In business, having an idea is only the beginning — the real challenge is turning that idea into measurable success. According to the statistics, every year, more than 30,000 new consumer products are launched worldwide. Yet the odds are stacked against innovators: only 40 % of developed products ever make it to market, and of those, just 60 % manage to generate revenue. In other words, most ideas never translate into growth.
This is exactly the gap that Taalay Usupbaev, a London-based product strategist, has spent his career closing. He helped launch Russia’s first low-cost bank for small businesses in partnership with Gazprombank, proving that even lean digital formats can scale reliably. At Apibank – Open banking platform, he led the rollout of instant payments for the self-employed, turning a conceptual need into millions of real transactions. Later, at Ozon, the country’s largest marketplace, he launched a business account service from scratch, embedding banking directly into e-commerce and driving measurable seller growth. Now in the UK, he applies the same discipline to new industries, from digitising construction equipment rental to building a personal finance planning platform.
His signature contribution is the Advanced Metric Tree methodology, a framework designed precisely to solve the problem of ensuring that promising ideas don’t stall but become measurable, scalable results.
The Three Lenses That Turn Concepts into Conversions
So how can British manufacturers ensure their ideas don’t end up among the majority that fail? Taalay suggests applying a system that brings clarity to product decisions by connecting customer needs, user experience, and business metrics.
The first lens is Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). Instead of starting from features, it begins with the customer’s “job” — what they are really trying to achieve, both practically and emotionally. For example, in financial services, one recurring “job” was reducing anxiety: users wanted to understand their financial position quickly without lengthy consultations. “The JTBD insight was simple,” Taalay recalls. “People wanted to know their financial status in 2–3 minutes without a call from a manager.” His team responded with lightweight calculators that delivered instant clarity, a small change that lifted top-of-funnel engagement by 30 % and raised registration rates by 8–10 %.
The second angle is the Customer Journey Map (CJM). Here, the focus shifts to the path customers take, highlighting the moments where they hesitate, drop off, or lose trust. In one B2B marketplace project, onboarding used to collapse when clients were asked for documentation without explanation. “We mapped the ‘moments of risk’, like when people didn’t know why we needed a certain document, and built micro-interventions,” he explains. By adding progress bars, clear reasons for each step, and a “save and continue later” function, conversion to account opening rose by 22 %, while average onboarding time fell noticeably.
The third element is the Metric Pyramid. This is where discipline comes in: every experiment is tied to a measurable lever, whether it’s traffic, first-order conversion, retention, or average order value. Taalay stresses: “We don’t argue about features. Instead, we connect them to a customer job, a point on the journey, and a growth metric. If a hypothesis doesn’t move C1, retention, or AOV, it’s not growth, it’s decoration.” By applying this discipline, his teams cut “task noise” and unlocked a 30 % conversion increase simply by focusing on bottlenecks instead of chasing every new idea.
Together, these three lenses form a structured way to move from insight to measurable impact, a discipline that can be applied just as effectively to manufacturing as it has been to banking or e-commerce.
What Happens When You Apply Structure
The approach shows its value most clearly when applied to UK industries that traditionally lag in digitisation.
One such case is the construction equipment rental market, where small and mid-sized firms often faced friction in renting machinery for recurring projects. Taalay’s team identified the job-to-be-done: businesses needed predictable, fast access without repeated negotiations and paperwork. The solution was trade accounts with pre-approved credit limits, unified billing, and user roles. This change increased order frequency and raised customer lifetime value by reducing transaction costs. In practice, conversion from request to first rental rose by 30 %, while repeat rentals grew by 9 %.
Another intervention came from the same industry: cash flow gaps regularly prevented firms from securing equipment when projects demanded it. By introducing a tailored Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) option, with lightweight scoring and behavioural limits, the platform allowed SMEs to continue operations during payment delays from their own clients. The result: higher average order values in peak weeks and fewer lost orders due to short-term budget constraints. “BNPL wasn’t born from a trend,” Taalay notes. “It came directly from the job clients were trying to get done — cover cash gaps and keep projects moving.”
These examples show how a structured method can modernise even conservative sectors. By linking customer jobs, journey points, and metrics, Taalay successfully turned equipment rental, once paperwork-heavy and unpredictable, into a scalable, data-driven service model.
Three Rules for Turning Innovation into Measurable Growth
What does this mean for British manufacturers facing supply chain pressures, rising costs, and intense global competition? Three lessons stand out.
- Treat innovation as a measurable system.Manufacturers often invest heavily in R&D or product extensions, only to see them stall. By building a discipline of linking every change to a measurable growth lever, whether that’s faster delivery, higher repeat orders, or lower defects, firms can avoid wasted effort.
- Look beyond the factory floor.As the rental platform case showed, breakthroughs often come not from machines but from how customers interact with the service: billing, approvals, and payment options. For UK producers, this means mapping customer journeys outside the workshop and fixing the hidden frictions that hold back adoption.
- Ground decisions in real customer economics.Whether it was SMEs covering cash gaps or contractors needing predictable rentals, the success came from addressing financial realities. For British businesses, that might mean offering flexible payment terms, subscription models, or service bundles that better align with how clients manage cash flow.
In the end, every business leader faces the same dilemma: too many ideas, too little clarity on which ones will truly move the needle. Taalay Usupbaev’s approach shows that growth is not about chasing the newest trend, but about solving the jobs that matter most to customers and measuring progress with discipline. For British businesses under pressure, this shift from intuition to system is more than a productivity boost; it’s a way to turn innovation from a gamble into a repeatable result.
