Today, we continue our exploration of how Jobs-to-be-Done helps product managers think differently, drive innovation, and develop new products and features based on the needs of the customer. In our first two posts, we gave you a Jobs-to-be-Done Cheat Sheet and used the example of an educational publisher to look at defining your market with the customer's job-to-be-done. Let's dig deeper into this example, looking at generating ideas, pricing, and market sizing.

Generating Ideas

We've all been in those meetings where "no idea is a bad idea" and the goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible. Brainstorming is the best way to generate ideas, right? Well, often, these sessions lead to long lists of features without clear criteria for prioritizing them. Not to mention, some people are now excited enough about their creative efforts they are willing to fall on a sword to see their ideas realized.

You don't need a long list of ideas. You need to generate ideas that will lead to results for your customer and your bottom line. High-impact features are more likely to come from asking a specific question: How do we serve our customers' most important and least satisfied needs?

In the last post we discussed the need of a student to reduce the likelihood that they have a question which can't be answered in the moment. Imagine you're a Product Manager at an educational publishing incumbent like Macmillan or Pearson. It's the late-90s and the internet is just beginning to reach a mass market. To serve this need, you could add more information to printed books or to a new CD-ROM product. Or you could notice that the internet enables students to connect with other people who could answer their questions. The customer need "reduce the likelihood of having a question which can't be answered in the moment," gives us clear criteria for knowing which solution is best. It's the one that makes it most likely the student's question can be answered immediately.

Setting a Price

The difference between paying for a product or getting the job done can seem subtle. Think of it this way: A person may only be willing to pay a one time purchase fee for a book (a product), but might pay a recurring monthly subscription to learn a language (see how DuoLingo gets the job done). Pricing by the customer's willingness to pay to get the job done helps you avoid leaving money on the table and gives you a more accurate picture of your market size.

Estimating Projected Revenue

There are 2 conventional methods of estimating the size of your market and your projected revenue: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is an estimate of the total revenue for some geography and industry (e.g. dollars spent on education in the US) multiplied by an estimated percentage of that revenue you can obtain. The bottom-up approach looks at how many people you can get to buy your product based on marketing and sales projections and multiplying that estimate by the price of your product. For instance, we project our marketing will reach 1 million people and we'll convert 10%, so we'll sell 100,000 books. Multiply 100,000 by $50 per book to get a $5 million market.

With Jobs-to-be-Done, the focus isn't on the product because products change over time. The focus is on the customer's job to be done. The market size is based on the customer's willingness-to-pay to get the job done and the number of job executors.

This approach helps you avoid market mistakes, which can be lethal. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica was a leader in education, the gold standard of information. Its business model was to sell books to consumers to help them and their children learn subjects. But just as there is no "iPod" market, there is no "encyclopedia" market. To size the market opportunity, instead of calculating the market size based on encyclopedias sold times price, education markets should be sized using the job executor (e.g. parents, students or teachers) times their willingness to pay to get a job (e.g. learn a language, learn a skill) done better.

That does it for this second installment of JTBD Product Management. Is your company still operating the old way? Could you benefit from implementing the thrv approach? If so, get in touch with us. We'd love to talk with you about how our products and services can help you launch high-growth products. Next week, we'll wrap it up by exploring how to approach the product roadmap, aligning your team and delivering an MVP.