Understand Customer Needs
With an attractive market selected for pursuit, the next step in the Outcome-Driven Innovation process is understanding all the customer’s needs in that market. Being able to identify all the customer's needs at this point in the innovation process is what makes ODI so powerful. Knowing just how customers measure value in advance of idea generation turns the creation of value into a science.
Understanding customer needs is all about understanding the job the customer is trying to get done. To begin the process, we create what we call a "job map." A job map is a visual depiction of a job, deconstructed into its process steps. A job map does not show what the customer is doing; rather, it describes what the customer is trying to do. Analysis of hundreds of jobs has revealed that all jobs consist of some or all of eight fundamental process steps: define, locate, prepare, confirm, execute, monitor, modify, and conclude.
Once a job map is created for a particular job, it acts as a framework from which to identify all the customer’s needs. For each process step, customers are able to describe the metrics they use to evaluate that step’s successful execution. These metrics are the customer’s needs, with 50 to 150 identified for a given job. With these metrics in hand, we know how customers measure value. Subsequently, we know how to create customer value and measure how much has been created. If a product effectively addresses all the metrics, then the customer will be able to get the job done perfectly. That is the ultimate goal of innovation.
Strategyn’s thinking debunks a long-held myth about innovation. For years, innovation thought leaders and academics contended that customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate. The innovation industry has accepted this as fact, believing it is impossible to know all the customer’s needs. When the job is the unit of analysis, this is simply not true. There is no such thing as an unarticulated or latent customer need – customers know perfectly well how they measure success when getting a job done and can verbalize those metrics. We have hundreds of studies to prove it.
