How a 20 year old Framework can refine your product development
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Ted Levitt, Harvard Professor
Aren’t you tired of looking for market data and applying the same old principles you once did in order to generate interest in your product. Wouldn’t you like to embed a success formula in your company and see decisions made through an objective stand point that helps the customer rather than boost departmental ego.
Making the right product is only half the journey nowadays. First to market isn’t the edge it was any more. As a company you need to stay on a path which ensures that your product is not only right for the market but constantly grows and remains right for it.
If I were to ask you the following question: “Tell me in simple terms: What do people hire your product to do?” What would your answer be? Take your time….
So? Have you given a lengthy answer or a supporting statement to your description, did you pause to think for a while and dabble between multiple tasks, or did you blurt out an awesome one/two liner. Congratulations if you did the last option. If not, chances are that you may not have a clear understanding of what job your customers are hiring your product to do.
A way forward
Consider the Jobs To Be Done framework to help you develop the clarity you need around your product. Introduced by Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen in the early 1990’s it makes the core statement that people don’t really make product purchases for the sake of it, they hire products.
He states a famous example which he helped a fast food restaurant improve their milkshake sales by causing them to understand the job it was being hired to do as opposed to the personas it was marketed to. The restaurant discovered that people hired the milkshake as an energy giver over a long morning commute. Previously they had hired bagels, snack bars and doughnuts for the same job but milkshakes proved to be the best candidate for it. This discovery lead the marketing team to change their pitch, and saw an increase in sales.
Personas are fine if you all want a shared understanding of who it is that you’re building for and what contextual information you need to take into consideration for instance, if you were thinking of a messaging app, you might have a persona called Muthuri who happens to be a 70 year old man and texts his nieces on a regular basis. This would mean that we may have to factor in low vision and a number of visual cues, as well as outbound SMSs for the product.
The job he’s hiring the app for is to simply connect with his nieces. He doesn’t know if he’s a target audience, he just knows that When he needs to instantly send a message to catch up with his nieces, He uses the <insert rockstar app name here>, so that he can communicate with the nieces.
The situation, motivation and desired outcome are captured in a simple When__________, I ___________, So _________ format as opposed to As_________, I__________, So_________. which persona models advocate for.
From theory to practice, a thousand foot view
You can use the following guiding principles to help you apply this method in your product research and development process
1. Structure your interview around figuring out why users are using your product
Ensure your questions focus on their:
a) Situations: (what were they thinking about, what were they doing, what were they feeling at the time),
b) Motives: (what needed to be done, were you switching from another product, was it to earn a promotion)
c) Outcomes: (what was the desired end goal, how was your life meant to be at the end of using product X or Y)
2. Take the findings and weigh your product against them
What your interview exposes is the real reason why the users unsubscribed, subscribed to, bought, signed up for, shared or performed any other action to your product and their motivations behind their actions.
Perform a review with the relevant departments around the findings and pin your products perceived performance against the findings. It’s paramount to let go of any emotional attachment to the product and be honest about its true performance versus your teams’ perceived performance.
3. Design around the agreed optimizations and ensure that your prototypes or mockups are measured against them.
After generating a number of findings and a probable path to success based on the information you have, start developing your wireframes and high fidelity mockups to incorporate UI elements and UX patterns which you believe do the job right.
Use real data to test where possible and remember to evaluate the mockup not on the strength of its beauty but on whether it gets the job done right, easily and fast. Ensure that visual appeal only enhances the products effectiveness of ensuring that the job gets done well.
To learn more about the Jobs To Be Done Framework, you can checkout the following resources:
- Intercoms book: https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
- A talk from Intercom discussing how they adopted this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNTW_9mFM7k
- Jobs To Be Done application in marketing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0NRo3yLqxM
- An in-depth talk of how Jobs-To-Be-Done can be used as a framework for Disruption(actual name of the talk, not an article buzzword): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBRw38Y06No
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