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.

From Customer Insights to Product Roadmap: The Translation Problem

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

The Insight Graveyard

Every enterprise innovation team has one. A folder — digital or physical — full of research reports that nobody reads anymore. Customer interview transcripts. Ethnographic studies. Survey results. Design sprint outputs. Personas that were workshopped with great enthusiasm and then never referenced again.

This is the insight graveyard. And its existence reveals the central failure of most enterprise product organizations: the inability to translate customer insights into roadmap decisions.

Innovation Metrics: Measuring What Matters Beyond Patent Counts

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

The Vanity Metric Trap

How does your company measure innovation? If your answer includes patent counts, R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, number of ideas generated, or percentage of revenue from “new” products, you are measuring innovation theater — the appearance of innovation activity — rather than innovation effectiveness.

These metrics are everywhere. Boards love them. Annual reports feature them. Innovation consultants benchmark against them. And they are, at best, weakly correlated with actual innovation outcomes.

Jobs to Be Done Method: A Guide for Product Managers

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

Why a Forty-Year-Old Insight Is Still Misunderstood

“Jobs to Be Done” sounds like an MBA buzzword. And yes, the framework comes from Harvard — developed by Clayton Christensen, then operationalized into a rigorous methodology by Tony Ulwick. But the reason it persists, decades after its introduction, is not because consultants like selling it. It is because the core insight keeps proving itself correct.

The insight: People do not buy products. They hire products to do a job in their lives.

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.

Product Discovery: Methods for Finding What to Build Next

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

The Backward Discovery Problem

Most enterprise product teams believe they do product discovery. They interview customers. They run surveys. They attend trade shows and listen to what the market is saying. They compile feature request lists from sales teams and support tickets.

And yet, despite all this effort, their hit rate on new products hovers around the industry average: roughly six out of ten fail to meet business objectives.

The problem is not that these teams skip discovery. The problem is that their discovery process is backward. They start with solutions and work back toward problems. They ask customers “what do you want?” instead of “what are you trying to accomplish?” They catalog feature requests instead of measuring unmet outcomes. They let the loudest voices — whether internal champions or key accounts — set the agenda.

Product Strategy for Enterprise Innovation Leaders

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

Why Most Enterprise Product Strategies Fail Before They Start

Here is a number that should disturb you: according to a 2023 study by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), 40% of new products launched by established companies fail to meet their business objectives. Not startups working with seed money and gut instinct — established enterprises with dedicated R&D budgets, experienced product teams, and decades of market knowledge.

The problem is not a lack of strategy. Walk into any product planning meeting at a Fortune 500 company and you will find strategy documents. Plenty of them. The problem is that most enterprise product strategies are built on a foundation of sand: internal assumptions dressed up as customer insights, competitive benchmarking mistaken for differentiation, and roadmaps driven by the loudest executive rather than the most important customer outcome.

Product Strategy Frameworks: A Comparative Guide

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

The Framework Problem

Enterprise product leaders are not short of frameworks. They are drowning in them. Porter’s Five Forces. Blue Ocean Strategy. Lean Startup. Design Thinking. Jobs to Be Done. The JTBD Growth Strategy Matrix. Each comes with its own books, consultants, certifications, and promises.

The result is not clarity but confusion. Product teams cherry-pick elements from multiple frameworks without understanding their underlying assumptions. They apply startup methodologies to enterprise contexts. They use competitive analysis tools to answer customer needs questions. And they wonder why their product strategies produce middling results.

Product-Market Fit for B2B: Enterprise-Specific Considerations

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

The Product-Market Fit Myth in Enterprise B2B

Marc Andreessen’s famous formulation — “product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” — has become gospel in the startup world. And in the startup world, it works reasonably well. You launch a product, observe whether customers are pulling it out of your hands, and know within months whether you have fit.

Try applying this to a crane manufacturer selling to construction companies across Europe. Or a medical device company with an 18-month regulatory approval cycle. Or an agricultural equipment maker whose customers buy once every seven years.

Value Proposition Design Using Jobs to Be Done

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

The Value Proposition Precision Problem

Every B2B company has a value proposition. Most of them sound the same.

“We deliver innovative solutions that help our customers improve efficiency and reduce costs.” Change the company name and this sentence could describe any industrial manufacturer in Europe. It communicates nothing specific. It differentiates from nothing. It resonates with no one in particular.

The problem is not that product teams lack effort or intelligence. The problem is that traditional value proposition design methods — even well-regarded ones like Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas — lack the precision needed to create propositions that genuinely resonate with specific customer segments.

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?

Innovation Workshop: Structure and Execution That Produces Results

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Post-It Problem

Close your eyes for a moment and picture a typical innovation workshop. Comfortable chairs, colored Post-its, whiteboards covered in clustered ideas. A facilitator in casual clothes says “there are no bad ideas.” By the end of the day, 147 Post-its cover the walls, participants are energized, and the CEO says “this was great — we should do this more often.”

Six weeks later: the Post-its are in a drawer. The 147 ideas were never prioritized. Nobody knows which ones address a genuine customer need. The daily routine has displaced the workshop energy.

Developing Product Strategy: From Vision to Roadmap

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

What Passes for Product Strategy in Most Companies

Let us be direct: what gets called “product strategy” in most B2B companies is a PowerPoint presentation with a vision statement on slide three and a feature list on slide seventeen. In between: market trend observations, competitive comparisons, and an optimistic revenue projection that nobody seriously believes.

That is not a strategy. That is a wish list with context.

A real product strategy answers three questions with precision:

Innovation Management in Large Enterprises: What Actually Works

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Organizational Immune System

Every large enterprise has an immune system. Not biological — organizational. This immune system is programmed to detect deviations from the status quo and neutralize them. It operates through budgeting processes, incentive structures, stage-gate procedures, governance bodies, and cultural norms that accumulated over decades.

The immune system is not malicious. It is useful. It protects the enterprise from uncontrolled change, from uncalculated risk, and from the chaos that would ensue if every manager pursued their own agenda simultaneously. Without this immune system, no large organization would function.

Design Thinking vs. Jobs to Be Done: What Works Better?

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two Frameworks, One Question

Design thinking and Jobs to Be Done — both promise better products through better customer understanding. Both have prominent advocates, impressive client references, and substantial consulting communities built around them.

But they are fundamentally different in their logic, their methods, and what they actually produce. A product team that understands both can deploy them with precision. A product team that knows only one has blind spots.