Innovating with a thermometer: 4 misconceptions and 5 truths
The fertile fallacy: no big problem, no party
“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem”.
G.K. Chesterton
Javi, an entrepreneur in his late twenties, calls me because he wants to tell me about his new project and find out what I think about it.
He tells me about it.
I find the “idea” interesting, even though I don’t know the market. Deep down, I believe that my opinion on the fly will be useless to him. Finally, seeing his fragility while championing his value proposition, I make up my mind and try to tell him how I would validate it instead of letting out whether I consider it a good or a bad idea.
A few days later, he sends me a presentation he crafted for investors. He wants me to help him improve it. Before I open the document, I am willing to bet that “The problem” will be on the first page.
I was right. And my mind dwells on how much we like to reuse “official” mindsets that are supposedly right. I’m talking about the problem-solution mindset. Most probably, you would agree that the aphorism “find a major problem and solve it” is a valid resource for most entrepreneurs (and investors who are suspicious ex ante if they don’t see it anywhere).
I can’t remember since when, but it’s been a long time since starting with the problem is not useful to me. Because if I do so, I don’t focus my attention on the core question: Is there an opportunity here? Or isn’t there?
Finding a major problem shouldn’t be your challenge. Your challenge should be to find out whether there is (or there isn’t) an opportunity for innovation. Because if you find a problem but it entails no innovation opportunities… your prospects are gloomy.
Ouch!! Innovation, innovation… Another warped concept. Let’s get down to it.
The sophism of disruptive innovation: give me more tech, baby
“A disruptive innovation is a product or service that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.”
Clayton Christensen
This sentence by Clayton Christensen, the father of Disruptive Innovation and one of the people who has contributed more to the evolution of the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, frames the concept perfectly. The widely misplaced disruptors are not new players that dramatically transform a market or create a new technology to replace incumbents. Not at all. Actually, it’s just the other way round: at the beginning, they are silent and they don’t look good.
This video by Clayton and McDonald’s Milkshake is gold:
These products and services are simple, accessible and cheaper than current leaders. But they hold great promise to transform an industry.
And no, they don’t need to be cutting-edge or groundbreaking from a technological point of view. That is the key. It is also possible to conquer a market by creating a product/service that is simply more convenient and accessible.
Well, well: How will you know whether what you are doing is disruptive innovation?
Let’s keep on.
Speed, speed, speed? No! Slow down, slooow down, search for the cause-effect relationship that makes people use a product
“Doing something bad faster does not lead to better results.”
Tony Ulwick
Tony Ulwick explains in his book “What Customers Want” why speed and iteration for the sake of it will not necessarily lead you to treasure island (validating your idea):
The mathematical probability of someone coming up with an idea that satisfactorily addresses all the customer’s unmet needs without knowing what they are or whether or not they are satisfied is close to zero. [Given the number of possible ways that just 15 unmet needs could be satisfied by products and services in any given market, millions of ideas would have to be generated before an exhaustive set of ideas could be created. If you assume three competing ideas for each of 15 unmet needs in various combinations, then you are generating ideas on the order of three to the power of 15, which is 14 million ideas. The chances of any one idea effectively addressing 15 unmet needs are one in 14 million. Furthermore, in most markets, we find there are more than 15 unmet needs.]
Validating your idea before finding out whether there is an opportunity for innovation means betting on a chance, on a black swan. And luck is just so: luck. You can’t control it.
If there is a path that can be controlled and depends neither on luck nor on your iterations, why not follow it?
Validate, validate, validate? No. Uncover progress.
“The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it”.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Focus on the cause-effect relationship that makes a customer use the products he uses, and less on validating your “leaps of faith”.
Background information
Clayton Christensen explains in his book “Innovation against luck” the importance of “context data” when you do (long) interviews to uncover Jobs and understand the driving forces that make people use the products they use. You should try and find depth, details.
I usually arrange background information into four categories:
👉 Circumstances
Specifically, when/where in your life do you use the product?
👉Understanding habits and trade-offs
Which product are you replacing?
👉Value by contrast
Why did you decide to change products? What did the previous one lack?
👉 The 5 “Whys” by Toyota
When you want to unearth the roots of a given behaviour, ask why until you get to the heart of the matter.
Bob Moesta, a whiz at doing JTBD interviews, uses a timeline for the customer’s buying process that covers the span between the first time he thinks of a product and the moment when he actually buys it.
At every stage, context information is uncovered that sheds light on where the struggle lies and about the progress the customer is searching for. The mindset entails “how to create progress in your customer’s life”. If the customer can’t clearly picture progress in his mind, he will not buy. Keep in mind that progress may also involve how a person wants to feel (emotional) or how he would like to be perceived (social). These two dimensions, as a source for copywriting and positioning, are worth their weight in gold.
In other words: through your product, your customers should see themselves transformed into a better “new me”.
Truth #1: When the importance of trade-off is higher than the value of your product.
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken”.
Warren Buffett
Most probably, every now and then you have bought a product as a consumer and soon after you have seen another product you like best… But you can’t back down for whatever reasons (money, laziness, or commitment itself).
A similar thing happens in company settings: How many times has an investment been held because of the misconception of sunken costs? When the switching costs to be paid by a potential customer are higher than the value provided by your product, the customer will not buy your product. And you can’t just qualify it as “there’s something wrong with my value proposal” or “we haven’t segmented properly”.
Simply enough, the customer’s circumstances don’t turn him into a buyer.
You should also keep an eye on the habits and inertia of customers; laziness is a powerful driver. Changing from a given product to another usually involves an effort of some sort, which may be more or less conscious.
Status-quo is a formidable competitor. You will need to uncover habits, inertia and trade-offs to make things smooth where appropriate.
Truth #2: “Struggling moments” or why the devil is in the details
“New product success becomes predictable once you know the metrics customers use to measure progress when trying to get a job done.”
Tony Ulwick
One of the aspects I like most about ODI (Outcome-Driven Innovation) is its focus on the ranked scores for the satisfaction of the “desired outcomes” a customer has when doing a Job.
Most outcomes are not put into words unless you ask questions to reach the “core structure”, the heart of the matter. For instance, some time ago I performed the exercise of uncovering the outcomes (metrics) I use to evaluate the Job “Spend the night in a hotel when I travel alone for business”, and I got more than 50 of them.
Among them, there were the amount of light that is filtered through the curtains in the morning (hotels have no shutters), how noisy the air conditioning system is or how much time I need to spend in the shower from the moment I open the tap until water comes out at the desired temperature.
Desired outcome statement
Here you can find the basic structure suggested by Tony to build statements for a desired outcome:
Improvement direction + Performance metrics + Control object + Background clarifier
Once you have found out the outcomes derived from every Job (functional, emotional, social, financial, etc.) it is a piece of cake, from a quantitative point of view, to assign scores to the level of importance and satisfaction of each of them. Then you may use the ODI “Opportunity Score” equation (Importance + (Importance — Satisfaction)) to find out the most important outcomes with lower satisfaction levels (lower right quadrant in the image below). This is where the truth lies.
Truth #4: Negative Jobs and Kano model
“You do not help customers make progress by optimizing parts of a system of progress individually. You improve the system by optimizing how those parts work together.”
Alan Klement
Long before I got to know about the work by Christensen and Moesta (JTBD) and Ulwick (ODI), the Kano model meant a lot to me, and it helped me a great deal in structuring my reasoning when it came to designing value proposals.
Fundamentally, it involves three dimensions: nice-to-have, must-be and unidimensional. For instance, given an archetype named “consumer x”, the features of a carton of milk would be as follows:
Nice-to-have: being a product from a nearby farm
Must-be: pasteurised and homogenised
Unidimensional: dose of milk in each carton
“Must-be” factors are like hygienic factors; nobody actually expects them, but their absence causes insatisfaction.
Well, there is a less known dimension (finding charts that contain it is no easy matter): negative attributes. These are characteristics of the product/service that push the customer away from buying the product.
If we translate this idea to the JTBD mindset, we would find its equivalent in negative Jobs; that is to say, those Jobs that somehow create some sort of struggle in the customer. For this reason, the customer wants to avoid having to do them directly. Nevertheless, he wants to know that something or somebody will do them for him.
Connecting to a customer with negative Jobs means showing your client you will free him from doing something he doesn’t want to do. And the other way round: a product that involves a customer having to do something he doesn’t want to do will drive the customer away.
Truth #5: When a cinema competes against a jigsaw puzzle
“Take the competition seriously, but not yourself”
Richard Branson
Jobs may be multi-faceted, and emotion is one of their aspects. As an example, one of the most frequent jobs is “Seeing my children enjoy themselves”. I can do many different things to achieve this goal: having lunch together at a burger’s, going to the cinema or doing a puzzle. When the Job becomes the unit of analysis, the range of competitors widens. You are not competing against your peers: you are competing against all those who generate the same progress in your customer’s lives.
Now let’s switch frameworks and analyse the use of the product or service. Let’s take cinema as an example. If we properly interviewed 5 people waiting to buy their tickets in order to find out what brought them to us, we would probably be able to pin down different forms of progress (much beyond “watching a movie”): “create new memories with my children”, “forget about work for a while”, “have a first date”, “kill time, “experience emotions”.
