Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Tony Ulwick outcome-driven innovation and jobs-to-be-done
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, I'm a big fan and active practitioner of the jobs to be done framework.
My guest this week, Tony Ulwick, is one of the pioneers who brought us this transformative approach to product innovation. Tony's breakthrough idea was a method for uncovering and leveraging latent customer needs, something he calls outcome driven innovation. In his new book, titled, Appropriately Enough, Jobs to be Done, Tony shares his deep experience helping traditional companies disrupt themselves and innovate successfully.
Tony: What we see is that the early adopters are [00:01:00] people who are the most underserved with today's solutions. And this is what we figure out from our segmentation methods. When we segment around unmet needs, we often find those, that group of people that are more underserved than everybody else, they're going to be the early adopters, the ones that are struggling to get the job done along certain dimensions are going to be the first ones to buy the product that addresses those met needs, and then over time, you know, other people begin to adopt the technology and so on.
So we think about that early adoption as, uh, you know, from the need side of the equation, as opposed from the technology side of the equation. And we've been able to prove and practice that that works exceptionally well.
Amy: I love soaking up the wisdom Tony's gained working at the forefront of innovation for over two decades.
I hope you enjoy his stories as much as I did.
Welcome Tony, to the [00:02:00] Getting2Alpha podcast.
Tony: It's great to be here, Amy, thank you.
Amy: I'm thrilled to get a chance to talk to you. You're doing some of the most important work. Out there right now for companies and. I appreciate your taking the time to take us behind the scenes and learn more about what you're doing.
So let's start off, just tell us a little bit about the role you play at your workplace and a little bit about what your day to day work life is like. What are the tasks that you actually do?
Tony: Sure. I'd be happy to start there. Well, you know, I've been CEO of Stratagent for 25 years, so it's become quite a routine set of activities, but really exciting nonetheless.
We typically do projects for our clients, typically Fortune 500 companies, uh, where they're struggling along Some, uh, innovation challenge could be product innovation, could be trying to find a new market to go into, could be operational innovation related or business model related. So typical day we're talking to companies [00:03:00] about those different kinds of challenges that they have.
And, um, typically want to know a few things. I want to know how and why is our approach innovation better than. Then there's, of course, most of these companies are really good at what they do. Uh, they've developed their own methods and techniques. And so they want to know why is outcome driven innovation and jobs be done thinking better than what they're doing.
The second thing we often spend time doing is showing people how it's going to work for them. And we've had a lot of experience in case studies over the years that we can rely on to demonstrate that, but that's really a key component of what I do as well. And then, of course, executing the projects. So we have a team of people internally that our delivery team, I work as a practitioner on many of those teams throughout the year.
So I'm typically engaged in five, six, seven projects at any given time. And that's really what I like. And I'm more of a practitioner than anything else.
Amy: [00:04:00] Very cool. So how did you get into all of this? Give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you first get started working in design and tech and what were those pivot points along the way that led you to what you're doing now?
Tony: Sure. Well, my career started back at IBM. I spent 10 years there from 1981 until 1991. I worked as a, uh, originally a, uh, a manufacturing engineer in the, uh, PC division. And I worked on a product called the PC junior, which was, um, a horrible flop for IBM, unfortunately. But recognizing that it was such a flop got me very interested in innovation as a process. And I spent my last six or so years at IBM as a product planner and try to figure out, you know, a better way to innovate so that the products we would put out would be more successful in the marketplace.
So that's when the, uh, the concepts of jobs thinking or what has [00:05:00] become known as jobs thinking and, uh, outcome driven innovation really started. Uh, kicking in, it was, I guess it was around, uh, 1991, 1990 or so when it really occurred to me that if we were to study the underlying process that people were executing, instead of the product that they buy or the demographics of psychographics, we had a new way to define customer needs.
And, uh, that was a starting point of outcome driven innovation. And so that started, we found this path. Um, I left IBM in 1991 to form Stratagen. We've been at it for 25 years and worked with hundreds of companies over the years, fine tuning the approach. And that's been our goal. That's been my personal goal for all these years is to figure out how to create an innovation process that mitigates risk of failure.
And I've been fortunate enough to be able to work with some of the brightest minds and companies around the world and test the concepts [00:06:00] and refine them through lots of iteration. So that takes us to today where we've got an approach to innovation that when implemented correctly has a 86 percent success rate, which is far in excess of what is typically found in a traditional innovation environment.
Amy: So what are some of the key differences with your approach that yields this greater success rate? What are some of the foundations of that?
Tony: You've heard the Einstein statement where he says, you know, if I had an hour to save the world, I'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes defining the solution.
And That's really one of the key differences here as well. When it comes to innovation, what we spend a good amount of time on is defining what is the job the customer is trying to execute and what are all the metrics they use to measure success and value as they go about getting this job done. And if you have that discipline and can figure out exactly what [00:07:00] Segments of customers exist to have different unmet needs and know precisely what those unmet needs are.
You can be far more successful. So I'll just give you a very quick example. We worked with Bosch, helping them create a new circular saw. They wanted to enter the North American market. They had to compete with Walt and Makita. Uh, very crowded shelf space at Lowe's and Home Depot. So they needed a product that would get the job done better, but at a similar price point.
So that was the goal. And, you know, we applied our approach, you know, we went out and talked to tradesmen of all type to figure out, uh, all the metrics they use to measure success as they're trying to cut a piece of wood in the straight line, which is. The job they were trying to execute, and we then quantified all those needs to figure out which were important, poorly satisfied.
And when we first looked at all the data, on average, there were no unmet needs. And if you were to stop right there, you would think that the market is a commodity market [00:08:00] and we have to compete on price. And this is why we. Do what we call outcome based segmentation. We segment the market around all those unmet needs.
So for example, you know, there might be some tradesmen that think outcomes one, two, and three are really important, probably satisfied. And another group that think outcomes 20, 30, and 40 are really important and unsatisfied. So we use factor and cluster analysis to figure this out. And what we discovered in that case was about a third of the market had 14 unmet needs.
And the reason they were underserved is because they had to make more finished cuts and lengthy cuts. So they had to make more blade height adjustments and blade angle adjustments. And because they encountered these complexities that others didn't have to encounter, uh, they had to 14 unmet needs that nobody else had.
So when we presented this information to the Bosch design team, it took them about three hours to come up with [00:09:00] a winning solution, and as they said, well, it's not as if we didn't have these ideas before. The problem is we've lots of ideas, thousands of them, they have a, you know, a thousand, 10,000 ID database that they were keeping track of, but what they didn't know is that they didn't know that that segment customers existed and they didn't know what those unmet needs were, but once they took the time to define the problem at that level of granularity and precision, um, it made it a lot easier for them to define a solution.
That will get the job done better at the same price point. And that resulted in the CS20 Circular Saw, which became a, uh, their best selling circular saw in the North American market for about 10 years.
Amy: That's a great story. I know that one of the trickiest things about doing innovation is figuring out who to talk to, who to pay attention to, and who to ignore.
When you're doing this kind of work for clients, when [00:10:00] you're exploring the market, trying to understand unmet needs, segmenting the market, how do you figure out who are the people in the market that are going to give you the signals for innovation that could be, you know, 18, 24 months out? How do you find the sort of early adopter types in the market versus You're more average types, you know, to use innovation diffusion theory language.
How do you find the early adopters and differentiate them from the early majority?
Tony: So you asked a couple of great questions there, and I'll try to break it up into two parts. So the first part is, what do we even need to talk to in order to get these insights? And so we typically Break them into three categories.
There's the end user of the product. That's actually the person that's using the product to get some job done. And we call that job the core functional job that the product is hired for. So understanding what that core job [00:11:00] is, is critical.
That's the reason the market exists. So, uh, that's certainly one customer type that we talk to.
Also, there's the buyer. The buyer and the user may not be the same person. A lot of B2B cases, that's certainly the case. So, uh, we need to talk to the buyer about the financial metrics that they use to decide whether they want product A or product B. Then there's a third type, goes after all what we call the consumption chain jobs.
People have to Receive products, set them up, install them, learn how to use them, interface with them, store them, maintain them, upgrade them, dispose of them. Those are all jobs along the product life cycle. And some products are highly dependent on some of those consumption chain jobs. So we did work, for example, with a company that produced siding for a home.
And of course, the homeowner is the end user of that product [00:12:00] and the builder is the buyer of that product. But the installer is also or the contractor who installs it is also critical in that case, because if you can come up with a solution that's much easier to install. Getting that consumption change job done better.
You can differentiate yourself in the marketplace. So we classify types of customers. We talk to them to those three groups. The end user, it's the core functional job done. The buyer uses a set of financial metrics to decide product A or product B. And those involved in the consumption chain, that could be a variety of people from installers to maintenance people, repair people, and so on.
That's part of the equation, if you will. Then you also asked about how to separate the Early adopters from the laggards. Oh, that's a great question. We have a really unique philosophy on this. We think that early adopters aren't adopting because they love technology. So early adoption doesn't have to do with.[00:13:00]
technology. It has to do for a need of getting the job done. What we see is that the early adopters are people who are the most underserved with today's solutions. And this is what we figure out from our segmentation methods. When we segment around unmet needs, we often find those, that group of people that are more underserved than everybody else.
They're going to be the early adopters of the ones that are struggling to get the job done along certain dimensions are going to be the first ones to buy the product that addresses those needs. And then over time, you know, other people begin to adopt the technology and so on. And so we think about that early adoption as, uh, you know, from the need side of the equation, as opposed to the technology side of the equation.
And we've been able to prove and practice that that works exceptionally well.
Amy: That's fantastic. And I have to say that's exactly how I define early adopters as well. And I'm glad that you're spreading that [00:14:00] because it's unique to a project and it's about burning unmet need. And so when you do that analysis. You know, truth pops out, right?
Tony: Exactly.
Amy: So you're in this really interesting position having run Stratagen for all these years and worked with, you know, hundreds of teams you've seen, obviously your own techniques have evolved as you've learned, but you've also seen different teams respond to this type of analysis. This type of segmentation and work.
What are some of the signals that you've noticed when you start to work with a team that indicate that team is going to have success with your methods, they'll be able to absorb it, take action and find success, maybe mindset signals or organizational structure signals. What are those signals that tell you, Oh, this is likely to succeed.
Tony: I think answering this is probably easier [00:15:00] pointing out some of the signals that would be indicative of failure. So I'm going to flip it around a little bit, and there's a number of them. So, um, let me start with segmentation. There's been a lot written about this, but companies have adopted segmentation techniques based on demographic, psychographics, attitude, behavior, traditional kinds of segmentation schemes, and they built their sales and marketing programs around these segmentation methods, and they are truly embedded in a company.
And one problem is when these types of segmentation methods are so embedded in the company, it's very hard for them to Adopt another view of segmentation.
So when we present to a team, you know, a segment of customers that have a unique set of unmet needs that don't fit in the demographic, like the circular saw users, for example, it wasn't, you know. People of certain age or [00:16:00] in a certain profession or anything like that. It's just simply people that had to make more complicated finish cuts.
And so they don't fit a demographic. It's just a needs based segmentation. And I find that companies that resist, and it's typically the marketing side of the house that resists rocking the boat with a new type of segmentation. And, uh, so that's, that's problematic and another struggle with that is even if we present the segment to them and they can see that it exists, they just want to put a demographic label on it so they can market to it.
So they're using, let's say, old fashioned or outdated marketing techniques to, to push a product out there and make people aware of its ability to get a job done better in the marketplace. I find those to be, you know, an interesting roadblock and that happens quite frequently. Okay.
Amy: Wow. Have you evolved any particular techniques or strategies to try and route around that roadblock?
Tony: Oh yeah, absolutely. I [00:17:00] think, you know, a lot of this can be diffused by breaking up innovation from marketing. And the way we talk to the marketing teams is to say, you know, we're going to. Cluster groups of people for purposes of innovation, and the goal here is to find segments of customers with different unmet needs, and that's going to help the product team create better products and services.
How you choose to market it is up to you. If you want to lay over your own segmentation methods on top of this. Then feel free to do that, but you know, let's give the development teams, the insights they need in order to create winning products in the marketplace. So what I'm trying to do there is just separate the marketing issue from the development team issue, because the development team knows they need this kind of information in order to succeed.
That's what they're looking for. And we see these battles go on in many companies between development and, uh, in marketing where, you know, the marketing teams have, you know, a Uh, their own segmentation methods. They have their own [00:18:00] research methods, research vendors that they've used for years, and, uh, they're very protective of the status quo and those situations.
It's very hard to get the company to adopt a new approach, even if the engineers and R and D team, uh, are really underserved in terms of what marketing is delivering them and unable to create winning products.
Amy: Wow. That's fascinating. So it sounds like you work both with the marketing team and with the engineering or product development teams.
Tony: Yeah, that's correct. In most cases.
Amy: When you're working with the engineering and product development teams and you are helping them define specific jobs and, and uncover specific jobs that create opportunities for innovation. Once you've identified a job, articulated the job using these segmentation techniques that you've been telling us about, how do you then?
Bridge the gap between what that job is [00:19:00] and what they actually decide to build. Because once you know what the job is, there are still different ways to attack it from the product side. Do you work with them on that too? Do you have specific techniques that help translate from a job to a product spec?
Tony: That's what our approach is all about. So what we're trying to do is go from market selection through market definition, defining it around the job, and then breaking down the job into its component parts and figuring out all the metrics people use to measure success and value, we call those desired outcomes.
And then we prioritize those desired outcomes with customers in the marketplace unmet. And then we segment around those unmet needs, all that reveals the information that's necessary in order to create better products and services. So, uh, once we've conducted that work, we typically work with teams, uh, the marketing team to go down the marketing path.
What I mean by that is, you know, once we know what the opportunities are, we. [00:20:00] We can look at different value propositions that the company might want to consider. We can look at the best ways to position their current products at the segments that we've discovered. Let's give you a quick example. You know, we worked with Coloplast in the wound care market.
And as part of that work, we discovered that wound care nurses had about 10 unmet needs. And, uh, interestingly, they didn't relate to healing faster. And that's the way most companies were positioning their products around the speed of healing. Well, what they discovered is that the wound care nurses wanted to make sure that the wound didn't get worse.
and 10 of those outcomes. Related to that problem. So it was pretty clear cut. So we found that segment that had those unmet needs and what Coloplast decided to do is to reposition their current product line. And instead of saying, you know, they can help wounds heal faster. They said that we prevent complications and [00:21:00] that change in the value proposition had an immediate impact.
So, uh, within the six month period, they saw double digit growth in their product set. And then of course they went on to improve their product line after that, but I'll cover that next, but that's a typical example of a company using the information to take the products that already have. Align them with the segments in the, in the outcomes that are met in the marketplace and communicate value in a different way that when we work with the product teams, we take them through a little different exercise.
What they're trying to do is to improve the current product set. They're trying to then prioritize what's in the pipeline to see if there's What they're doing is going to address any unmet needs or not. And they're looking to see if there's a need for a brand new product. So another example, we just recently completed a project with a company in the all terrain vehicle space.
And we discovered a segment of customers there, they were not addressing at all. [00:22:00] Uh, so it was very interesting because the other two segments that we discovered, they had a 55 percent and a 45 percent market share, but in this other segment, they only had an 8 percent market share. And we analyzed why, and it became clear that the, the opportunities there were not obvious.
And what that group of people needed was a lot more of one thing and a lot less of a whole bunch of other things. And when, you know, in the many markets, the way their products are designed by price point. So you have the lower end products that have very few features or no features, the higher price products that have all the features.
Well, you know, we discovered a segment that wanted more of a couple of features and a lot less of many others and knowing exactly what they were, you know, open the door to a new product line that fits that segment of the market to address those needs.
Amy: So you're really delivering detailed, high impact, actionable market analysis.
Tony: Yeah. [00:23:00] With what we say is we're developing a growth strategy for the client and the growth strategy consists of a market strategy, you know, how to position current products and future products. And then what should those future products be and what should your, how should you improve your current products as well?
Amy: So you've mentioned a number of times that you interview customers in different segments in order to understand the jobs they're trying to get done. Yeah. Absolutely. There are many, many interviewing techniques out there. You know, I use some, every user interface designer or product designer has their favorite interviewing techniques.
Now you use a very specific kind of interviewing technique designed to unearth jobs. Could you tell me? Take us inside that a bit and tell us, you know, without giving everything away, what are some of the key interview questions or the way an interview would proceed that is designed specifically to understand the customer's jobs?
What does that look like?
Tony: Let's [00:24:00] first talk about the methods that we use. We use a variety of methods. So whether it's ethnographic or group interviews or one on one interviews or phone interviews or in person interviews, observational research, we do all of those different approaches when appropriate.
I'd say what's unique about what we do is what we're trying to collect. So whereas, you know, in many ethnographic interviews, the researcher is collecting data. A tremendous amount of information. They're writing down everything, but what they see and what they're hearing and what they're sensing and so on.
We don't do that. What we're trying to do is capture a set of outcomes. What that means is we're trying to figure out all the metrics that the customer is using to measure success when getting the job done, we know that in most markets, there's anywhere from a hundred to 150 different metrics that people use to measure success.
So our goal of the interview. It's not to write down everything people are saying or observing. What we're doing is we're [00:25:00] listening. We're listening for their outcomes. Now, the key here is that we have, you have to know what an outcome is. What I always find interesting is that companies do customer research trying to capture needs, but they're really, in most cases, it's not a clear definition of what a need actually is.
You know, unfortunately, needs have to be stated. With words and those words have to be organized in a sentence that has meaning and the meaning it has to have is one side. The equation has to have meaning for the customer. It's a measure of value, right? How they measure value and getting the job done for the company.
That same statement has to be actionable from an engineering standpoint. So it has to be measurable and controllable in the design of the product. So we've spent a couple of decades perfecting what this statement has to be in order to be an effective input into the process. We call this statement the desired outcome, and that's where outcome driven innovation comes from.
So this is really the key to everything. Now, when we do these interviews, the interview [00:26:00] start first by Making sure we have the job definition correct. So we may do a handful of interviews just to probe on the job, the job statement, make sure we've got it right. Once we've got the job statement correct, we'll move on to the next set of interviews to create what we call a job map.
The job map is extremely helpful. We've written an article about it at HBR back in 2008 called the Customer Centered Innovation Map. It's been an enormously helpful tool in that all jobs Have a certain steps. There's typically planning steps, gather inputs and organize them before you can actually execute the job.
And then you typically monitor the execution of the job and make modifications as you go and then conclude. So knowing that jobs follow these certain formats, we can start dissecting the job. A job map is not a process map. It's not a customer journey map on a customer experience map. It's a map of all the steps that the [00:27:00] customer's trying to get done and notice that I'm saying trying to get done because we're not laying out what the customer is doing.
And the reason we do that, what the customer is doing differs depending on the solution that they're using. So even though there might be one job that the customer is trying to get done throughout the world, there might be 50 different products or types of products that help people get that job done.
If you were to go to all those different people and just map out what they're doing, you'd end up with 50 different process maps. What we're doing is we're creating one job map that independent, all the solutions describes exactly what all those customers are trying to get done. So this one job map would be valued across the whole world.
It's representative of what anyone in the world was trying to get done. If they're trying to get that job done. So it's agnostic of solutions. So we spend maybe five or six interviews trying to define what that job app looks like. So we'll go through, you know, iterations on that and just fine tune it, work with a number of customers, just getting [00:28:00] that in shape.
So the output of that is, you know, 10 to 20 job steps. That's it. We lay it out in a flow, like a diagram that describes the steps that the customer's going through from the time they begin the job until the time they end the job. And then the detailed work begins. Now we're going to define all the outcomes.
So the next set of interviews, uh, We take our respondents, again, whether it's a Skype interview, uh, in person, one person, uh, observational, the method really doesn't matter that much. It's what we're doing during the interview that's really important factor. And what we're doing is listening for outcomes.
How are they measuring success as they're going through the job? So, you know, as they're cutting that piece of wood in a straight line, for example, you know, how they, they might say, well, you know, as we're making the cut, sometimes it's hard to see where to get started. You know, like we make the little cut line with a [00:29:00] pencil, but then when we put the saw over it, the table's so big, uh, on the saw that it covers the starting point, and we're not really sure we're starting in the right location.
Now, what we hear from all that is that, you know, they're trying to minimize the likelihood that the cut doesn't start in the desired location, right? So we would write that down as the outcome, minimize the likelihood that the cut doesn't start in the desired location. And we move on from there, capture all these different statements that are measures of value.
Now, notice when we make that statement, it's independent of solution. stable over time. We can test different concepts against that outcome to see, you know, which outcome, which, which solution, which circular saw, which new design that we can conceptualize is better at minimizing the likelihood that the cut doesn't start in the desired location.
Now you can imagine if you had, you know, all 100 of these outcomes and then priority order. And you can figure out exactly which ones were most [00:30:00] important, least satisfied, the biggest opportunities for improvement. And uh, once we have that insight that, well, that comes from the quantitative piece a bit later, but, um, the, the qualitative piece, uh, is concluded once we've, uh, gathered that complete set of, of outcome statements.
Amy: And then what do you do with that result?
Tony: Well, at that point, we have the 100 to 150 different outcome statements and we create a survey, a quantitative survey that we're going to field with anywhere from 270 to maybe over a thousand people. And we asked those people, the customers, the end users to tell us what product they're using.
Are they using a Dewalt? Are they using a Makita? And to tell us how satisfied they are with each outcome and how important is it that they are able to achieve each outcome? So we have these data points and we capture these data points because we're trying to figure out which needs are unmet [00:31:00] And we define unmet as the needs that are really important and poorly satisfied Now what we're looking for here is, you know, a number of opportunities to go pursue And the quantitative research that we get back helps us figure out with a level of precision exactly what the unmet needs are.
As we engage with clients, I try to simplify things and say, what we're trying to do for you is to help you agree on what a need is, what the needs are, which are unmet. And if there's segments of customers with different unmet needs, and if the product team, marketing team, development team, can all agree on that, chances go up dramatically that you'll be able to create a solution that gets the job done significantly better and win in the marketplace.
And it goes back to what I said earlier, if we had an hour to, to innovate, it's been 55 minutes. defining the jobs and the outcomes and five minutes developing the solution.
Amy: Beautiful. [00:32:00] So you've been doing this great work now for over two decades, working with different teams, as you've brought to life here.
What is something that you know now, having Done all this work and gone through projects that were big successes, projects that went sideways, et cetera. What's something you really know now about successful innovation that you wish you had known 10 years ago?
Tony: That's a great question. There's so many things I wish I knew 10 years ago.
Amy: Me too. You know, what's something perhaps that maybe surprised you along the way?
Tony: I always felt years ago that if our clients only knew 10 years ago, What the unmet needs were, they would certainly go figure out ways to satisfy them and come up with great products. So, you know, when strategy is early days, we thought that the, the end game and a lot of what we delivered was the research just to point out to a company.
Here's where the [00:33:00] opportunities are, and here's the unmet needs. And we felt, or we thought that they know what to do with that. But interestingly enough, what I learned is that they don't. And, um, they need a lot more help taking that information. And I think you mentioned this earlier and going all the way from defining what those needs are, figuring out which are unmet, and then translating that into a product concept and a product requirements document.
Hands. Then they know how to plug that into what they currently do. I didn't really realize that long ago. And the way we discovered this is we, we did a study, I think it was back in 2010, and we interviewed 60 of our past clients. And ask them, you know, how successful were they using the approach? And we found that those that use the approach and put a product out in the marketplace were very successful and 86 percent success rate, but we also discovered that a number of [00:34:00] people didn't do anything.
Now that they had just sat there and we explored that to a greater degree and learned a number of different things along the way, but the biggest problem was they couldn't figure out how to translate. The market research insights into a product requirement document. And so since that time, we've spent a lot more time with our clients in the back end, going well beyond the research to actually formulate the market, the product strategy with them so that they can be, uh, increase their chances of success to a greater degree.
Amy: So you discovered an unmet need and now you're serving it. So that's great. What is. Inspiring you these days. What trends, whose work are you paying attention to? Obviously you're doing this great work and you're inspiring a lot of people, including me. Who's inspiring you?
Tony: Well, there's lots of people that inspire me in business every day.
I would say my clients, you know, really [00:35:00] inspire me and they have for years. I mentioned earlier, I get to work with the brightest minds in the industry. From all different types of companies, these are the smartest people and to be able to learn with them, uh, and learn how to improve this process is truly inspiring.
That's what I've focused on for the last 25 years is to figure out how do we make the best innovation process possible and through that inspiration, been able to maintain a really strong focus over all these years on just this one thing. And that I think is, uh, really been part of the secret to success.
persistence and focus on solving one problem.
Amy: Yep. Are there any trends in the marketplace, in enterprise or in consumer that you're excited about that you're paying attention to?
Tony: Well, we look at all the different technologies, so it's interesting, like, if you look at artificial intelligence, uh, you could look at nanotechnology, or you could just pick any [00:36:00] technology, but technology will only catch on if it helps customers get a job done better.
So, um, a lot of what we do is we, Work with companies to figure out, you know, how can they use upcoming technology to get the job done better? Cause if it's not satisfying set of unmet outcomes, it's not going to be readily adopted in the marketplace. So trying to find that match is a good part of what we do for our client base.
Amy: Fantastic. So is there anything that's coming up for you in the next few months on the horizon? You'd like to tell us about any programs or speaking engagements? Now, I know you have a book out fairly recently.
Tony: I do. It came out last October. It's called jobs to be done, theory to practice. And it's an update to my book, uh, what customers want that came out in 2005.
That was really the first book on jobs be done and outcome driven innovation. And this latest book updates a lot of our insights so that, you know, we can be right up to speed with the way we're thinking about things. As [00:37:00] part of that book too, we talked about a manual and a toolkit that we're putting together for our clients.
I think one of the, um, You know, key decisions that we've been thinking about for years and finally took this direction is that, you know, we could continue to be practitioners internally and keep this internal to strategy, or we could also help our clients do what we do. So in the coming months, we will be releasing a manual and a toolkit to our clients that will enable them to build little armies of outcome driven innovation practitioners within their organizations so that they could lead this on their own.
Amy: That's fantastic. That will really leverage your work.
Tony: Well, we hope so.
Amy: Well, thank you so much, Tony, for joining us today and sharing your stories and insights and wisdom. It's been very eyeopening and inspiring.
Tony: Thank you, Amy. It was my pleasure.
Amy: Great. Look forward to talking to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, [00:38:00] the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.