Hello Stefano,

Thanks for writing this post about your concerns about ODI.
I think you’re missing some of the nuance, though. Outcome-Driven Innovation is about identifying customers’ desired outcomes, so that you can help them achieve them.

It’s not a development methodology at all.. so yes, it’s absolutely on the team to be sure they can execute. That’s nothing to do with ODI or JTBD, though.

JTBD / ODI helps you understand what is important to your customers, so you have direction. How you decide to get there is up to you.

I agree absolutely that a company, especially one just starting off, should focus on one piece of the overall Job to get started.
The trick to ensuring you can help customers get their overall Job Done better is to understand their Desired Outcomes for the step you’re working on, and how that helps them in the grand scheme.

Hubspot auto-reply emails don’t guarantee a company has those ‘good sales people that are able to close’. But they still help people get more customers because they minimize the variance in responses a salesperson sends out to prospects.

Think of it this way: a Job to be Done has a number of steps. You can choose to improve one of the steps, as long as it’s “right-sized” to help the customer get the overall Job Done better. Are you stating they’re going to double their customer base just by adding auto-replies?

No.

But can you state that it’ll lower errors and improve salesperson productivity, so that they can work more deals to get more customers?

Ultimately, JTBD is about what Jobs customers are trying to get done, and how your product helps them do so. Desired Outcomes aren’t some trick to get companies to guarantee things they don’t have control over. It’s really just a way to understand what’s important to the customer so you can focus your efforts on those things.

There are tons of things Hubspot could do with auto-reply emails. But unless they’re helping their customers get that core functional Job done (get more customers), it’s a distraction. The point of knowing the customers’ Job and Desired Outcomes is to make sure you’re adding value, not just complexity.