The Innovation Bridge: Turning Human Struggles into Business Wins

Why most innovation efforts stall, and how connecting JTBD with OKRs creates a bridge from unmet needs to measurable business impact.

Innovation dies twice.
First, when teams chase ideas without anchoring them in real user needs.
Second, when they discover real opportunities but fail to convert them into organizational focus.

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) promises the first cure. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) promise the second. Yet, most companies treat them as parallel universes. One lives in the research lab, the other in the boardroom. The result? Insights that never scale, and strategies that never connect with customers.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Your strategy isn’t customer-centric if your customers can’t find themselves in your objectives.

The Gap Between Opportunities and Objectives

Let’s start with the basics.

• JTBD opportunities are unmet customer needs, revealed when you measure Desired Outcome Statements by importance and satisfaction.

• OKR objectives are strategic commitments, framed as ambitious directions for the organization.

The problem is obvious: opportunities tell you what customers want, while objectives tell you what the company wants. And too often, these two don’t talk to each other.

Think of all the energy wasted when a product team uncovers a top opportunity — let’s say, “newcomers struggle to find a trusted doctor when moving to a new city” — and leadership instead sets an objective like “increase ARR by 20%.” Both are valid. But without a bridge, they cancel each other out.

The Bridge Approach

The bridge approach is simple:

1. Start with opportunities.
   Use JTBD to identify high-importance, underserved outcomes. These are the raw ore of innovation.

2. Reframe them into objectives.
   Translate the opportunity into a strategic aspiration that matters to the company.

3. Balance Key Results.
   Combine at least one user-centric measure with at least one company-centric measure.

4. Design initiatives as bets.
   Treat projects not as guaranteed plans but as experiments that may or may not move the Key Results.

This creates a smooth flow:

Opportunity → Objective → Key Results → Initiatives

Why This Works

Three reasons: