Product Strategy on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Building an Innovation Culture in Enterprise Organizations

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

The Culture Delusion

“We need to change our innovation culture.”

If I had a euro for every time a VP of Innovation said this to me, I could fund a reasonably sized Series A. It is the default diagnosis for every innovation failure: our products are mediocre because our culture does not support innovation. The prescription follows logically: change the culture.

The result is a predictable parade of culture initiatives. Innovation labs. Hackathons. Failure celebrations (“fail fast, fail forward!”). Inspirational posters featuring Einstein quotes. Innovation ambassadors with colorful lanyards. Maybe a trip to Silicon Valley to absorb the California vibe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.