The Fuzzy Front End; Fuzzy No More
It’s Only Fuzzy If You Let It Be
If you use the term the “fuzzy front-end” of innovation, by default you subscribe to a view of innovation that says the front-end is hard to understand (fuzzy). It’s giving up before you even get started. Don’t succumb to this premise – it is wrong. In fact, the front-end of innovation can, and should, be clear, and here’s why.
People call the front-end of innovation fuzzy for a reason. It is typically fuzzy because companies are lacking critical information or something in their process has made it needlessly complex, or perhaps both. But if you fix these things, the front-end should be clear and actionable.
Have you ever seen a diagram like the one below? Just type in to a search engine “fuzzy front-end of innovation” or “new product development process” and you will see something extremely similar. One of the things you will notice is that the front-end is almost always characterized by ideas.
But what are ideas? Ideas are simply potentialities of how a company might solve / satisfy a customer need. An idea is a mix of technology, design elements, features and processes directed at one or more customer needs. If a company is evaluating many ideas, possibly dozens, then they have to evaluate hundreds, even thousands of underlying customer needs. How do you know if those needs are the right ones to pursue? How does a company know if what they are testing is the customer need or the company’s implementation of the solution? When ideas are commingled with customer needs during the front-end of innovation, the answer is, they don’t know.
An innovation process that starts with ideas is often characterized by the following:
- Many ideas, but low confidence of which ones to pursue
- Projects driven by personality / opinion vs. evidence
- Incremental innovation, with suboptimal results
- Many iterations in the product development cycle, trying to validate both the underlying customer need and the solution design
An ideas first innovation and development process will end up looking like this:
First Principles of Innovation
The foundation of the front-end of innovation is based upon two first principles. The first principle is that customer’s buy products and services to help them get “jobs” done. This is called the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) theory. The second principle is that customers have metrics for success for getting a job done. A complete set of these success metrics (called outcomes), describe the perfect execution of the job. Both jobs and outcomes are knowable, measurable and describe what it will take to succeed in a given market.
Needs, Not Ideas, Drive the Front-End of Innovation
The first part of the innovation process should be characterized by needs alone. In this front-end, a company must fundamentally understand the answers to the following questions:
- Where should we grow?
- How will we succeed?
- What should we do?
“Where should we grow” describes the market, including the job executor and their job. “How will we succeed” includes a deep understanding of the job executor’s metrics for success (outcomes) on doing the job. “What we should we do” includes only the best ideas that address high value outcomes at the lowest cost, effort and risk.
By doing the qualitative and quantitative research upfront, the company knows precisely where to create value. The company is not wasting time on coming up with dozens / hundreds of ideas that will never see the light of day. The company’s creative resources are instead focused on finding unique solutions only for the underserved outcomes.
The fuzzy front-end is much less fuzzy when the front-end starts with a detailed understanding of customer needs. However, if a company starts with ideas first, the front-end, innovation becomes radically more complicated. A more accurate funnel should look like this.
This separation of customer needs from ideas allows the innovation and development process to become truly lean in both time and cost. That’s because there are no iterations in the very front-end of the innovation process – just primary research and strategy development to answer and plan around those three questions. Iterating only comes later, during the concept development and testing phase. This is well after the team has validated the customer, their job, and the outcomes they need to satisfy with their innovation.
What About Design Thinking, Agile, Lean Startup, etc.?
We realize there is a lot of information floating around about failing fast, iterating to achieve a minimal viable product, showing empathy to your customer’s needs…etc. While there is some wisdom in these models, applied too early in the innovation process they will add more time and cost to your innovation process, not less. That’s because the models are either focused on, or were developed from, the perspective of the solution, not the customer need. It’s not surprising therefore that these models work best when designing the concept and are not well suited to identifying and prioritizing a complete set of customer needs. Using the right tools at the right time is critical to building a high performing, truly lean and agile innovation process.
Separating needs from ideas in the front-end of innovation takes more discipline but the benefits are many, including:
- Less time and money spent sorting through and developing ideas that will never succeed
- A shared view of the customer and their needs between marketing, development and sales
- Faster time to market (less iteration)
- Higher probability of discovering new areas of growth
- Improved innovation success rate
Case Study – The Value of the Needs First Model
Recently an attendee of our JTBD + ODI MasterClass shared a very powerful example of the benefit of this thinking. He works for a leading technology firm. His design / UX challenge was to help improve the customer’s online DYI support tools. He had just completed reading JOBS TO BE DONE: Theory to Practice and wanted to put the model to the test.
Instead of starting with ideas first and testing solutions, they focused on the customer’s job of “obtain customer support” and identified the customer’s needs for getting that job done. Once they had identified where customers struggled, they made design changes, tested them and improved the solution design (iterated) as needed. The results, were nothing less than amazing. Activity on five sources of DIY support content increased almost 300%. They also saw call deflection improve by over 50%; which they estimate will contribute to $118 million in cost avoidance in 12 months.
Fuzzy No More
The fuzzy front-end is only fuzzy if you let it be. Companies that embrace the first principles of the front-end of innovation (customer jobs and outcomes) will have a significant time, cost and creativity advantage over its ideas-first competitors. Don’t let the term fuzzy front end put your innovation process at a disadvantage – switch from ideas-first to needs-first.
Communicatie | Deltares | buurtvergroener | parkmaker | bruggenbouwer | NL2120
6 年Kijk Eric Frijters
Strategisch Adviseur Publieke Dienstverlening | Transformatie-expert | Verbinder van Systeem- en Leefwereld | Eigenaar Wim Rampen CX Consultancy & Interim
6 年Nice and thought provoking perspective. We're fully aligned on the job to be done / ODI methodology. But you're cutting corners when it comes to the positioning of other schools of thought in the innovation space. Service Design for one never takes an idea first approach. It's an understand the customer need in context first, act later approach, unlike the lean start-up and other fail-fast advocates. The fuzziness of the front-end, to me, is about the understanding that we're dealing with humans and emotions. I know jtbd/odi translates that into metrics (outcomes of social and emotional jobs) as well, but they are secondary to the functional core job. And that's where I think the Service Design approach is complementary to jtbd. For it recognizes the importance of, and deals with the different mindsets and emotions that people take to the value co-creation table and uses that in the design of solutions to help people get their job done. I'd say, let's make an effort marrying jtbd with the fuzzy front-end the right way, through service design. I'm certain it will open new perspectives and opportunities to innovate better. What do you say?
Growth & Transformation Executive | CMO | General Manager | Start-Up Advisor | Entrepreneurial Leader
6 年Rob, nice post that summarizes the "fuzzy front end" paradox.? While I agree with your perspective and approach, I'd argue that the upfront effort of insight collection & synthesis is indeed iterative.? Like you, I agree that the major failing is in starting with the "what" be it the idea/widget versus the "why" underlying insight/problem. ? The upfront effort of building empathy, observation, building JTBD hypothesis is anything but linear. ? However, if done properly allowing time to distill these points into "insight maps" can actually serve as repositories for platform pipelines.? In the end "insights" are rarely, if ever, articulated by consumers or easily picked up from a few direct observations.? That all said, I do agree with you on (a) the right approach starts with consumer insight/problem identification, (b) with discipline can yield an exponentially higher success rate, and (c) should be able to yield results over time. ? Bottom line is that most organizations, particularly large CPG, don't have the patience to dedicate to the front end because they are focused on "making stuff".
Helping organizations create a better future through Space that supports invention, discovery and innovation
6 年Rob, It's important to distinguish the path from the drunks on the path... The reason that I was able to immediately recognize the value of ODI was because of my use of Design Thinking. Understanding the metrics that customers use to measure outcomes is one of the purest definitions of empathy, from an innovation standpoint, that I've ever encountered. What makes empathy, empathy - ie if you take it away you change the thing to something esle - is understanding. Where most Design Thinkers trip up is in seeking AN or THE insight. Innovation is all about creating a laser guided sledge hammer. Improvement in only one dimension, sometimes even radically, may not be enough. A profitable segment is often hidden in a sea of issues. I compare it to a relationship. What one thing could you do perfectly that would keep you out of the doghouse with your significant other forever... It doesn't exist. You have have to understand a collection of things - and they are often context dependent. What works when no one else is around if very different than when around family or co-workers. Dale H.
Technology CEO | Strategic Advisor| AI, Analytics, VR/XR, SaaS | HealthTech Innovation & Sales Channel Development | Startups
6 年Its certainly less fuzzy for incremental innovation. I'd hope it could also help add clarity for disruptive product or service innovation too.