Innovation Strategy on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

From JTBD to Product Requirements: Bridging the Gap

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

The Most Dangerous Gap in Product Development

You did the research. You mapped the job. You captured 130 desired outcomes, surveyed 300 customers, and identified 15 outcomes with opportunity scores above 12. You know — with quantitative confidence — what your customers need.

And then nothing happens.

The JTBD insights sit in a research report. The product roadmap continues on its pre-existing trajectory. Engineering works on features that were decided before the research was complete. The beautifully constructed JTBD Canvas hangs on a wall, admired and ignored.

The Complete Guide to Jobs to Be Done

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

Why Most Innovation Fails — and What Jobs to Be Done Changes

Here is a number worth pausing on: industry research consistently puts the new-product failure rate at roughly 70% — Doblin’s well-known study reported 96% across all innovation initiatives; subsequent academic work has put the figure for new consumer products in the 70–80% range. Whichever number you trust, the majority of new products do not meet their financial targets. Not because teams lack talent. Not because budgets are thin. They fail because teams build products around what they think customers want rather than understanding what customers are actually trying to accomplish.

What Are Jobs to Be Done? A Primer for Product Leaders

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

The Question Your Product Team Is Not Asking

Every product team asks some version of “what do customers want?” It is the default question. It drives surveys, focus groups, advisory boards, and roadmap meetings. And it is the wrong question.

Customers do not want products. They want progress. They want to move from a current state — marked by frustration, inefficiency, risk, or dissatisfaction — to a better state. Products are just the means. When your product team focuses on what customers want in a product, they get a list of feature requests filtered through the customer’s limited awareness of what is technically possible. When they focus on what progress customers are trying to make, they get a durable understanding of the market that outlasts any single product generation.

Chinese Competition: Innovation as the Answer to Price Pressure

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Wrong Response to a Real Problem

In the last three years, I have sat in strategy sessions at half a dozen DACH industrial manufacturers where the agenda item was labeled something like “Chinese competition response strategy.” The conclusions reached in those meetings have been remarkably consistent, and remarkably misguided.

The typical response: cut costs, defend price, emphasize quality and reliability as differentiators, and hope that the regulatory environment in Europe will create enough friction to slow Chinese market penetration. Some companies add a slide about “innovation” to the deck — but when you look at what they mean by innovation, it is usually a feature roadmap that had already been planned before the competitive pressure appeared.

Innovation Consulting: When and Why to Engage External Help

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Industry That Oversells Itself

Innovation consulting is one of the few professional services categories where the product being sold is often the opposite of what is delivered. Firms sell breakthrough thinking and transformational capability. They frequently deliver frameworks, workshops, and recommendations that sit in a shared drive until the next strategy cycle.

I say this as someone who runs an innovation consulting firm. The industry has earned this skepticism, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging it before offering any guidance on how to make better use of external innovation expertise.

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.

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.