Product Management on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

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.

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.

Functional, Emotional, and Social Jobs: Understanding the Full Picture

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

The 70% of Customer Needs That Your Product Team Ignores

When I ask product teams in manufacturing and MedTech what their customers need, the answer invariably focuses on performance specifications. Faster cycle times. Higher precision. Better durability. Lower weight. More throughput.

These are functional needs — and they matter. But they are not the whole picture. Not even close.

In every JTBD/ODI study we have conducted — across loader cranes, surgical instruments, feeding systems, power management, agricultural equipment — emotional and social outcomes account for 30-40% of the total underserved need landscape. In some categories, they dominate it. A product team that captures only functional needs is making investment decisions based on 60-70% of the available information. They are leaving the rest to chance — and to competitors who pay attention.

How to Conduct a JTBD Interview: Questions, Process, and Template

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

Why Most Customer Interviews Produce Useless Data

Your team runs customer interviews. You hear phrases like “it would be great if…” and “we really need a way to…” and “our biggest pain point is…” You diligently record these insights, synthesize them into themes, and feed them into your product roadmap.

And then you build the features, launch them, and discover that adoption is lukewarm.

The problem is not that you talked to the wrong customers. The problem is that you asked questions designed to extract feature requests when you should have been asking questions designed to extract desired outcomes. Traditional customer interviews are solution-oriented — they probe what customers want in a product. JTBD interviews are outcome-oriented — they probe what customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success.

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 Canvas: A Step-by-Step Guide

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

The Tool That Makes JTBD Actionable

Jobs to Be Done is a powerful theory. But theory without structure is philosophy, not strategy. The JTBD Canvas is the structured tool that transforms JTBD thinking into a documented, shareable, and actionable artifact that product teams can use to drive decisions.

If you have ever walked out of a JTBD workshop with sticky notes full of insights and no clear path forward, you know the problem. The Canvas solves it. It provides a single-page framework that captures the job, its context, the job map, desired outcomes, emotional and social dimensions, and the current competitive landscape — all in a format that a product manager can present to an engineering team, a VP can present to a board, or a cross-functional team can use as a working reference.

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.

JTBD Examples: Real-World Applications in Manufacturing and MedTech

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

Beyond the Milkshake: JTBD Where It Matters Most

Every article about Jobs to Be Done tells you about milkshakes and morning commutes. These examples are useful for explaining the concept. They are useless for showing you how JTBD works in contexts where product decisions carry multi-million euro consequences, regulatory constraints shape what is possible, and the end user’s job literally determines whether people live or die.

This article presents JTBD applications from the industries where I have spent the past two decades: manufacturing, construction equipment, and MedTech. These are real scenarios drawn from companies operating in the DACH region — Palfinger in loader cranes, Fresenius in enteral nutrition, and MOTUS in mobility solutions. The details are illustrative and drawn from public information and our podcast discussions (episodes #7, #12, and #41), with some specifics generalized to protect proprietary information.

JTBD for B2B: How Enterprise Product Teams Use Jobs Theory

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

JTBD Was Built for Consumer Products. B2B Needs Something Different. Right?

Wrong.

This is the most common objection I hear when presenting Jobs to Be Done to B2B product teams: “Our market is different. We have buying committees, not individual consumers. Our sales cycles are 12 months, not 12 minutes. Our customers are engineers, not milkshake buyers. JTBD does not apply here.”

It applies here more than anywhere. And the reason is precisely the complexity that B2B teams cite as the objection.

JTBD vs. Personas: Why Traditional Segmentation Fails

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

The Six Personas That Were All Wrong

A medical device company — a mid-size European firm with strong positions in surgical instruments — came to us with a problem. They had invested six months and a significant budget developing buyer personas for their flagship product line. Six detailed profiles: “Efficient Eva,” “Research-Driven Rainer,” “Budget-Conscious Barbara,” and three others. Each persona had a name, a photo, a backstory, demographics, psychographics, goals, frustrations, and preferred information channels.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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:

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.

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.

JTBD vs. User Stories: When to Use Which

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

A False Competition That Is Costing Product Teams Time

Every few years, the product management community invents a new thing that is going to replace user stories. Design thinking replaced them. Now JTBD is replacing them. Except user stories keep showing up in sprint planning, and the teams that abandoned them for something more sophisticated often find themselves arguing about what a feature should do without any shared language to resolve the argument.

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.

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.

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.