Lean JTBD: An Interview with Urko Wood

Urko Wood is a leading expert in the field of JTBD. Having come up through the ranks of business consulting, he became a Strategy Advisor at Strategyn, the chief pioneer of the JTBD innovation approach. In 2012, after 7 years at Strategyn, Urko founded the innovation consultancy Reveal Growth.

With a career spanning decades, Urko has honed his expertise in uncovering customer insights and driving growth through differentiated strategies. His work has helped numerous organizations better understand their customers’ needs and achieve breakthrough results.

Urko Wood, Founder of RevealGrowth

An avid thought leader, Urko regularly shares his insights on the Reveal Growth blog, which we highly recommend.

Urko presented his concept for “Lean JTBD” on JTBD Untangled. Jim caught up with Urko for an interview. Here’s how it went.

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JIM: How did you get started with JTBD? What were some of your first steps?

URKO: Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was working in a strategy consulting firm that conducted a lot of Voice of the Customer (VoC) research for our large B2B clients to help them drive growth in their strategic accounts. That meant I would interview key customers in select strategic accounts to identify opportunities for improvement and growth.

But in 2002, I had a new client with a different problem: they needed help finding new markets and creating new offerings. That’s when I realized that, while VoC was reasonably effective at helping companies improve their current products and services, it was not effective at helping companies develop new products and services. That’s because the VoC methodology was based on asking customers for feedback on a current product/service. If you didn’t have a product/service in the market, however, then there’s nothing to reference and it didn’t work.

While I was trying to figure out how to deal with this challenge, I happened to read an HBR article by Tony Ulwick, “Turn Customer Input into Innovation,” in which he explained the problem I was facing and introduced some new thinking that solved it. I immediately saw the relevance and started applying this new thinking as much as I could. (This was before Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christenson popularized the general approach as “Jobs-to-Be-Done”).

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than I could learn from an article so, in late 2005, I reached out to Tony, the timing was right, we hit it off, and I started working there six weeks later. I worked there for nearly seven years until 2012 when I started Reveal Growth Consultants “to inspire and equip every client to innovate and grow without guesswork.”

JIM: That’s certainly a solid foundation! Tell us a little about Reveal Growth and the consulting work you do. What problems does JTBD solve for clients?

URKO: We partner with companies that are eager to drive innovation and revenue growth without guesswork. We do this by revealing the hidden unmet needs in your market and helping you create unique value so you can set yourself apart from the competition.

A lot of companies struggle with innovation because they don’t know which of their target customers’ needs are going unmet by their own offerings and their competitors’ offerings. If you don’t know which of your target customers’ needs remain unmet, then innovation becomes a guessing game that leads to high failure rates, wasted time and resources, a lot of frustration, opportunity costs, and even reputation damage. We fix that problem in essentially three steps.

First, we identify and rank the client’s target customers’ unmet needs. “Unmet” customer needs are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents.

Second, we work with the client team to evaluate and select which opportunities are attractive to pursue. Great new products and growth strategies are formulated by addressing unmet needs in the market with the organization’s relative strengths. This process enables clients to engineer that fit.

Because the opportunities are stated in “solution-free” language, the client team has a unique strategic view to forge “organization/market” fit before attempting “product/market” fit. That is, the client team can determine how to best address each attractive opportunity be it with a new or improved offering, an acquisition, better messaging and positioning, or realigning operations. This enables leadership to choose “where to play” and “how to win” with solid data and confidence.

Third, we facilitate focused brainstorming to help the client team devise solution ideas that address the selected opportunities with precision. All the prep work preceding this ensures that only pre-validated unmet needs that are attractive to the firm are targeted. Hence, the relevant market intelligence and company criteria needed to create a solid product/market fit get baked into the ideas at concept creation before development. This quickens time to money, increases success rates, and drives revenue growth in a reliable manner.

JIM: Any success stories you’re particularly proud of that you can share?

URKO: Yes, thanks for asking. There are lots of them such as helping:

• A private jet service to create a unique business-centric service for C-Level leaders who fly frequently for work on private jets
• An off-road vehicle manufacturer to upgrade its side-by-side vehicle product line including nine vehicle platforms and over 70 models
• An online university to retain more students in undergrad, masters, and doctoral programs

But the one success story that illustrates the power of the process to deliver revenue and a lasting mindset shift concerns a regional accounting firm, GBQ Partners, headquartered here in Columbus OH. Who would think that an accounting firm would be an exemplar of innovation?

Due to an influx of new entrants charging below-market rates to get a foothold in the market, the partners at GBQ were eager to find new revenue streams beyond tax and audit to drive revenue growth, margins, and give associates an additional career track as well.

The firm’s target customers are CEOs and CFOs in mid-sized, privately held companies. In talking with the managing partner, we quickly determined that their professional staff could help these CEOs and CFOs get any finance and/or accounting-related task done. So, that enabled us to define their target market as “CEOs and CFOs in mid-sized privately held companies seeking to get their finance and accounting-related tasks done.” (I use the word “tasks” sometimes to avoid confusion with “HR jobs.”)

We then recruited and interviewed a diverse mix of 12 CEOs and 12 CFOs and discovered about three dozen finance and/or accounting-related tasks they’re trying to get done in the course of their work, such as:

• Closing the books
• Determining the profitability of a new product, store, or service
• Planning for succession

After identifying and ranking the opportunities, we met with the partners (about 18 of them) to evaluate and select which opportunities to pursue and how to best address them. Then we led them through a focused brainstorming session that resulted in:

• The development of two new service lines
• An acquisition of a cyber security firm
• A joint venture with a talent management firm
• Later, a fractional CFO service

They did a great job of capitalizing on the opportunities. Interestingly, when I met with the managing partner a year later to interview her for a case study, I asked, “What was the biggest impact you and the firm received from working with us?” and her answer was “the mindset shift.”

Initially, I was crestfallen because the initial objective was to drive revenue growth. But she went on to explain that, yes, they were pleased with the revenue growth and, as she put it:

“One of the most important things that came out of our work with Urko was a shift in our mentality from focusing on what we know how to do, to what the client is trying to get done. Instead of saying “Here’s the audit report,” now we ask, “What is the client trying to get done with the audit report and how can we provide good business advice along with that work product?”

– Darci Congrove, Managing Partner, GBQ Partners

I like this example because it demonstrates how clients can drive revenue growth in a repeatable manner and gain a game-changing mindset shift that will reap rewards for many years to come because it’s part of the culture now. Research also shows that employees who focus on how they can help their customers are much more engaged with their work as well.

JIM: Excellent examples. The “mindset shift” is a great proof point along with the quote from the managing partner. How have you quantified the impact of JTBD work or seen it done, in general? Many people struggle with that. Any wisdom to share?

URKO: Great question. It’s often hard to isolate the impact of the JTBD work from other factors that contribute to the end result of a project. Not only do all the downstream development and commercialization activities contribute to the end result, but companies often execute multiple initiatives to achieve the same objective. That can make it impossible to tease out and quantify the impact of the JTBD work with precision.

Yet, most of the time, I think we can demonstrate the value of our JTBD work anyway (if not quantify it with a number) based on the measurable results of achieving the client’s objective, e.g., driving revenue growth, increasing market share, etc.

The way to do this is to gain conceptual agreement with the prospective client about their objectives, criteria for success, and the estimated impact/value of achieving their objectives upfront before we attempt to frame the project or develop a proposal. Sometimes, the biggest impediment to quantifying our impact is due to not gaining conceptual agreement about it upfront.

Also, it’s helpful to remember that a lot of the value that JTBD delivers comes from helping clients avoid failure or significantly enhance their success. In my experience, the best clients know that the likelihood and/or cost of failure is high without our help. If that’s not the case, they’re probably not good candidates.

Here are a few questions that I have found to be helpful (among others) to ask prospective clients during the upfront exploratory conversations [1].

1. What are the three biggest impacts that will result from the success of this project?
2. How will the Board know that you achieved that impact?
3. What if you do nothing? What will be the likely consequence and cost?
4. What if your efforts fail? What will be the likely consequence and cost?

By gaining conceptual agreement with the client about their objectives, metrics for success, and the estimated impact/value from achieving their objectives, we’re in a good position to demonstrate value even if not quantify it with a number.

[1] Alan Weiss, PhD, has written extensively about how to gain conceptual agreement with consulting clients and quantify value before developing a proposal.

JIM: What’s next for JTBD as it continues to evolve? Where do you see the field going in the future?

URKO: There’s a lot going on, for sure.

1. The first thing that comes to mind, not surprisingly, is the continual integration of AI, Advanced Analytics, and JTBD. I think it’s inevitable that Jobs Theory will continue to get built into these technologies. New platforms will emerge to enable companies to uncover a set of jobs and criteria for all of their target customers throughout the value chain and product portfolio. Advanced Analytics will get better at revealing emerging jobs (i.e., new market opportunities) as well. I think these emerging technology platforms will eventually enable client companies to get all their “customer needs-related” jobs done (e.g., understanding all the jobs, steps, and criteria in the target customer’s core jobs for every market, related jobs, steps, and criteria, emotional and social jobs, etc.) done on one platform.
2. Also, as JTBD becomes better known and trusted, I think we’ll see adoption going down market into Small and Mid-sized companies.
3. We’ll probably see more integration among JTBD, Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean as people gain more experience with each discipline and learn how to benefit from the unique strengths each delivers to improve product management.
4. Lastly, because JTBD provides organizations with a more complete, prioritized, and actionable set of customer needs than was ever possible before, I think we’ll see JTBD adopted by the customer-facing, value creation functions within organizations.

That is, I can imagine more and more executive leadership teams wanting JTBD insights for every strategic planning session because it provides such powerful insights about “where to play?” and “how to win?”

Marketing departments will want JTBD insights to formulate their messaging, positioning, and branding.

Operations will want JTBD insights to help them align operations with customer success rather than simply for operational efficiency.

M&A may want JTBD insights to better evaluate prospective acquisitions.

I’m sure there are many other developments underway as well. Bottom line, I think the future is bright for anyone who can help organizations drive innovation and revenue growth without guesswork.

JIM: That’s a positive picture for sure. I might add “Lean JTBD™” to the list, too. Can you tell us about that?

URKO: Yes, thanks for asking. My team and I are creating a new offering called Lean JTBD™ that is designed for executives and/or product teams that struggle to differentiate, innovate, and grow, and may not have the time or budget for a full JTBD consulting project.

Although many executives blame their team for lacking creativity or themselves for lacking the courage to pull the trigger, in my experience, those aren’t the real problems. The real problem is a lack of focus, a lack of clarity about where the market remains unmet, where the big opportunities lie.

Study after study has shown that the leading cause of new product and startup failure is “market risk,” i.e., making something people don’t want, so leadership’s hesitation is warranted! As every JTBD practitioner knows, revealing the target customers’ unmet needs (i.e., jobs and criteria) with precision before generating ideas is a great start, but the cost and complexity of traditional JTBD consulting projects can be barriers to consumption for many companies.

Our objective with Lean JTBD™ is to extract the fundamentals of JTBD and package them in a way that enables organizations to take small steps in strategic places to create a major positive impact on productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage. I hope this will help more small and mid-sized companies benefit from Jobs Thinking and larger firms to get started with baby steps as well.

One of the cool things about this is that some of the basic questions we ask customers to uncover unmet needs can also be highly effective at creating a culture of innovation. Most employees have someone who is relying on their work, both an end-user and someone within the firm. Getting clear about their internal customer’s JTBD, criteria for success, etc. can drive internal innovation, productivity, and employee engagement. We want to help companies enjoy all these benefits by integrating a few simple ideas and practices into their day-to-day operations.

Any readers who might be interested should join our waiting list to learn more and stay apprised. (The waiting list will be posted on our website soon at https://revealgrowth.com/ shortly).

JIM: I’ll be sure to look out for that. Thanks, Urko!

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Urko Wood on “Lean JTBD” on JTBD Untangled