RightThing helps companies discover new product categories and prove they are real. It is led by Todd Reily, whose Bose vision team originated the Ultra Open Earbuds and helped open the multibillion-dollar open-ear audio market.
Start with one question25+ patents. Two TIME Best Inventions of the year.
Not every problem matters. Not every idea is meaningful and worth pursuing.
The most expensive words in business: "we think our customers want."
Your customers may not be able to tell you what they want. But the only way to build something they love is to understand them more deeply than anyone else does. Most teams never get the chance. Real insight costs six figures and takes a quarter, so they substitute: a survey, a few friendly chats, gut feel. Then they bet the roadmap on it.
The highest stakes decisions get made with the least evidence.
Defining vision and validating new opportunities is what I led at Bose. Here is how I approach that work, shaped by what worked there and what didn't.
01Mapping the future. We start with the futures your team believes in: the cultural, market, and technology trends already playing out and the scenarios they could produce. The point is thinking objectively and expansively about what is to come, beyond any one ideal future. The outcome is a set of shared beliefs and a prioritized map of opportunity spaces, each large enough to hold a roadmap of products and services.
02Architecting the opportunity spaces. We map the solutions in each space with a structured method from MIT Systems Architecture that separates outcomes, strategies, and solutions. It reliably surfaces options well beyond the obvious. Your team strengthens and prioritizes the field, then selects a portfolio of concepts that push on different dimensions to test with real consumers.
Read: Why I Stopped Brainstorming · Why Your Team Picks Compromise Ideas
03Opportunity validation. The team makes the leading concepts tangible through prototypes, product stories, and artifacts from the future. Where the team is aligned and confident, it moves. Where there is uncertainty, we run a targeted study on exactly that question. This phase builds the feedback loops that dial in the right solution.
Read: If You Can't Feel It, It Doesn't Exist · The Collapse of the Double Diamond
We systematically break down uncertainty, wherever yours lives.
A thousand interviews in an afternoon. The teams that win are not the ones with the best first idea. They are the ones that learn fastest.
A custom AI researcher runs real one-on-one conversations with your customers. It follows up. It asks why. It notices when an answer does not square with the last one and goes after the gap. Not a survey. An interview, at survey scale.
A hundred people, or a thousand, in an afternoon, at a price within reach of a startup for the first time. From question to confident decision in two weeks. For a single question, Right Overnight is a five day study: a question on Monday, the test runs overnight, an answer by Friday.
Your total commitment: two working sessions. Everything in between is handled for you.
A note for the vision-driven. A first version should come from vision. The open earbuds did not come from a survey. We never use research to ask people what they want, and we don't overreact to what they say. We use it to understand what motivates and drives them, then build new intuition and sharper vision from that knowledge.
We use AI for what machines do well: reach, scale, speed, the preparatory work.
The rest is human, and it is the part that matters. Anticipating how culture is shifting. Understanding why people do what they do. Imagining a future that looks different from today. Getting a team aligned on what the evidence means, and deciding what to pursue next.
The machine has no taste. It relies on us for quality.
This is the old dream of human-computer symbiosis, finally working. The machines got faster so that we can be more human.
Todd Reily has spent his career in categories that did not exist yet. He led design and design research at two startups creating new ones: industrial smart glasses in 2012, social robots in 2015. Then he led the vision team at Bose for nearly a decade, where his teams explored the future of sound in the home, on the go, and in the car, and originated the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, which helped open the open-ear category, now doing billions a year.
His teams have been recognized with more than 25 patents and two TIME Best Inventions of the year.
Plenty of those projects never reached the market. Each one still produced real learning about how new categories come to be, and that learning is the point: in new territory, the ability to drive down uncertainty quickly is everything. RightThing exists to pass that on.
He works where the unknowns are biggest right now: audio, wearables, and robotics.
The best first move is a small one. One decision you are stuck on, one study scoped to it, an answer in about two weeks.
Happy to walk you through a real dashboard and sample transcripts first. Most people want to see it before they believe it.