ODI 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 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.

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.

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.

Systematic Innovation in Enterprise Organizations

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

The Problem With Innovation in Large Organizations

An Austrian manufacturer of precision agricultural equipment invests 8% of annual revenue in R&D. The engineers are among the best in Europe. The patents are real. The product quality is demonstrably superior by any technical measure. And yet the company has been losing market share for four consecutive years to a competitor from Eastern Europe whose products are technically inferior by almost every specification.

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.

Customer-Centric Innovation: Why Traditional Methods Fail

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Uncomfortable Arithmetic of Customer-Centric Innovation

Every company claims to be customer-centric. Every strategy presentation includes a slide titled “The Customer at the Center.” Every roadmap meeting features the phrase “we need to get closer to the customer.”

And yet, depending on which study you cite, somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of new products fail in the market.

If everyone is already customer-centric, why do so many innovations fail?

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?

The History of JTBD: From Christensen to Ulwick to Modern Practice

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two Men, One Idea, a 30-Year Argument

The history of Jobs to Be Done is not a clean origin story. It is a messy, contested, productive intellectual dispute between two of the most influential thinkers in innovation, each of whom claims a different version of where the idea came from and what it actually means.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the phrase, saw JTBD primarily as a narrative lens — a way of telling stories about customer motivation that made product decisions feel more human. Tony Ulwick, the practitioner who worked alongside Christensen at the beginning, saw something entirely different: a quantitative framework for eliminating product failure by measuring unmet needs with statistical precision.

When to Engage Product Strategy Consultants (And When Not To)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Honest Answer No Consultant Will Give You

Most articles about whether to hire product strategy consultants are written by product strategy consultants. That tells you something about their objectivity. I will give you a different answer — one that sometimes means recommending you do not hire us.

The decision to engage external product strategy help is not primarily about capability. Most competent product organizations have capable people. The question is whether external expertise can change the outcome in a way that justifies the cost, the disruption, and the inevitable internal politics that come with outside involvement. Sometimes the answer is yes. Often it is no. The difference lies in the specific conditions your organization faces.

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.

Why JTBD Fails: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

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

“We Tried JTBD. It Didn’t Work.”

I have heard this sentence, or a version of it, at least a dozen times in the last five years. Always from a senior product manager or VP who invested real time and budget into a JTBD initiative, generated a job map, ran some interviews, produced a slide deck — and found that six months later, the product roadmap looked essentially identical to what it would have been without any of it.

The Mechanical Engineer and the Innovator's Dilemma

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Best Engineers Build the Wrong Products

There is a particular kind of strategic failure that is almost exclusive to engineering-led companies, and it is both the most understandable and the most damaging. The best mechanical engineers in a company — the ones who genuinely understand their product domain — are the most resistant to the innovations that will eventually displace their products. This is not a paradox. It is the logical consequence of deep expertise applied to the wrong problem.

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.

The Job Map: Mapping What Customers Are Trying to Accomplish

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

The Mistake Everyone Makes Before Building a Job Map

When product teams discover Jobs to Be Done, they typically start in the same place: they write a job statement and then immediately ask “what do customers want?” They generate a list of needs, rank them by frequency of mention in qualitative interviews, and call the result a job map.

It is not a job map. It is a prioritized list of feature anecdotes organized under a job statement header. And it fails — consistently and predictably — because it skips the step that makes the job map actually useful: decomposing the job into its functional process steps before identifying any outcomes.

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.”

Innovation Portfolio Management: Balancing Core and New

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

The Portfolio That Manages You

Most companies that believe they manage an innovation portfolio are actually managed by one. They have existing product lines that generate the revenue used to fund next-generation development. Those existing lines have customers, commitments, and internal advocates who are very good at making the case for incremental improvement. New growth opportunities have hypothetical future value and internal advocates who are newer, less senior, and less skilled at organizational politics.

Measuring Product Innovation: Metrics That Actually Matter

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

The Measurement Theater Problem

Every VP of Product or Innovation I speak with can tell me how many new products they launched last year, how many patents their engineers filed, and what their R&D spending is as a percentage of revenue. Almost none of them can tell me whether those launches addressed the customer outcomes that were most underserved, what proportion of their R&D investment targeted genuinely unmet needs, or how the satisfaction of their customers’ most important outcomes has changed over the past three years.

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 Product Leader's Guide to Customer-Centric Decision Making

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

The Gap Between Believing in Customers and Deciding Based on Them

Almost every product organization claims to be customer-centric. The language is everywhere: customer obsession, voice of the customer, putting the customer first. It appears in mission statements, company values, and product strategy decks. It is invoked in roadmap meetings as a rhetorical trump card — “but what do the customers actually want?”

And yet the majority of product decisions in B2B companies are not made based on systematic, quantified customer evidence. They are made based on the opinions of internal advocates, the loudest customer complaint from the most recent sales call, the competitive feature that the market analyst flagged in a report, or the engineering team’s judgment about what is technically interesting. The customer is present in the language but absent from the evidence.

Agile Product Development with a Focus on Customer Outcomes

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

Agile Without Outcomes Is Just Fast Wrong

The promise of agile product development was compelling: shorter cycles, faster feedback, less waste from building the wrong things. Two decades after the Agile Manifesto, most software product teams work in some variant of agile. A growing proportion of hardware and industrial product teams have adopted agile-inspired elements. And yet the failure rate for product development — the proportion of products that fail to achieve meaningful market adoption — has not improved materially.

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.