The latest Growth Forge® Software release includes the new Solution Definition and Implementation Planning tools, covered in previous posts. But this release is broader than just those two tools. Five additional updates complete and strengthen the workflow that runs from initial customer insight through stage gate investment decision. Here's what else shipped, and why each piece matters.
Jobs to Be Done — Now a Dedicated Tool
The Jobs to Be Done framework (previously part of the Market Requirements tool) becomes its own dedicated tool. The new tool starts one level higher than individual job definitions: with the target use case. Before defining specific jobs, teams now define the overall context in which the customer is trying to accomplish something. That framing provides the organizing structure for everything that follows. The tool now expands job mapping across the full customer journey and product lifecycle — nine phases from initial discovery through solution retirement. This matters because customers have needs at every phase, and solutions that only address the core product use moment leave potentially crippling gaps or enable competing alternatives openings to exploit. The structured output feeds directly into the Requirements and Solution Definition — ensuring the solution scope is grounded in a complete, organized picture of what customers actually need to accomplish.
Requirements — Refinements and Improved Analysis
The Requirements tool has been updated to better represent the different stakeholders driving solution requirements and more helpful analytics. Where it previously focused solely on market requirements — what customers need the solution to deliver — it now captures requirements grouped by the nature of the value they deliver and for whom:
- Desirability requirements: What the whole solution must deliver to meet customer and value network needs — translated from JTBD outputs into specific, measurable requirements
- Feasibility requirements: The technical, operational, and delivery capabilities required to build and deliver the solution — including manufacturing capacity, distribution reach, or access to capital where relevant
- Viability requirements: Organizational, strategic alignment, and business model constraints that the strategy must operate within
Organized by the DFV framework, this expanded view ensures that solution definition and competitive evaluation start from a complete picture of what success requires — not just from the customer's perspective, but from the organization's delivery capability and business model perspective as well. Requirements in all three categories can surface constraints and trade-offs early, before they become expensive problems later in development.
Competitive Analysis — Refinements and Improved Analysis
The Competitive Analysis tool has been updated to work with multiple definitions of performance:
- Desired Performance from potential customer as defined in the Requirements Tool
- Target Performance established in Solution Definition Tool
- Expected Performance established in the Implementation Tool
It’s helpful to distinguish “target” performance from the markets “desired” performance, because a solution does not need to excel in every requirement. You may choose to optimized your solution by excelling at the most important and poorly served requirements while performing “well enough” in less critical requirements, or even underperforming on requirements that are not really important to customers, focusing your resources for maximum value and differentiation.
The analytic widgets have been enhanced to better represent these differences and highlight where your solution is genuinely differentiated on the requirements customers most value, and where you have competitive exposure — a gap between your projected performance and what the market requires — that needs to be addressed before you have a viable strategy.
Market Sizing — More Precise Forecast Modeling
The Market Sizing tool now supports two-dimensional conversion tables, allowing market sizing logic assumptions to be modeled against two correlated market segment variables simultaneously. For strategies where adoption depends on the intersection of two distinct segment characteristics — and where modeling each dimension independently would introduce meaningful error — this is a material improvement in forecast precision. Single-variable conversion assumptions are still fully supported; the two-dimensional capability is available when the market structure and logic warrant it.
Strategy Evaluation — Criteria-Based Review of the Complete Hypothesis
With all of the tools to define a complete strategy hypothesis now in place across all six BRI Strategy Framework dimensions, there's now a dedicated tool to evaluate those strategy hypotheses consistently across a portfolio.
The Strategy Evaluation tool reviews the complete strategy hypothesis and evaluates it against the portfolio's stage-specific evaluation criteria. For each criterion, the tool compares the current evidence level against the minimum required for the stage, making it immediately visible where the strategy is investment-ready and where evidence gaps need to be addressed before the stage gate.
For innovation project leads, it functions as a working diagnostic: a structured way to assess readiness before presenting to decision makers, and a map of where to focus evidence-gathering effort in the time remaining. For portfolio managers, it provides a consistent, criteria-based basis for comparing projects — so investment decisions across a portfolio reflect the quality of evidence and analysis, not the quality of individual presentations.
The evaluation criteria themselves are customizable by methodology and portfolio , which means the standard applied is always the one the portfolio manager has established for the program — not a generic checklist.
What the Complete Release Delivers
Taken together — the two new tools covered in the previous posts and the five updates described here — this release completes Growth Forge's coverage of the strategy hypothesis model across all six BRI Strategy Framework dimensions. Every dimension now has dedicated tooling. Every tool connects to the others through a shared data model. And the full workflow, from initial customer insight through stage gate evaluation, is supported end to end in a single integrated platform with the most comprehensive new product or business strategy modeling tool suite available.
Ready to explore the full release? Request a demo or log in to your Growth Forge account to see everything that's new. Questions? Reach out to us here.
Growth Forge® is BRI Associates' enterprise strategy development and portfolio management platform for innovation leaders and their teams.
