A hiring/onboarding technique for setting explicit expectations with a candidate before they join. The exercise: imagine the hire nine to twelve months in, and identify the one meaningful thing you would want to be able to score them an 11 out of 10 on — not a generic strength, but the specific outcome that would make the hire an unambiguous success. That target is then communicated explicitly to the candidate during the process, rather than left implicit.
Used alongside the MSN List (Must/Should/Nice-to-Have Hiring Framework): the MSN bullets define the evaluatable floor, while the 11/10 question defines the aspirational ceiling the candidate is being hired toward.
The question is asked as a forward-looking retrospective: imagine the new hire 9-12 months in, and name the single meaningful outcome, output, or team achievement — not a trivial one — that would make you rate them an 11 out of 10 rather than a 10 out of 10. The exercise is meant to happen before the role's success criteria are written, and the 'one thing' it surfaces should then be communicated explicitly to candidates during interviews, not held back until after hire.
Its real value is diagnostic of the hiring manager, not the candidate: most hiring managers, when asked, have never actually thought through what a singular defining achievement for the role would look like. Being unable to answer the question exposes that the role's success criteria were never truly defined in the first place.
Dan Olsen contrasts two ways to win an already-satisfied need (see Importance vs. Satisfaction (Opportunity) Framework): being "10x better" within the existing satisfaction ceiling, or taking it to 11 — a disruptive move that resets what "fully satisfied" even means, as in Walkman → MP3 player → iPod, where each step redefined the ceiling rather than incrementally raising it.
Segway is his cautionary case: it aimed to disrupt "walking," a need already high on both importance and satisfaction, via to-11 innovation, and mostly failed to generalize beyond niche segments (mall cops, tourists) — a market can be too satisfied for disruption to find traction, even when the innovation itself is genuine.
In the context of the Importance vs. Satisfaction (Opportunity) Framework, Olsen ties this question to the upper-left quadrant (high importance, low satisfaction): to displace an existing solution you can't just nudge satisfaction up a notch, you need to push it dramatically past the incumbent — "true disruptive innovation means taking it to 11." Segway is his example of a product that generated enormous hype but never actually delivered an 11-level jump in satisfaction on an important need; Uber is his counter-example of a product that did.
Olsen illustrates the idea with the This Is Spinal Tap "these go to eleven" clip: the old solution isn't broken, and can legitimately be a 10 out of 10 — the new technology simply redefines the scale, resetting the ceiling to 11, or 20, or 100. This is the correct frame for disruptive innovation: it doesn't have to fix something broken in the incumbent to displace it.
The iPod over the Walkman/MP3 players is Olsen's worked example — none of the prior devices for "listen to music on the go" were failing on their own terms; the iPod simply moved the ceiling. See Benefit Ladder for how that need persisted as one stable underlying need across roughly 30 years of successive solutions (troubadours → transistor radio → Walkman → Discman → MP3 player → iPod → phone).
Contrast with "10x Better" Rule (out-executing within the existing ceiling) and see Two Competitive Strategies: Upper-Left Capture vs. "To-11" Disruption for when attempting this move is, and isn't, the lower-risk bet.