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

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:

1. Comparability. Different opinions are expressed in the same unit—jobs and outcomes—making them easier to weigh.

2. Evidence filter. Only jobs confirmed by field research—interviews, observation, or data—count in prioritization. The rest remains theory.

3. 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: