When budgets are constrained and leadership attention is focused on demonstrating return on every pound of investment, organisations predictably tighten their focus. Innovation programmes get paused. Anything with significant uncertainty around immediate value gets deprioritised. The instinct is understandable – but it can leave a genuine growth opportunity sitting untouched in the existing product portfolio.
Why your existing product portfolio is your best growth asset
When resource is scarce, the highest-return move is often not new product development. It is extracting more from what you already have – improving your existing products in ways that cause more customers to choose them, and cause existing customers to stay loyal for longer.
The logic is straightforward. New product development carries significant cost, risk and time to market. Product optimisation, done well, can deliver meaningful revenue growth with a fraction of the investment – because the product already exists, the customer relationship already exists, and the only question is whether the improvements you make will shift buying behaviour in your favour.
The critical word is “done well.” Most organisations approach product optimisation the same way they approach most decisions: on the basis of internal opinion, the loudest recent customer complaint, or an executive preference. The result is improvements that make the product better in ways that feel reasonable but do not actually drive customer choice. Investment gets spent. Revenue does not move.
Why product improvements need to be anchored in customer choice
Choosing how to improve your product should not come down to subjective judgement. It should be anchored in a clear understanding of why customers choose your product over the competing alternatives – the specific dimensions of value that, when improved, will actually cause more customers to choose you.
This is the distinction that separates product optimisation that drives growth from product optimisation that produces a better product nobody switched for. And it is a distinction that most conventional research methods are not built to make – because surveys and satisfaction data describe what customers think about what already exists, not what would cause them to choose differently.
How Jobs to Be Done uncovers the drivers of customer choice
The most proven method for understanding customer choice is Jobs to Be Done, developed by Professor Clayton Christensen and refined by practitioners including Bob Moesta. It uncovers the deep underlying reasons customers make the product choices they do – not through traditional research but through a specific approach to exploratory conversation that surfaces the functional, emotional and social progress customers are trying to make, and the forces that cause them to hire or fire a product in pursuit of that progress.
This is the same foundation that sits beneath our Causal CX approach – starting with what customers are actually trying to accomplish, and what is causing them to choose, before any improvement decision is made. Applied to product optimisation, it answers the question that internal opinion cannot: which dimensions of this product, if improved, will cause more customers to choose it?
The research is qualitative and exploratory. It reconstructs real purchase and switching decisions in detail, examining the circumstances, motivations and competing forces that caused someone to choose or reject a product. The output is not a ranked list of features customers say they want – it is a causal account of why customers chose, and what would move that choice.
From insight to improvement: how to prioritise and test
Once you understand the drivers of choice in your market, product improvement decisions become significantly more tractable. The backlog stops being a list of ideas competing for resource and becomes a prioritised view of which investments will drive uptake and which will not.
Improvements identified through this process can then be tested and refined using Lean Startup methodologies – low-cost experiments that validate whether the proposed improvement actually shifts behaviour before significant resource is committed to building it. By the time you invest in implementation, you have strong evidence that the improvement will move the outcome you are trying to move.
This approach – understanding the drivers of choice, generating improvements on those dimensions, testing before building – is best practice innovation methodology applied one level closer to the existing product. It carries considerably less risk than new product development, works within constrained budgets, and is aimed precisely at the thing that actually determines whether a product grows its customer base: giving people a better reason to choose it over the alternatives.
The case for doing this now
Focusing on this kind of targeted product optimisation can feel conservative when growth ambitions are high. But it is precisely because the approach is targeted, grounded in evidence about what drives choice rather than internal assumption, that it produces returns that speculative innovation often does not. It also builds the capability and the research foundation that stronger future investment can grow from.
The organisations that come out of constrained periods with stronger market positions are rarely the ones that cut everything and waited. They are the ones that kept investing in the things most likely to move customer behaviour – and were disciplined enough to know which things those were.
Elemental Concept and Purple Shirt help organisations across the UK, Australia and New Zealand identify the drivers of customer choice and build product optimisation strategies that act on them. Find out more about our Jobs Based Innovation practice or customer experience strategy services.
