solutions designed specifically to address those needs?
And the final measure is, am I going to move the level of satisfaction so I'm
going to get the job done significantly better?
Just like I said right up front, the goal of the innovation process is to come
up with a solution that you know with a high degree of certainty is going to
win the market before you start developing it, not after it's launched like the PC Junior. Right.
So that's that's the ultimate measure right there. Does my product concept move
the needle? Can I prove it?
I see. So the last question would be only what resources or training would you
recommend for entrepreneurs interested in mastering jobs to be done outcome
driven innovation methodologies?
Yeah, Jeff, that's a great question. You know, we spent the last five years,
and I spent a couple years, me personally, just writing more material to help train practitioners.
It's all located on our website.
It's called ODI Pro.
You can Google it and quickly find it. But it includes the certification courses
that help you become a good practitioner. but probably more important,
it has a whole bunch of webinars and presentations,
And instructions in there on how to make it happen. You know,
how do you do an interview?
And this is where entrepreneurs often struggle because they don't have the skill
sets to go sit and talk to customers.
They're not necessarily qualitative
and quantitative research and data analysts and that sort of thing.
But those are the type of skill sets that are required to make this stuff happen.
And you should have them on your team as any organization who's trying to win in the market.
Well, I would say pretty good closing words.
Thank you very much for being here, my guest. We had a little interruption,
and I do have two two-year-old boys and two five-year-old boys here playing in the background.
Just a room next to me. I hope the noise wasn't too bad.
Tony, thank you very much. It was a pleasure having you as a guest.
We link down here in the show notes for everybody who'd like to learn more,
something like your Wikipedia article, your LinkedIn profile,
the website of your company, the Jobs to be Done framework, and two of your
Harvard Business Review articles.
Excellent. And there is a free book at Jobstobedonebook.com,
a free e-book or free audio book. So that's also a possibility.
Great. Awesome. so only thing left for me to say is thank you very much it was
a pleasure talking to you thank you Joe I appreciate it have a good day bye bye.
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