The purpose of companies is to help customers complete a task — the job-to-be-done. Products succeed when they enable customers to do that job better.
The value of research doesn’t come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation.Pavel Samsonov UX Collective · Medium · August 2024
Outcome-Driven Innovation is a process for the systematic discovery of value-creation potential.
People use products to accomplish tasks. Solutions change quickly — the tasks people want to complete remain stable over decades.
A market is always a pair: a group of people (job executors) and the job they are trying to get done. Not a product category. Not an industry. Sales of existing products are not a reliable measure of innovation potential.
Tasks are processes with desired outcomes. Successful innovations help people complete a task better, faster, cheaper and more sustainably.
50–150
A typical job has 50–150 measurable outcomes — the criteria customers use to judge success. Each outcome is rated on a 1–10 scale for importance and satisfaction.
Outcomes are not loose customer wishes. They follow a grammar that makes them measurable, solution-independent and stable across markets.
Minimize the time it takes to determine the fracture type that will likely form in the formation.
Source: Strategyn, “Outcomes Cheatsheet” (2023)
With ODI, your company is not entirely customer-driven. It is customer-informed — but the responsibility for solutions stays with your team.Anthony W. Ulwick Turn Customer Input into Innovation · Harvard Business Review, January 2002
The ODI methodology was first documented at scale in the Cordis case (Ulwick, HBR 2002): a maker of angioplasty balloons grew from <1% market share to 10% in the US, 18% in Japan, 20% in Europe and 30% in Canada. Cordis launched 12 new catheters and went on to create the modern coronary stent — one of the most successful medical devices in history.
What Cordis did wasn’t magic: they interviewed cardiologists, nurses and hospital administrators about every step of the angioplasty procedure — and translated the answers into ~75 outcomes after 30 interviews. The outcomes with high importance and low satisfaction (“minimize restenosis”) became development priorities. The result: a stent that reduced restenosis by 20% and generated ~$1B in first-year revenue.
A proven process that systematically uncovers customer needs and translates them into validated growth strategies.
Note: These six steps are the ODI process. Within step 2 we use the Universal Job Map — eight universal phases (Define · Locate · Prepare · Confirm · Execute · Monitor · Modify · Conclude) used to decompose any job so outcomes can be captured systematically.
A market is always a pair — a group of people (job executors) plus the job they are trying to get done. Not a product category, not an industry. Defining the job at the right level of abstraction is decisive: too close to existing products yields incremental innovation; too broad yields insights that cannot be implemented.
Customer needs are identified through qualitative market research and organised in a job map — the core job, related tasks, emotional tasks and consumption-chain tasks. For each step we identify the outcomes customers use to judge success. We typically capture 50–150 outcomes per job-to-be-done.
Customers evaluate each outcome in a comprehensive quantitative study across two dimensions: importance and satisfaction. The result tells you exactly where the opportunity lies — and where you are wasting effort.
Quantification results are summarised in an Opportunity Landscape that visualises innovation potential as well as opportunities for simplification. We segment markets by outcomes — a new segmentation typology based on customer needs rather than demographics.
We support you in developing a market- and product strategy based on identified customer needs. Together we select the right growth strategies for your customer segments — whether to extend existing service platforms or develop new products, services and business models.
Projects that do not contribute to identified opportunities are eliminated. Where opportunities are not covered, new concepts are defined and validated. The portfolio aligns with quantified customer needs — no more pet projects, no more strategic drift.
