Anthony W. Ulwick

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

Building an outcome-driven organization is best accomplished in three phases:

Think about putting one product team through this process at a time, or putting many teams through simultaneously.

In Phase I, the cross-functional team for a selected product area participates in an intensive one-day workshop in which an ODI practitioner engages the team in a unique customer journey. For the first time the team sees its market through a “Jobs-to-be-Done” lens, and it learns what customer insights they need to drive outcome-driven decision-making. The team walks away with highly valuable customer insights derived from ODI-based qualitative research. The time commitment associated with this phase is relatively low, yet it moves the team well toward its goal of being outcome- driven.

In Phase II, the ODI practitioner leads the ODI-based quantitative research effort. With a statistically valid data set in hand, the ODI practitioner conducts outcome-based segmentation analysis, competitive analysis and others analyses needed to inform a market and product strategy.

With the insights that result from these analyses, the
company is able to make data-driven business decisions for years to come.

In Phase III, the ODI practitioner teaches managers and employees across the organization how to use these insights to formulate market and product strategies and to drive outcome-driven decision-making. Let’s look at each phase in more detail:

PHASE I: UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER’S JOB- TO-BE-DONE

The best way to learn how to be customer-centric is to apply
the basic Jobs-to-be-Done principles to your market. In Phase I, the cross-functional product team experiences the power of outcome-driven thinking in a one-day workshop in which they (i) learn the fundamentals of Jobs Theory and the ODI process, (ii) participate in a facilitated qualitative research discussion designed to obtain critical customer information, and (iii) begin to use their newfound insights to make outcome-driven business decisions in their market. The completion of Phase I will boost the team’s ability to succeed at innovation because they leave in agreement on (i) who the customer is, (ii) what functional and emotional jobs the customer is trying to get done, (iii) the job map, (iv) what a customer need is, and (v) what the customer’s needs are—the metrics customers uses to measure success and value when trying to get the job done.
The workshop employs the techniques and principles showcased in the Harvard Business Review article I co-authored titled “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” (May 2008). Workshop participants typically include the product team (e.g., marketing, sales, planning, engineering, R&D), a handful of external customers, and the ODI practitioner, who leads the effort. The workshop is designed to shift the product team’s thinking along a number of fronts (see the table below).