We recently connected with Zac Lyons and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Zac, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

Over the last 2 decades or so, tech companies have been all-in on being customer-centric. Approaches such as design thinking, design sprints, lean startup, and JTBD have all been embraced as ways to get closer to the customer.

Although most of our clients are in industries such as financial services, software, and tech, over the past few years we have seen an up surge in more conservative, slower-moving industries starting to embrace these approaches. As an example, the US Army.

Traditionally, when the US Army wants new equipment, they write specifications that are handed out to defense firms. These firms will bid on those contracts and, if they win, spend millions building prototype solutions that they demo to the Army a year or more later. Unfortunately, an all-too-common response from soldiers responsible for executing the missions and who are seeing the prototype for the first time is, “That’s great, but what I really need is…”

Given this, we set out to understand the unmet needs of soldiers first in what we call mission-driven innovation. I find this very rewarding because, for most of our clients, lives aren’t on the line. For soldiers, they are.

In one project, we talked to soldiers in a platoon who are responsible for conducting reconnaissance missions on foot. Since they are on foot, they don’t have any heavy artillery. They must rely on support if they stumble upon enemy forces who outmatch them. As you can imagine, in the field this can take some time to ask and receive approval for air support or in-direct fires. By that time, if they are discovered by the enemy, they may be killed.

When we presented this very real struggle of soldiers to the defense industry, one company had an immediate solution. They had been working on light-weight swarm drone technology, but did not have a very good application in mind. With the soldiers’ problem now front and center, they quickly presented their technology to the Army to have it fast tracked as a solution to provide a distraction to the enemy so that our soldiers can evacuate their position before being seen.

It’s a great example of being customer-centric and allowing the needs of soldiers to drive the adoption of technology vs. the other way around.

Zac, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

The journey I am currently on started about 20 years ago. I’ve always been naturally inquisitive and love finding better approaches to solving problems. In the early 2000’s, I was a newly minted product manager at Intuit and was asked to develop a new version of TurboTax for Millennials. Being new to the role and wanting to be successful, I started going to conferences, reading books, and interviewing firms to get up to speed. As I dug in, however, I quickly learned that most new products fail, 75-90%. I didn’t want to fail. As a result, I was compelled to find a better way.

During this pursuit, I stumbled upon a boutique consulting firm who introduced me to JTBD, the theory that customers hire products and services to get something done (a job). Soon after, I hired them to do a project for me. I still remember the day we got the insights back from the study. I quickly pulled a team of marketing, design, and tax experts together and, within days, we developed marketing and product concepts that ended up bringing in 10k Millennials to TurboTax, winning us accolades from the WSJ and Business Week, and leading to my first patent. A light bulb went on in my brain. If I could be successful innovating with this approach, anyone could!

Needless to say, I fell in love with JTBD and joined the consulting firm. I was cruising along as a consultant when, after 5 years, I started to get restless. There were some gaps in the firm’s methodology that I wanted to fix. So, I decided it was time to leave and go on my own.

I began Agile Innovation Advisors over 10 years ago and have been helping companies improve their products and services by gathering actionable insights on customers using JTBD ever since. I’ve now done over 150 studies. I am proud to say that I have never stopped innovating my own methodology. It’s not a stretch to say that I took the best innovation process in the world, and made it better.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I first started doing JTBD studies, many people I spoke with had never heard of it. I would have to explain what it is and why it is needed. Now, JTBD has become the leading approach to gathering customer insights.

Furthermore, over the past five or so years since Jake Knapp wrote his book Sprint, I’ve seen many clients embrace design sprints as the go-to approach for developing new solutions.

In the spirt of continuously improving, we decided to marry the two approaches, JTBD for studying customer needs and design sprints for developing solutions to the unmet needs. Together, what we call agile innovation. They are a natural fit for each other. Now, we typically will help clients with a JTBD study first, prioritizing the biggest challenges of their customers, and then go right into a design sprint to help them turn this insight into innovative new concepts.

Our clients really love this combination because it enables them to take action immediately and mitigates falling back on ineffective old habits of focusing on solutions and the latest and greatest technology before truly understanding what their customers need.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

JTBD is a fairly simple concept to understand. It’s about defining what task, activity, or goal your customers are trying to achieve and then decomposing it into steps so that you can gather their measures of success for each of those steps. Simple enough.

However, like learning a new sport, you can’t just read about it or attend a webinar and then expect to be an expert.

Successfully using JTBD is a skill that takes practice, from defining the job your customers are trying to get done, to breaking it down into steps correctly, to gathering customer needs rather than solutions or wishes.

Having completed hundreds of studies over the past 2 decades, we’ve become quite proficient. This includes learning how to conduct interviews, listen to customers rather than push a hidden agendas, and analyze survey results to produce a heat map of market opportunity.

Can business owners or product and marketing managers learn these skills? Sure they can. However, my question to them is wouldn’t your precious time be better suited to learning how to take these valuable insights and turn them into great products and services? After all, a successful business leader does not need to be great at gathering customer needs, but should become incredibly effective and efficient at developing concepts that help grow their business. That is how we assist them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.agilovation.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zlyons/
• Other: https://www.agilovation.com/blog