Outcome-Driven Innovation on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Customer Desired Outcomes: The Building Blocks of ODI

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Concept That Makes ODI Work

Every methodology has a core unit — the atom from which everything else is built. For Lean, it is waste. For Six Sigma, it is variation. For Outcome-Driven Innovation, it is the customer desired outcome.

A desired outcome is the metric a customer uses to measure success when executing a job to be done. Not what they want to buy. Not the feature they request. Not the problem they complain about. The outcome — the specific, measurable result they are trying to achieve at each step of the job.

How to Write Outcome Statements That Drive Product Decisions

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Sentence Structure That Predicts Product Success

Here is a claim that will sound absurd until you see it in practice: the single biggest determinant of whether your next product succeeds or fails is the quality of a few hundred sentences.

Not your engineering talent. Not your marketing budget. Not your competitive intelligence. Sentences.

Specifically, outcome statements — the precisely formatted expressions of customer needs that form the backbone of Outcome-Driven Innovation. Get them right, and you have a quantifiable map of every opportunity in your market. Get them wrong, and you are surveying noise.

ODI Case Studies: How Enterprise Companies Innovate Systematically

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Beyond Theory: ODI in the Real World

Theory is cheap. Frameworks are plentiful. What most product leaders actually need is evidence — concrete examples of what happens when Outcome-Driven Innovation is applied in practice, in industries similar to theirs, with the kind of complexity and organizational politics they face daily.

This article presents four detailed case studies of ODI implementations in enterprise environments. For confidentiality reasons, company names and some identifying details have been changed. But the data, the process, and the results are real. Each case follows the same structure: the situation before ODI, how the process was applied, what the data revealed, and what happened after.

ODI for Product Managers: A Practical Implementation Guide

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The PM’s Dilemma: Everyone Has an Opinion, Nobody Has Data

If you are a product manager in a DACH enterprise company, your job looks something like this: You sit between engineering (who wants to build technically interesting things), sales (who wants whatever the last customer asked for), marketing (who wants whatever is trending), and leadership (who wants growth but not risk). Your role is to synthesize these competing inputs into a coherent product roadmap.

ODI vs. Design Thinking: Complementary or Competing?

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Framework Wars Are a Distraction — Mostly

Walk into any innovation team in Munich, Vienna, or Zurich and you will find two camps. One swears by Design Thinking — they have the Post-it notes, the empathy maps, and the prototyping labs to prove it. The other camp has quietly adopted Outcome-Driven Innovation and wonders why they spent years brainstorming in circles.

The internet treats these as competing religions. They are not. But the relationship between them is more nuanced — and more lopsided — than the diplomatic “they’re complementary” answer most consultants give.

Outcome-Driven Innovation: The Definitive Guide

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Why Most Innovation Still Fails — and One Method Doesn’t

Here is a number that should bother every executive reading this: the failure rate for new products has hovered between 72% and 90% for the past four decades. Billions in R&D spending, thousands of design sprints, mountains of Post-it notes — and the success rate has barely moved.

Now here is a different number: 86%. That is the success rate of products developed using Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), based on the published ODI track record across more than 1,000 innovation initiatives since 1991.

The ODI Process: 6 Steps to Systematic Innovation

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Six Steps That Change How You Innovate

Most innovation processes are either too vague (“empathize, ideate, prototype, test”) or too rigid (“fill out Gate 2 form 14B”). Outcome-Driven Innovation sits in the space between — structured enough to be repeatable, specific enough to produce actionable output at every step.

The ODI process has six steps. They are sequential: each step produces deliverables that the next step requires. Skipping a step, or doing them out of order, breaks the logic chain and undermines the results. This is not a buffet where you pick your favorites — it is an engineering process where each stage builds on the last.

The Opportunity Algorithm: Finding Underserved Customer Needs

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Formula That Replaced Gut Feeling

Every product team has the same argument: “Which customer needs should we address first?” In most organizations, this debate is settled by seniority, volume, or salesforce pressure. The VP’s pet feature wins. The customer who shouted loudest wins. The deal that is about to close wins.

The Opportunity Algorithm replaces this dysfunction with mathematics. It is the quantitative engine of Outcome-Driven Innovation, and it does something that no brainstorming session, empathy map, or NPS score can do: it tells you, with statistical confidence, exactly which customer needs are underserved, appropriately served, or overserved in your market.

What Is ODI? Outcome-Driven Innovation Explained

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Innovation Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Every large company in the DACH region has an innovation process. Most of them have several. There are stage-gate models, design thinking workshops, hackathons, venture boards, innovation labs, and — the latest trend — AI-powered idea generators. The one thing most of them share: they do not reliably produce successful products.

The data is consistent and damning. Depending on the study you cite, somewhere between 72% and 95% of new products fail to meet their revenue targets. McKinsey, BCG, and the Product Development and Management Association have all published variations of this number. It has not materially improved in 40 years.

Outcome-Driven Innovation in the DACH Region

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Why an American Framework Fits DACH Engineering Culture Better Than Expected

Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) was developed in the United States. Tony Ulwick refined the methodology over three decades and hundreds of projects with companies including Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Bosch. The headline number: 86 percent of ODI-guided product launches succeed — five times the industry average.

Those figures are impressive. But for a German engineer, an Austrian product manager, or a Swiss managing director, an American success story is not enough. The real question is: does this work here? In our culture, with our customers, in our markets?

From Opportunity Scores to Product Roadmap Priorities

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Prioritization Problem That Data Was Supposed to Solve

Every product manager I have worked with has experienced the same meeting. The roadmap review. Everyone has opinions. The VP of Sales wants the CRM integration because a large customer mentioned it. The VP of Engineering wants the architecture refactor because the technical debt is becoming untenable. The CEO wants the feature she saw at a competitor’s booth last month. The product manager has twelve user stories all tagged “high priority.”

Why 86% of ODI-Guided Products Succeed (And What That Means for You)

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A Statistic You Should Question — and Then Take Seriously

86%.

That is the product success rate that Tony Ulwick and die ODI-Praxis claim for products developed using the Outcome-Driven Innovation methodology. Compared to the commonly cited industry average of 17% — or, depending on the study, somewhere between 10% and 30% — the 86% figure is so dramatically different that it invites skepticism.

You should be skeptical. No claim this striking should be accepted uncritically, especially one that comes from the inventor of the methodology. Let me show you why, after examining the evidence carefully, I am convinced the directional claim is correct — and why the specific number, while not independently audited, is plausible given the mechanism behind it.

Quantitative Research in Innovation: Why Gut Feeling Is Not Enough

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Research That Convinced Nobody

A senior product manager at a €400M industrial equipment manufacturer spent four months on customer research. She visited fifteen customer sites across three countries. She sat in on operational shifts, watched operators use the equipment in real conditions, and conducted 90-minute interviews with the engineers, technicians, and supervisors who worked with it daily.

She came back with a detailed qualitative synthesis: themes organized into a hierarchy, representative quotes, a job map that her team spent three weeks refining, and a set of “insight areas” — customer need categories that her research suggested were underserved.

The ODI Market Definition: Why Getting the Market Right Changes Everything

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Question That Reframes Everything

“What market are you in?”

It sounds like a trivial question. Every executive has an answer ready. The VP of Marketing can recite the market definition from the last investor presentation. The VP of Product has the competitive landscape slide. Everyone in the leadership team has a clear, consistent, completely wrong picture of what market they are actually in.

Wrong is perhaps too strong. Incomplete is more accurate. But in strategy, incomplete and wrong often produce the same outcomes: innovations that solve problems nobody has in the market you defined, while the problems that actually drive customer switching behavior sit invisibly outside your competitive frame.