Reveal Growth Consultants, Inc.

09/08/2026

The Global Innovation Management Institute has published an article by our founder, Urko Wood, introducing Lean JTBD OS®, and announcing the ISO-accredited Level 1 certification course now in development to teach it.

Innovation is not inherently risky. The way most companies do customer discovery is. Teams don't fail for lack of creativity, technology, or effort. They fail because critical customer inputs are missing at the moment the biggest decisions get made.

Skipping discovery doesn't remove that work; it moves it downstream, where it shows up as rework: iterating, pivoting, rebuilding, and burning cash to learn what a handful of well-structured interviews would have revealed before anything was built.

Lean JTBD OS® was built to fix that: a qualitative front-end innovation operating system that reveals what customers are trying to accomplish, where they struggle, and how they measure success, so teams know where to focus and what to do to create new value, before they build.

Read the full article on GIMI's page: https://lnkd.in/p/gUUFsiWJ

To bring this methodology to a global audience, GIMI and I joined forces to launch the GIMI-accredited JTBD Level 1 certification.

Want to be part of the first cohort? Reach out to GIMI to schedule a conversation: https://lnkd.in/dWFq_6ZH

08/04/2026

Every founder and innovation professional knows about Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Fewer know what should come before it.

An MVP tests a solution. But something has to tell you which problem is worth solving in the first place. Most teams answer that with assumptions, and then the market grades their guesswork.

I've named the missing step: Minimally Viable Discovery, or MVD. The simplest set of upstream discovery questions to answer before you commit to building.

In today's newsletter, I introduce MVD and the five questions at its core.

Every founder and innovation professional is familiar with the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP). Build the most basic version of a product idea, test it with customers, and learn.

07/08/2026

Most people believe customers can't tell you what they want.
They're only half right.

Ask customers what to build, and yes, they'll mislead you. Ask what they're trying to accomplish and where they struggle, and you've found the one source of insight your rivals are still guessing at.
That's where innovation advantage lives.

👉

The Mississippi judge, law professor, and state representative Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr.

04/23/2026

For decades, roughly 40% to 45% of startup failures have been tied to poor product-market fit. The surprising part is that this stayed true while Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Customer Development, and Agile became mainstream.

These processes are excellent at reducing solution risk (the risk of not being able to make or deliver what customers need), but they were never built to reduce market risk (the risk of misunderstanding customer needs so they don't buy what you make).

AI makes the need to address market risk before you build even more urgent. It can generate code, prototypes, and experiments at machine speed. But speed does not equal insight. We need a compass before we accelerate.

If you do not know what is worth building, you just reach the wrong answer faster, and waste more resources.

I explored this in my latest newsletter article by reviewing The Enterprise AI Playbook: Lessons from 51 Successful Deployments by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab:

What Stanford Found Stanford's Digital Economy Lab spent five months interviewing executives at 41 organizations to document 51 enterprise AI deployments that delivered measurable value. The Enterprise AI Playbook, published in April 2026 by Pereira, Graylin, and Brynjolfsson, reports that 77% of th

03/31/2026

Innovation failure rates have not improved in 30 years despite widespread adoption of Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Customer Development, the Business Model Canvas, and Effectuation.

Why? Because there's one key part of the front-end of innovation that none of these methods were designed to address.

This article is my response to Jerry Neumann's recent essay 'We Have Learned Nothing' in Colossus.

Link it the first comment.

03/19/2026

Airbnb nearly went bankrupt iterating on the wrong problem.

The founders spent months tweaking growth hacks and site design. When they finally talked to hosts and guests, they discovered the real job was not 'find a place to crash.' It was 'feel safe booking a stranger's home.'

The iteration loop eventually worked. But the conversation that changed everything could have happened first.

Most innovation processes are disciplined and well-executed. They just start in the wrong place.

Last week, I explored why the starting point matters, and what changes when teams discover what customers need before they decide what to build:

Most innovation efforts do not fail because of poor ex*****on. They fail because the process begins after the most important decision has already been made.

03/05/2026

Your AI knows everything except what's actually worth building.

Most teams have excellent methods for refining solutions. Very few have a systematic discipline for discovering which problems are worth solving first. This piece explores why that gap exists, what AI can and cannot contribute, and why iteration is the right tool for solutions but the wrong tool for discovery.

The one thing is knowing what's worth building. AI can process data, generate insights, and produce recommendations faster than any team.

02/12/2026

Have you ever had strong strategy discussions with your team only to watch momentum stall because taking action seemed too risky?

Most leadership teams can recognize this moment. A strategy offsite ends with a long list of initiatives everyone agrees are “promising.

01/27/2026

After my own repeated failures early in my career, one lesson became unmistakable: innovation usually fails before ideation, when teams skip discovering what customers truly struggle with.

This article explains what changed once that became clear.

Memory expert Jim Kwik says: "There's no such thing as a good or bad memory; just a trained or untrained memory." The same applies to innovation: There's no such thing as creative or uncreative teams; just trained or untrained teams.

12/30/2025

Feeling like you're on a treadmill, shipping features faster but never getting ahead? You're not alone. Here's why AI product-market fit feels so fragile (and what to do about it):

Elena Verna, Growth Leader at Lovable, an AI-native company that has reportedly reached $200M ARR, recently described what she calls a “product-market fit treadmill.” Her point is stark.