Why Amazon wins | Innovate the core, innovate to transform
Take a look at your organization’s innovation projects. Are you strategically balancing your efforts between the core business and future growth areas? In advising companies about innovation, an area I stress is the value of consciously pursuing both little and BIG innovation. Often, companies pursuing innovation can be categorized as either: Seeking small innovations such as operational […]
Avoiding innovation errors through jobs-to-be-done analysis
The lean startup movement was developed to address an issue that bedeviled many entrepreneurs: how to introduce something new without blowing all your capital and time on the wrong offering. The premise is that someone has a vision for a new thing, and needs to iteratively test that vision (“fail fast”) to find product-market fit. It’s been […]
Consumer adoption of Bitcoin | A jobs-to-be-done analysis
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently did one of his tweetstorms on the topic of Bitcoin, a technology he avidly supports. In 25 tweets, he talked about criticisms people have of Bitcoin. Including this one (#18) about “use cases”: 18/The third critique I call the “innocent” one — “Are there enough sufficiently compelling uses cases for Bitcoin […]
Gmail offers surprising innovation lessons for the Fortune 500
If you’re familiar with the story of Gmail, you know – for a fact – that it was a 20% time employee project by Paul Buchheit. A little bottom-up experimentation that grew into something big. Surprise! That story is wrong. It was a desire by Google, the company, to offer its own email. From Harry McCracken’s great piece How […]
Is it innovation or just an improvement? Does it matter?
On the LinkedIn Front End of Innovation group, I saw this post: Interesting (and heated) discussions @ Unleashing Innovation Summit in Amsterdam earlier in the month: Incremental innovation is NOT innovation – it’s just marketing. REAL innovation is breakthrough/transformational… Agree or not? I’ve seen this debate before. Attempts to finally, once-and-for-all establish just where improvement […]
Will customers adopt your innovation? Hope, fear and jobs-to-be-done
When will a customer decide your innovative product or service is worth adopting? It’s a question that marketers, strategists and others spend plenty of time thinking about. The factors are myriad and diverse. In this post, let’s examine two primary elements that influence both if an innovation will be adopted, and when it would happen: Decision weights assigned […]
Collecting and analyzing jobs-to-be-done
via the Daily Mail I’ve previously written about collecting jobs-to-be-done from customers. Because I was analyzing a broad topic across the entire innovation lifecycle, it was a good way to get a breadth of insight. However, it doesn’t work as well in the more common situation for product managers and innovators: analyzing a specific flow. […]
The Product Manager is the Chief Customer Development Officer
If pressed, what would you say is the secret to product success? Certainly there are a number of things that go into making and selling products. Prioritization, design, manufacturing frameworks, marketing, service, cost of production, etc. Each of these elements needs to be optimized, and there are people, practices and tools that do just that. […]
10 examples of fabulously flawed product-first thinking
In talking about jobs-to-be-done here, I sometimes think that all I’m doing is stating the obvious. I mean, isn’t it obvious that you’d create something that helped fulfill a need or desire? What else would you do? But I’ve seen in my own work experience, and across a multitude of initiatives in other industries, cases […]
Uncover latent needs with a simple question
After publishing Latent needs are overplayed as an innovation dynamic, I got a lot of feedback. Plenty of agreement, but also some good counterpoints. And in reading through some of them, I realized that there is something to this. A lot of people are convinced that whole markets are waiting to be built based on people […]
Latent needs are overplayed as an innovation dynamic
Reading this thought piece from the Silicon Valley Product Group, The End of Requirements, I saw this point about latent needs: Unrealized needs (also called “latent needs”) are those solutions where customers may not even be aware they even have the need until after they see and experience the solution. Examples include digital video recorders, […]
Generate opportunity maps with customer jobs-to-be-done
In seeking to better understand customer jobs-to-be-done, I found myself a bit underarmed. Meaning, I didn’t really have a way to do this. The value of jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking has only emerged recently. It’s still nascent, and there aren’t ready guideposts to follow. However, Tony Ulwick has been at it over two decades. Indeed, his […]
Exactly what jobs will self-driving cars satisfy?
On Twitter, I made this observation about the future of self-driving cars: Our kids will have a very different “driving” experience. Self-driving cars allow them to work during transit, and improve safety. #jetsons— Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3) September 22, 2013 A moment later, Megan Panatier made this skeptical counterpoint: Whenever I hear people talking about self […]
What do you mean customers don’t know what they want?
If I’d asked customers what they want, they’d have said more convenience and relevance. Look familiar? I’ve riffed on that Henry Ford quote about faster horses, yada, yada. It’s not too far off from what customers would theoretically have been seeking in faster horses. I altered that quote to fit a modern day phenomenon: 3D […]
A Method for Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to Product and Service Design
Say you’re designing something new for a product or service. Of course, you have your own ideas for what to do. But, how informed are you really about what is needed? This is a question I faced in thinking about game mechanics used in a social platform. A common product approach is to work up […]
