616: TRIZ for product managers, without years of training – with Jay Nakagawa and Bill Reid

AI tools for accelerating TRIZ and JTBD Watch on YouTube

TLDR

Jay Nakagawa and Bill Reid recap their workshop from the 2026 PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit on combining Jobs-to-be-Done and TRIZ and using AI tools to accelerate their analyses. These tools help product managers eliminate contradictions between competing customer demands instead of settling for trade-offs.

Introduction

Your customers want it faster, better, and cheaper, all at once. Most product teams pick two and call it a trade-off. What if the trade-off is a contradiction you can solve, resulting in much greater value? I recorded this episode at the 2026 PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, where that question was answered.

Two returning guests join me. Jay Nakagawa is Co-Executive Director of the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Competitive Intelligence (SAICI) and is also the Director of Competitive Intelligence at Dell Technologies. Bill Reid is Vice President at Boulder Imaging and has spent more than 30 years developing products at companies including Ford, GE Aircraft Engines, and GM. He is named on more than 20 US patents.

At the PDMA Ignite Innovation Summit, they led a workshop that combines Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), and generative AI to turn hard constraints into product breakthroughs. Let’s learn a practical, 80/20 way to apply TRIZ principles and how generative AI can speed up inventive problem-solving so you don’t have to be a TRIZ expert.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

TRIZ: A Framework for Solving ContradictionsGenrich Altshuller developed TRIZ while working in a patent office. He believed anyone could be an inventor. He looked at patents to study how people solve problems and found patterns that held across fields. His tools include separation principles, technical contradictions, substance-field analysis with 76 standard solutions, and 12 trends of technical evolution. Bill describes TRIZ as a how-to book for solving known contradictions among constraints. Bill and Jay have combined TRIZ with Jobs-to-be-Done and competitive intelligence to identify and prioritize customer needs.

AI Tools for Faster TRIZ AnalysisUsing AI tools can accelerate TRIZ analysis from weeks to minutes. At the PDMA conference, Jay and Bill led a workshop on using TRIZ and Jobs-to-be-Done with AI tools.

Jobs-to-be-Done and TRIZThe workshop started with guiding product managers to understand their customers’ Jobs-to-be-Done statements. Bill used the example of a quarter-inch hole. The JTBD statements are to minimize the time to make the hole, minimize damage to the wood, and maximize accuracy. Improving speed leads to increased damage to the wood. That is a contradiction among customer needs.

Workshop participants used a contradiction matrix from TRIZ to plot technical parameters corresponding to customer needs. Teams then used the contradiction matrix to brainstorm solutions.

Know Fundamental Principles to Evaluate AI OutputAnalysis can be accelerated using AI tools, but as Bill and Jay explain,