Moving from user role based approach to problem statement based approach for Product development

User story and Job story — Image (http://bit.ly/2lyUg4f)

As a Product Manager, one should be always in a state of clarity, collaborative and communication mode to get things done. In this story, we will discuss about user focused story and problem focused story and how one of those can add efficient value addition in the product.

Thanks to Scrum framework , the user story is a well known term that people across the globe uses it during product development. You can dig down with quality user story for product development. This approach focuses on the user role based mindset where stories are defined to achieve the user’s needs (or user’s wishes). From my experience while leading the teams for product development, ‘The User’ is a big term in general while defining a single user story.

The User story

As the standard format of user story suggests:

User story format — Image (http://bit.ly/2yZjlLd)

As a [Role] I should be able to do [Action], so that I can achieve the [Purpose].

Here this is a solution centric statement that a specific role of the user, wants to perform certain action so that user can achieve the purpose from the product.

Challenges in such situations:

1. Everyone in the team thinks that the user wants to do this X to solve the problem and the team members just discuss and act on how we can implement this solution in the sprint.
2. It directly says about the solution that they users want from the product. So everyone in the team start focusing on how to implement the said solution.

The Job story

Ultimately we are solving user’s needs in the product not their wishes. While digging further, every need has following three characteristics:

1. Situation
2. Motivation
3. Outcome

Situation tells us that where and when there is a need. Motivation tells us that what inspires the users to perform any action in the product. Outcome is another state of previous situation that user wants to achieve from the product.

Format of a job story:

Job story format — Image: (http://bit.ly/2iPkbDY)

When I am at ‘X situation’, I want to able to ‘Y motivation’, so I can achieve the ‘Z outcome’.

Some examples:

1. When a user is on the registration screen of the app, user wants to do registration either from Google, LinkedIN or Email, so a user can land on the home screen of the app.
2. When a user selects any product, user wants to click on checkout, so a user initiate the checkout process to buy the selected product.

Summary

It is way better to solve problems that only exists and to do this the job story approach empowers the respective team members. This is an attitude that tells the fundamental and real required information to solve users real needs.

Try this approach in during your product development and share your experience in the comments below.