TEI 045: Understand What Customers Need Before Developing a Product

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode
045 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad
McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved
in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow
their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About Our Guest: In
this episode I’m talking with the creator of an entire category of
product innovation – one that significantly changed how I think
about the process of innovation. Clayton Christensen said his
approaches “bring discipline and predictability to the often random
process of innovation.” The category of innovation is known as ODI,
Outcome-Driven Innovation, and it was created by Tony Ulwick. When
ODI was published in the Harvard Business Review, they declared it
one of “the ideas that will profoundly affect business as we forge
ahead in today’s complex times.” Tony also authored the
best-selling book What Customers Want, explaining how the
jobs-to-be-done framework is transformed into practice with ODI. At
IBM, Tony worked on the PC Junior as a manufacturing engineer. The
team was very excited to launch the product but within a day the
Wall Street Journal declared it a flop! It turned out that they
were right and the cost to IBM in a failed product was over $1B.
This got Tony thinking about the metrics to determine what makes a
good product – a product that customers want. This was the start to
Outcome Driven Innovation, which has matured over the last three
decades.