Jobs to Be Done 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.