How to Design Services that People Love

The Outcome-Driven Approach to Innovation

This post is a short introduction to the customer-centred, outcome-driven approach to innovation that we use at The App Business.

It is a powerful way of thinking that puts customers’ desired outcomes at the centre of every conversation. We use this methodology to understand people’s unmet needs, focus on the right opportunities and design products and services that create value.

The key ideas behind this come from the ‘Jobs-to-be-done’ framework, which Clay Christensen, Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek, Alan Klement, Anthony Ulwick, Ryan Singer and the bright people at Intercom, have done a lot to articulate and popularise.

You could spend the next few months reading about ‘Jobs-to-be-done’ online, but most people struggle to make this powerful way of thinking work for their organisations, projects and clients.

I certainly did struggle initially to make Jobs-to-be-done stick at The App Business, until I took the jargon out of it and translated it into 2 clear ideas, and 4 simple tips. This is what I’m offering here.

This is the first post in a series of two. The first one outlines some of the key ideas behind Outcome-Driven Innovation. The second post, shows how to use it in four simple tips.

We focus too much on feature ideas,
and lose sight of desired outcomes

Creating products and services that people want takes more than building an app.

It takes a deep understanding of unmet customer needs, a clear focus on the right opportunities, and a lean, rigorous, iterative design process.

Most innovations fail because, at some point in the development process, teams lose sight of what customers really want to achieve.

I believe that by and large, innovation and product development teams focus too much on feature ideas, and lose sight of desired outcomes.

This is quite natural. As human beings, we have a deep rooted tendency to focus on solutions (i.e. feature ideas) and lose sight of the outcomes we want to achieve. Our habit is to express our needs (and fight for them) in terms of specific solutions, rather than desired outcomes.

Look at how product development teams work day-to-day and in particular, for example, how they use product backlogs.

In most organisations, product backlogs focus on feature ideas. In theory, these are meant to clearly describe a user’s desired outcomes as well. But in practice they rarely do, and almost never do it well.

This is because feature backlogs and user stories are, first and foremost, tools to describe solutions to be elaborated and engineered, rather than desired outcomes.

Then, look at the daily rituals of a typical product team.

By the end of a daily scrum meeting, everyone on an agile team is generally quite clear about what tasks they’re going to work on today, and what feature they’re building.

But at some point in the day-to-day trenches of product development, it’s difficult for all team members to keep a clear understanding of
• the situations that customers are in, when they use these features
• .. and what customers they’re trying to achieve in these situations.

Focusing on feature ideas without being clearly aligned on the desired outcomes makes it difficult for teams to direct their efforts in the right way, or solve the right design problems.

When organisations focus too much on feature ideas and lose sight of desired outcomes, they waste their resources building impressive-looking features that customers don’t use.

These fancy features don’t get used because they don’t actually make it quicker and easier for customers to achieve the outcomes that they want, in the situations that they’re in.

Outcome-Driven Innovation (which some people also call ‘Jobs-to-be-Done’) is a simple, powerful way of thinking that puts desired outcomes at the centre of every conversation — so no one loses sight of them.

It’s based on two simple ideas:

People don’t want features, products or services; they want outcomes.

People don’t actually want products, services or features. People want outcomes, and they hire products or services to achieve these outcomes.

For example, when a B&Q customer says “I want a lawnmower”, what they really want is a nice lawn — not a lawnmower.

Or, if a friend tells you that they want a connected thermostat, what they’re after is probably not a connected thermostat: maybe what they really want is a comfortable home or to save money.

And, yes, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they might have asked for a faster horse. But what these people were trying to achieve was to get to distant places quicker and easier.

Focusing on the outcomes customers want to achieve, illuminates the path to successful innovation.

Focusing on feature ideas won’t give you the direction that you need to discover successful products and services. It’s like walking in a random direction and hoping you’ll arrive somewhere scenic.

Starting from desired outcomes is deciding where you want to go first and then figuring out how to get there.

Go to my second post here to see how to use Outcome-Driven Innovation in 4 simple tips.

Written by Jean-Francois Hector on February 15, 2017. Get in touch via my Twitter, Linkedin or drop me an email.