Why JTBD's Quantifiable Needs Deliver 5X Innovation Success Over Vague 'Wants'

You've seen it happen. A product team spends months, maybe years, chasing what customers say they want. They listen to feature requests, run focus groups, and analyze survey data filled with subjective desires. The result? A product launch that lands with a thud. According to research from MIT, a staggering 95% of new products fail, not because they are poorly built, but because they fail to address a real customer need. This isn't just a tactical error; it's a strategic crisis rooted in ambiguity.

This article provides the quantitative justification for shifting your innovation strategy from the unstable ground of customer 'wants' to the bedrock of measurable Jobs to be Done (JTBD). We will explore why the JTBD framework, specifically when applied through a rigorous methodology, achieves a success rate of 86%—a five-fold improvement over the industry average. This is the evidence you need to stop guessing and start building products that win.

Table of Contents

• The High Cost of Ambiguity: Why Chasing 'Wants' Is a Losing Game
• The Fundamental Difference: Why Measurability Matters
• The Deceptive Nature of 'Wants and Desires'
• The Stability of Jobs to be Done
• The JTBD Solution: Anchoring Innovation to Real Demand Signals
• The 5X Success Metric: 86% vs. the 17% Industry Average
• How to Convert a Vague 'Want' into a Quantifiable Need
• Market Proof: The Financial Power of a JTBD Focus
• Building a Quantifiable Roadmap Anchored to Customer Struggle
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Stop Guessing, Start Measuring

The High Cost of Ambiguity: Why Chasing 'Wants' Is a Losing Game

Innovation teams are often trapped by the "faster horse" fallacy. When Henry Ford supposedly said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," he was highlighting a core problem: customers describe problems in the context of solutions they already know. Their 'wants' are fleeting, subjective, and tied to their current reality.

Basing a multi-million dollar product strategy on this kind of feedback is like building a house on sand. The data confirms this. That 95% failure rate cited by Clayton Christensen isn't an anomaly; it's the predictable result of a flawed process. When teams prioritize a list of requested features or vague desires like "make it easier to use," they enter a cycle of guesswork. They build something, hope it sticks, and more often than not, it doesn't.

The financial impact is devastating. Every dollar spent on engineering, marketing, and sales for a product destined to fail is a dollar that could have been invested in a predictable growth engine. The true cost isn't just the wasted budget; it's the lost market opportunity and the erosion of team morale.

The Fundamental Difference: Why Measurability Matters

The core reason Jobs to be Done outperforms traditional methods comes down to a single concept: measurability. Vague wants are not measurable. A Job to be Done, when defined correctly, is.

The Deceptive Nature of 'Wants and Desires'

Think about the typical feedback companies receive:

• "I want a dashboard that's more intuitive."
• "We desire a cheaper solution."
• "I wish this report was faster."

These statements are riddled with problems. They are:

• Subjective: What does "intuitive" mean? How much "cheaper" is cheap enough?
• Solution-Focused: They propose a solution (a faster report) rather than defining the underlying problem.
• Unstable: A customer's desire for a specific feature can change the moment a competitor releases something new.

Worse yet, this kind of feedback is corrupted by what researchers call "emotional noise." Studies published in Frontiers in Neuroscience show that emotional inputs can reduce the likelihood of making an optimal strategic choice by 10-15%. When you build your roadmap on subjective wants, you are baking that inefficiency directly into your innovation process.

The Stability of Jobs to be Done

Jobs to be Done shifts the focus away from the user and their fleeting desires and onto the objective goal they are trying to achieve. The "job" itself is remarkably stable over time. People hired fire to keep warm and cook food centuries ago; today they hire furnaces and microwaves to get the same jobs done. The job is the constant; the solutions evolve.

A properly defined customer need within the Jobs to be Done framework is:

• Objective: It describes a functional goal, free from subjective interpretation.
• Problem-Focused: It details what the customer is trying to accomplish, not how they want to do it.
• Stable: The core job rarely changes, providing a fixed target for innovation.

This distinction isn't just academic. It transforms product strategy from a reactive guessing game into a proactive, data-driven science. For a deeper dive into the foundational principles, exploring the Jobs to be Done theory provides essential context.

The JTBD Solution: Anchoring Innovation to Real Demand Signals

The most proven and rigorous application of Jobs to be Done theory is a methodology known as Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). This approach systematically translates the customer's job into a set of measurable performance metrics, completely removing the ambiguity of 'wants and desires'.

The 5X Success Metric: 86% vs. the 17% Industry Average

Here's the single most important statistic for any leader evaluating their innovation strategy. Companies using traditional, want-based methods see an average innovation success rate of just 17%. By contrast, companies that adopt the rigorous, metric-based ODI process achieve a success rate of 86%.

That's not a marginal improvement. It's a five-fold increase in predictability and return on investment. This happens because the ODI process isn't about asking customers what they want. It's about identifying, with mathematical precision, where they struggle to get their job done. It pinpoints the exact actions and variables that are slow, inaccurate, or effort-intensive, revealing where the biggest opportunities for growth exist.

How to Convert a Vague 'Want' into a Quantifiable Need

So how do you make this shift in practice? It starts by breaking down the customer's job into discrete steps and then defining the perfect execution of each step with a "desired outcome statement." This is where we move from art to science.

At thrv, we define customer needs as a simple but powerful pair: an action and a variable.

Let's take the vague want: "I want a faster way to plan my sales route."

This is unhelpful. "Faster" is subjective. A JTBD analysis would first identify the core job: "Plan a sales route for the day." Then, it would break that job into steps, one of which is "Determine the optimal sequence of stops."

From there, we can define the measurable needs associated with that step:

• Determine (action) the travel time (variable) between stops.
• Determine (action) the ideal time of day (variable) to visit each account.
• Calculate (action) the total mileage (variable) for a proposed route.

Suddenly, you have a set of quantifiable, stable, and solution-agnostic needs. Your engineering team isn't chasing the vague concept of "fast." They are working to improve the speed and accuracy with which a user can determine travel time or calculate mileage. This clarity aligns everyone—product, marketing, and sales—around solving the real customer problem. This alignment is critical for any growth strategy for a company.

Market Proof: The Financial Power of a JTBD Focus

The shift from wants to jobs delivers dramatic financial results.

Look at Cordis Corporation, a medical device company. By focusing on the surgeon's Job to be Done—gaining vascular access during angioplasty procedures—they uncovered a host of unmet needs that existing products ignored. The resulting product line was so successful it grew Cordis's market share in the category from just 1% to over 20%. They didn't do this by asking surgeons what features they wanted; they did it by measuring where surgeons were struggling.

Another classic example is the famous "milkshake study" conducted by Clayton Christensen's team. A fast-food chain wanted to improve milkshake sales. They asked customers what they wanted—thicker, chocolatier, cheaper—and the changes had no impact.

When they switched to a JTBD lens, they discovered the real job: customers were "hiring" the milkshake for the long, boring morning commute. They needed something to keep them occupied and stave off hunger until lunch. The competition wasn't other milkshakes; it was bananas, donuts, and bagels. Armed with this insight, the chain made the milkshake thicker (so it lasted longer) and added small fruit chunks (to make it more interesting to drink). The result? A 7x increase in sales.

Building a Quantifiable Roadmap Anchored to Customer Struggle

A common concern with JTBD is that it might lead to abstract insights that are difficult to translate into a product roadmap. This is a myth. A quantitative JTBD approach does the opposite: it provides a clear, data-driven blueprint for prioritization.

Instead of relying on gut feel or the "loudest voice in the room," teams can use data to identify the most underserved needs. The key is to survey customers and measure which steps of the job are the most difficult to execute well. This is often done using a Customer Effort Score (CES), which identifies the percentage of customers who struggle with a particular step due to a lack of speed or accuracy.

When you know that 40% of users struggle to "determine the travel time between stops," but only 5% struggle to "add a new stop to the list," you know exactly where to focus your resources. You have a direct demand signal from the market.

This method allows you to:

1. Identify High-Value Opportunities: Focus on the needs with the highest CES, as these represent the most frustration and the highest willingness to pay for a better solution.
2. Segment the Market: Group customers based on the needs they struggle with most, allowing for precise targeting with both product and marketing.
3. Create a Defensible Strategy: Your roadmap is anchored to stable, measurable customer needs, making it far more resilient to competitive moves and shifting trends.

This data-driven approach is the foundation of a successful product innovation strategy that creates durable equity value.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Isn't Jobs to be Done just another way of saying 'customer needs'?

A: Not quite. Traditional 'needs' are often vague and can be conflated with wants or solutions. JTBD provides a rigorous structure (Action + Variable) for defining needs that makes them measurable, stable, and separate from any specific solution. It's the difference between "I need an easy-to-use CRM" and "I need to determine which sales leads are most likely to close."

Q: Can this framework be used for B2C products as well as B2B?

A: Absolutely. The milkshake example is a classic B2C case. The core principle is universal: people and companies "hire" products and services to get a job done. The jobs may differ—a consumer wants to "prepare a healthy meal," while a business wants to "process monthly payroll"—but the methodology for uncovering and quantifying the associated needs is the same.

Q: Does focusing on functional jobs ignore the emotional aspect of a product?

A: No. A complete JTBD analysis considers functional, emotional, and social jobs. The milkshake wasn't just about functional hunger (a functional job); it was about alleviating the boredom of a commute (an emotional job). The key is to define and measure all aspects of the job to get a complete picture of what the customer is trying to achieve.

Stop Guessing, Start Measuring

The choice facing innovation leaders is stark. Continue to operate on the ambiguous, subjective feedback of customer 'wants' and accept the 95% failure rate as the cost of doing business. Or, make the strategic pivot to a system built on stable, measurable, and quantifiable customer needs.

The Jobs to be Done framework, executed with quantitative rigor, offers a proven path to de-risking innovation. By achieving an 86% success rate, it provides the predictability and performance that turns product development from a gamble into a reliable engine for growth. Stop chasing faster horses and start measuring what matters.