Post on 06-Apr-2017
Why Product Managers Should Own a Job, Not a Set of Features
Let’s start on a pessimistic note
“It's all one ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space.”
Product Entropy The natural state of products is to proceed to a state of disorder.
The natural state of products is to proceed to a state of mediocrity.
Our values are in part an attempt to combat that pull.
At the personal level
with hacks
At the company level
At the product level
Fight Entropy
Intercom’s story with jobs
How to start
JTBDFeature Focus
Your product strategy becomes “Fill out the feature matrix”
Don’t make products that people have to take crap out of just to be able to use it
Credit: @Mr_Mike_Clarke
http://www.productstrategymeanssayingno.com/
credit: Joshua Porter
Use Jobs To Be Done
as a framework to fight feature focus
Fight Entropy
Intercom’s story with jobs
How to start
JTBDFeature Focus
https://youtu.be/f84LymEs67Y
The milkshake story
“We care so that you can eat with confidence.”
Jobs are timeless, independent of technology
People, particularly students and young people, wanted to pass notes and messages, without fear of other people seeing them…
People wanted to store photos in a safe place, like the shoe box under the spare bed…
People wanted to collect scrapbooks of ideas, for home renovations or other projects…
Once you understand the job, how to improve the product becomes much more obvious.
It also makes it more clear who your competitors are, and what your opportunity is.
JTBD are about providing a flash of clarity, not a flash of brilliance.
Clarity of your customers problems, and your purpose, is what frees you to build great products.
Fight Entropy
Intercom’s story with jobs
How to start
JTBDFeature Focus
We’ve bet the company on JTBD
http://jobstobedone.info
http://jobstobedone.info
Existing customers
Existing customers
Prospective customers
ACQUIRE
Chat with visitors on your website to help
them become customers
Team Users
Team Inbox
Team Messages
PLATFORM
DELIVERY
CHANNELS
PATTERNS
ACQUIRE
Chat with visitors on your website to help
them become customers
#1 FEATURE REQUEST
Can I see stats on the average response time per person on the team?
I need counts of how many conversations my team replied to last month.
Focus on the smallest unit that will give the most value
in the shortest time
Questions support teams have
TrendsPatterns
Customer Perception
Team Performance
We thought this was a map
I want to impress people at an expo
I want to impress people on Twitter
I want to impress investors
If we think it’s a “map”Geographical accuracy
Precise filtering
Clustering of segments
Drag to zoom for regions
Accurate scales & distances
When we know the job…A beautiful map
Animated with live action
Full screen version
Hide sensitive data to share
Make it easy to share
A worse “map”, does a better job
Make internet business personal
recording video recipient
user
recipient
recipient
Turns out this was hard to do
Video Provider
Transcoding service (e.g. AWS Elastic Transcoder)
Eddie Cue :“There are things people can tell us and there are things they can’t. Both are really important but one of the dangers is to only do things people tell you to do. To innovate you have to look beyond.
We used to say that we get paid to look around corners.”
Fight Entropy
Intercom’s story with jobs
How to start
JTBDFeature Focus
https://medium.com/@marksweep/how-to-introduce-jobs-to-be-done-to-your-organization-de7800ee313b
https://medium.com/the-job-to-be-done/replacing-the-user-story-with-the-job-story-af7cdee10c27
https://medium.com/the-job-to-be-done
http://jobstobedone.org/
http://jobstobedone.info/
“That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time.”
Larry Page
Look for 10x, not 10%
Thank you!Intercom: http://intercom.ioBlog: http://blog.intercom.io Me: @brian_donohue
http://intercom.io/pmbook