One Innovation Team, Five Customers, Three Solutions, Zero Results — Why Innovation Projects Collapse

Yetvart Artinyan
Sep 23
4 min read

Innovation Health — How Jobs to be Done fixes misaligned innovation projects

Innovation projects rarely fail because teams lack creativity. They fail because they can’t agree on which problem is truly worth solving.

Every team member shows up with a mental picture of “the customer.” They don’t always say it aloud. They may not even be aware of it. But that mental model silently drives priorities, features, and definitions of success.

The engineer imagines the power user who pushes every feature to its limits.The marketer envisions the mainstream consumer who wants simplicity.The sales lead thinks about enterprise clients with purchasing power.Leadership imagines the segment that looks best to investors.

By week two, you don’t have one customer. You have five. And soon, you don’t have one strategy. You have five.

At that point, collaboration becomes a mirage. What you really have are parallel projects competing for scarce resources.

Alignment is the multiplier

Alignment is often dismissed as bureaucracy: sticky notes, slide decks, steering committees. It feels slow, unnecessary.

But alignment isn’t paperwork. It’s leverage.

Without it, energy fractures. Talented people work hard but cancel each other out. With it, the same people amplify one another. Two plus two stops equaling three and starts equaling five.

The paradox: alignment feels slow at first. You pause, surface assumptions, debate. In cultures obsessed with speed, this feels like wasted motion. But speed without alignment is noise. Alignment is the only true accelerator.

Why teams see different customers

Why can’t smart professionals just agree on who the user is?

Every role filters reality differently:

Engineers spot friction points in product interaction.
Marketers spot triggers, adoption patterns, and unmet expectations.
Executives spot revenue potential and market impact.
Designers notice unmet needs in daily life.

These lenses are not mistakes. They are shaped by training, incentives, and lived experience. The problem arises when organizations treat these assumptions as facts.

The hidden cost of false consensus

Many teams avoid confronting these differences directly. They gloss over them with vague problem statements or abstract personas. On paper, everyone is “aligned.” In practice, nothing is resolved.

When execution starts, divergence reappears. One group designs for usability. Another pushes advanced features. A third optimizes for enterprise sales.

The result? A Frankenstein product that satisfies no one.

This is not just inefficient. It’s costly. Every unvalidated assumption consumes time, money, and attention.

Jobs to be Done: alignment through evidence

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) offers a way out. It doesn’t just provide a new language. It enforces a discipline:

👉 Every opinion about the customer is a hypothesis until validated with real-world evidence.

Instead of debating personas or features, JTBD asks: Which job is the user—the job performer—trying to get done, and where is the struggle?

This reframing brings three advantages:

Comparability. Different opinions are expressed in the same unit—jobs and outcomes—making them easier to weigh.
Evidence filter. Only jobs confirmed by field research—interviews, observation, or data—count in prioritization. The rest remains theory.
Natural prioritization. Among validated jobs, urgency, frequency, and underservedness decide what matters most—not internal politics or personal bias.

Alignment through Jobs to Be Done

Here’s how the discipline works in practice:

Collect the raw views. Ask every team member: “Who is the job performer we are serving, and what job do you believe is most critical for them?” Capture the exact phrasing without edits.
Lay them side by side. Don’t collapse or smooth them over. The value is in seeing the differences explicitly—different job performers imply different strategies.
Validate in the field. Treat each proposed job as a hypothesis. Interview users, observe behavior, test whether the struggle truly exists in their lives. If you can’t find evidence, it doesn’t belong in your prioritization discussion. Otherwise, it’s just theory.
Prioritize with JTBD criteria. For the validated jobs, weigh urgency, frequency, and underservedness. Which job performer faces the sharpest struggle? Which struggle, if solved, creates the most leverage?
Make a choice. Not a compromise. A choice. Select the focal job that will anchor strategy.

When done well, diversity of opinion isn’t erased. It becomes raw material for sharper focus. Each perspective contributes, but the team commits to a single, evidence-backed definition of progress—anchored in a real job performer, not a hypothetical persona.

Startups vs. corporates: the alignment gap

Both startups and corporates struggle, but in different ways:

Startups confuse investor signals with real-world evidence. They pivot fast but often chase unvalidated assumptions.
Corporates confuse internal consensus with evidence. Boardroom decisions become “truth,” while actual users may tell a different story.

Both fall into the same trap: debating assumptions as if they were facts. JTBD forces evidence first. Only validated struggles make it to strategy.

Why this matters more than ever

Technology is abundant; clarity is scarce. Any team can ship features. What’s rare is knowing which features actually matter.

Without alignment anchored in evidence, companies build elegant solutions to problems no one has. With JTBD, teams build around real progress, measured by whether the job performer achieves it.

This isn’t about customer centricity as a slogan. It’s about operationalizing empathy with discipline. Evidence is the difference between wasted effort and meaningful impact.

A practical example

Imagine a fintech startup debating jobs for different audiences:

“Help young professionals invest for the future.”
“Give parents confidence their kids can manage money.”
“Make freelancers feel financially secure despite income volatility.”

All plausible. Each points to a different job performer. But without field validation, they’re just assumptions.

After research, the team discovers freelancers consistently describe anxiety about unpredictable income. Their existing tools—spreadsheets, bank apps—fail to alleviate this struggle. The job “make freelancers feel financially secure despite income volatility” now has evidence: urgency, frequency, and underservedness.

The team makes a choice. This validated job, anchored in a real job performer, becomes the strategy’s North Star. Other ideas are parked until evidence emerges. Execution accelerates, with every decision tied back to real user progress.

Closing thought

Innovation projects don’t fail because teams lack imagination. They fail because there are many imaginations, and they are not tested against reality.

Jobs to be Done doesn’t eliminate disagreement. It reframes it. Every perspective is a hypothesis. Only evidence determines what moves forward.

That shift—from opinions to validated jobs—separates teams that burn months on internal arguments from teams that create outcomes the market actually values.