Anthony W. Ulwick

VALIDATING THE PROCESS

In October 1991, I left IBM and founded The Total Quality Group. The goal of this one-man consultancy was to apply my newly envisioned process, which I called CD-MAP (to denote the concept of customer-driven maps), to product strategy and planning initiatives.

One of my first clients was Cordis Corporation, a company that was trying to reinvent its line of angioplasty balloon products. I interviewed interventional cardiologists to break down and analyze the process they went through to “restore blood flow in a blocked artery.” Through this qualitative research effort, I carefully constructed 75 uniquely defined customer need statements that I called

desired outcomes. The statements described the metrics that interventional cardiologists were using to judge and measure their success as they tried to restore blood flow in an artery. With these customer-defined metrics in hand, I conducted quantitative research to discover which of those outcomes were underserved—important to the interventional cardiologists, but not well satisfied. I discovered several.

I then facilitated a series of strategy sessions to help the Cordis team use these insights to create a new product line. By mid-1993, the company launched 19 new products, all of which became number 1 or 2 in the market.

Cordis’ market share increased from 1 percent to more than 20 percent, and its stock price more than quadrupled. Needless to say, I was thrilled: this was validation that my method worked. Tying customer-defined metrics to the underlying process the customer was trying to execute was the key to success.

ADVANCING THE PROCESS

I engaged in dozens of innovation initiatives over the next several years, achieving similar results with companies such as Motorola, Pratt & Whitney, Medtronic, AIG, Allied Signal and Telectronics. Making process refinements with every application, I learned how to apply the process in multiple industries and for hardware, software, and service offerings. The process became very robust as I continued to
rid it of inefficiencies and variability and established a strict set of rules for defining desired outcome statements. As the decade progressed, I decided to rename the company and offering to communicate its focus on strategy and innovation, and in 1999, the company became Strategyn and the data- driven process became Outcome-Driven Innovation^® (ODI).

Also in 1999 I was granted my first patent on the ODI process. It was the first of 12 patents I would eventually receive regarding my strategy and innovation process.

In late 1999, I had the distinct pleasure of

introducing Outcome-Driven Innovation and our research and segmentation techniques to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. We met in his Harvard office on several occasions in the 5 years that followed. I introduced Clay to ODI and showed him examples of how the process was executed and the results it delivered our clients.

Clay was quick to key in on the fact that the focus of our approach was not on the customer or the product, but rather on the underlying process the customer was trying to execute, or, as he eventually came to call it, the “job” the customer was trying to get done.

Clay was kind enough to cite Strategyn and me as originators of these practices in his 2003 book, The Innovator’s Solution, in which he popularized the idea that people “hire” products to get a “job” done. To this day, Clay continues to be a proponent of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and a key contributor to its development.


Clay also introduced me to Mark Johnson and Matt Eyring, who I enjoyed working with on a number of joint activities in the early days of Innosight. I was honored that an offer was made to me to join Innosight as a partner in 2004, although I respectfully declined the offer. While Innosight’s focus on disruptive innovation was exciting, my focus on Jobs-to-be- Done theory and ODI remained my top priority.

In 2002, Harvard Business Review (HBR) published my article called Turn Customer Input into Innovation, which described Outcome-Driven Innovation and its successful application at Cordis. The success of that article helped our team to grow Strategyn as a business and inspired me to write a book on Outcome-Driven Innovation called What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products. Released in 2005, this seminal book explained in detail how ODI transforms Jobs-to-be-Done Theory into an effective innovation practice. Since that time I have had the honor of writing other articles that were published in HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review.

The most rewarding part of my journey has resulted from being a hands-on ODI practitioner. That is my passion. I have led and continue to lead hundreds of innovation engagements with inspiring people in the world’s most admired companies. Every week I have the privilege of learning from top thinkers in companies across a wide range of industries. In 2016, the Strategyn team and I have worked with companies such as B. Braun, HD Supply, Minitab, Panasonic, Kawasaki, WL Gore, Momentive, The Medicines Company, Roche, P&G, Medtronic, Oracle, Johnson & Johnson, Arm & Hammer, Harte Hanks, and Terumo. I am a practitioner at heart.

Years of hands-on experience applying ODI have been the key to continued process improvement and our advancement of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory. To this day my team and I have ongoing ODI best practice reviews to share our collective knowledge and improve our thinking, tools and practices.