Sample frameDay 207·Product · Needs

Good morning. You know what your customers say they need. You've never asked how badly any of it is being handled today.

Product.

The Opportunity Score

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The question

Pull up the list of needs your team believes it's building against and go down it line by line: for each one, can you say how much the people who actually do that work care about it, how well they're served today by whatever they use instead, and which of those two numbers you've ever gone and measured?

The idea

Anthony Ulwick began working on innovation strategy at IBM in 1980, founded the consultancy Strategyn in 1991, and set the method out in 'Turn Customer Input into Innovation' in the Harvard Business Review of January 2002. His complaint isn't that customers lie to you; it's that they're poor at naming solutions and unusually good at naming outcomes — what they want the work itself to do, said in a form somebody could measure. Cardiologists asked Cordis Corporation for a smoother angioplasty balloon; the outcome underneath was minimise the risk of dissecting a vessel, and that's a sentence engineers can be turned loose on. So you collect the outcomes for a job — Day 4's job — go back to the people who actually do it, and ask two questions about every single one. How important is this to you. How satisfied are you with the way it's done today. Both come back as numbers out of ten, and Ulwick's arithmetic is importance plus the shortfall: importance + (importance - satisfaction), the shortfall floored at zero. Cordis broke the procedure into four steps and put those questions to cardiologists of differing experience, age and location, to nurses, to hospital administrators. The winner scored 9.5 for importance and 3.2 for satisfaction — 15.8, the highest on the list — and it was about the blockage returning afterwards. Cordis built out its catheter range off the rest of that list, and by 1994 it held about a tenth of American angioplasty sales.

The framework

01
What counts as an outcome, and what doesn't.
Every line on the list has to be a result the customer wants, written so it could carry a number — not a feature, and not a solution in a feature's clothing. The shape is a direction of movement, something that genuinely varies, and the circumstance it applies in. Anything naming a mechanism has already skipped the step where you were still allowed to be surprised, and a list of mechanisms is just your roadmap read back to you in the customer's voice.
02
Ask twice about every outcome, and mean the second question.
Ask how important the outcome is, then how satisfied they are with how it's handled today — and ask the people who do the job, not the people who sell to them. Importance alone ranks nothing, which is a property of a well-drawn outcome list rather than a fault in the asking: an outcome anybody would drop was never an outcome. Satisfaction is what discriminates, and it's what nobody asks, because it invites a customer to say plainly that the thing you already shipped isn't working. The shortfall is what gets ranked here: needs, in the order they're failing people — not offers, in the order a buyer would pick them.
03
One continuous ranking, not a sorting into kinds.
Every outcome lands on one continuous scale, and the scale is deliberately lopsided: the score adds importance to the shortfall of satisfaction beneath it, so importance is counted twice and satisfaction once, with the shortfall never allowed below zero. A need people care enormously about therefore stays near the top even where it's already handled reasonably well, while a badly served need nobody cares about sinks. Scores over ten mark the underserved end, where building has somewhere to go. Where satisfaction runs well ahead of importance you're over-delivering, paying every month for a standard the customer stopped noticing years ago.
04
What the average hides.
Average the scores across everybody who touches the job and you'll bury the finding you came for: two groups wanting opposite things produce a comfortable middle that describes nobody. Note who Cordis actually surveyed — cardiologists of differing experience, age and location, then nurses, then hospital administrators — because those are different jobs standing at the same table, and one averaged list would have spoken for none of them. Segment on the outcomes themselves rather than on the firmographics your CRM already holds. And be clear about the limits: this ranks needs, not solutions. It says where the ground is soft and nothing whatever about what to build there.

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