The customer is always right. Love your customers. The customer knows best.

We've all heard these old sayings. And to some extent they are right. Consumers vote with their wallets. They know what they want when they see it. The problem is when it comes to user input in the product development process the results are less than impressive.

Homer Simpson's long lost brother found that out the hard way in the Simpson's episode "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?". Herb the owner of Powell Motors goes bankrupt when he asks Homer to help design his very own dream car.

Homer makes suggestions and when the engineers object, Herb vetoes them. The engineers finally having to listen to the voice of the customer. But of course the car is a commercial disaster, bankrupting Powell Motors and poor brother Herb. 

When creating, developing and marketing new innovative products it is critical to have the best input possible. The traditional user-driven innovation supplies R&D with lots of user input. The problem being, they are the wrong type of inputs. Users are lobbied for their wishes, requirements and suggestions for new products. Taken at face value these inputs are if not worthless, at the very least useless. Proper input must be actionable, quantifiable and verifiable. What we need to know is what is it the users are trying to accomplish, what are the jobs they are trying to get done and what are the intended outcomes?

Outcome driven innovation is the solution to this problem.  By investigating the jobs users are trying to get done we can develop a system of actionable and verifiable outcomes. The benchmark for success is measured by the degree with which we help users do the intended jobs and complete their tasks.

You can't ask a user about a product that doesn't exist. You can ask them about the jobs they need to get done. Which makes more sense?