ODI Qualitative Research
Strategyn’s service offerings for identifying customer needs are unparalleled. While many believe it’s impossible to identify all the customer’s needs up front in the innovation process, Strategyn has spent the last 20 years developing a methodology for doing just that. And it works.
This is the key to the high success rates that companies have seen using Strategyn’s Outcome-Driven Innovation methodology. Having this insight in advance of idea generation, companies can eliminate hundreds of product iterations and transform 80 percent failure rates to 80 percent success rates. Only Strategyn’s discoveries around the jobs-to-be-done innovation theory make this possible.
What we have discovered is that understanding customer needs is all about understanding the job the customer is trying to get done. When focused on the job-to-be-done, there is no such thing as latent needs and needs that customers can articulate.
To begin that process we create what we call a job map. A job map is a visual depiction of a job, deconstructed into its process steps. 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.
Our team of researchers is uniquely trained to construct a comprehensive job map for any market of interest and to capture from customers high-quality need statements that comply with our strict rule set. Our researchers typically conduct phone interviews, one-on-one and group interviews, ethnographic interviews and customer visits to capture the needed customer inputs.
Deliverables include:
- A job map of the core job-to-be-done (job mapping)
- Needs related to the core job-to-be-done
- Jobs related to the core job
- Emotional jobs
- Consumption chain jobs
These inputs provide companies with the information needed to help customers get a job done better or to get other jobs done. This is the purpose of innovation. Getting these inputs is the most important and most difficult part of the innovation process. It takes years to become proficient at capturing such statements. As your partner in innovation, we will ensure that you have the customer inputs you need to succeed.
