The point where most people understand it's important to apply the principle of "good enough" is when a new product concept is first introduced to the market for testing. This is not the time to debut a highly sophisticated and feature-rich finished product, because you don't know yet which features and functionality will need to be changed, added or removed. Instead, it's better at this stage to introduce a basic product that addresses only the most critical "jobs to be done" of the target audience. Even though the early iterations of any new product are just "good enough," if the product truly addresses an unmet job it will still be better than any of the existing alternatives, and should garner audience acceptance even in its prototype form. These first iterations should also be "good enough" - that is, should address critical unmet jobs sufficiently well - to elicit valuable information about what must be changed or expanded, and the product can be improved beyond "good enough" as you become more and more sure about what the target audience wants.

Consider as an example the first word processing programs (yes, I'm old enough to remember many of them). They were very basic and slow, and had almost none of the functionality of current programs. But they were better than any typewriter, and therefore they satisfied a huge unmet job even in their most elementary forms. Features and functionality were added in subsequent versions, and now many current word-processing programs far exceed "good enough" and reach well above most people's demand for performance.

So that's the first place the concept of "good enough" should be applied. But there's an earlier point at which it needs to be applied, and that's in the actual design and conception of new products. Here's where newspaper organizations' RPV - resources, processes, values - automatically predispose them to conceive and try to execute the highest-quality, highest-performing product possible. But that's not always what the customer wants. In this instance, "good enough" means the customer thinks it's great.

The Innovator's Solution talks about the Marriott hotel organization as a prime practitioner of this approach to "good enough." Roughly paraphrased, the book's example goes like this: Consider a business executive attending a large industry conference. There's a good chance the conference is in a major city, possibly at a J.W. Marriott hotel. These hotels have all the services, facilities and amenities that conference organizers, exhibitors and attendees want, and the cost of rooms, meals, drinks, and exhibit space all reflect that.

Now this same executive needs to make a sales call involving an overnight trip. The executive wants to stay as close as possible to the customer's place of business, and will very possibly wind up at a Courtyard by Marriott. Courtyards have very few of the amenities of a J.W. Marriott, but our business executive really doesn't want all those amenities - he or she just wants a convenient place to stay, possibly to work, to get a quick breakfast and be able to get easily to the customer's location. By J.W. Marriott standards, a Courtyard is inferior, but for our executive's purposes, the Courtyard is exactly "good enough."

Now imagine that this executive's company buys an organization located across the country, and a team of managers needs to spend three months there integrating the new company. This team may wind up staying at a Residence Inn by Marriott, which has a quite different set of amenities - kitchens, suites, expanded housekeeping services - that neither the J.W. Marriott nor the Courtyard has. But again, what the Residence Inn offers is exactly "good enough" for the management team that has to stay there for three months, and would not be suitable at all for the executive attending the trade show at the J.W. Marriott.

Finally, imagine our executive on vacation with his or her family after all this work. They're staying in a Springhill Suites by Marriott, which offers family- and vacation-friendly amenities that aren't at all useful to working executives.

Four different scenarios, four different solutions, each with different amenities but all with the same Marriott brand and all that it connotes. No matter why someone needs to be away from home overnight, Marriott's goal is to have an accommodation solution that's "good enough" so the target customer thinks it's great. But to put J.W. Marriott-type amenities in a Courtyard or a Residence Inn would be pointless since those customers don't want all those amenities and would resist paying for them, thus, as my colleague Steve Gray says, "making the hill to profitability steeper."

How do we incorporate this second concept into newspaper organizations' new product development? By focusing relentlessly on the jobs to be done of the target audience and making the product "good enough" to do that job well, but no better than that. For example, if the job to be done is to keep a senior executive well informed so he or she can conduct business effectively, a free commuter daily or an entertainment-oriented publication isn't good enough; that executive needs a high-quality full-service newspaper. But if the job to be done is to entertain the same senior executive during his or her commute, commuter dailies and entertainment pubs are a fine solution and the many high-quality features of a more in-depth publication would be wasted.

A huge bonus to this way of approaching product design is that, instead of reaching our executive just once - with the full-service newspaper, or with a full-service hotel like a J.W. Marriott - we reach that person multiple times, to do multiple jobs. Our RPVs have predisposed us to think that there's only one possible information solution for each demographic in our market. But if we focus on jobs to be done we'll see that one person may have many jobs, for which we can devise multiple products, and that if we make those products "good enough" to do those jobs well but not so good they overshoot customer need, we'll have found the sweet spot that maximizes both audience acceptance and profitability.