This week features the third and final installment of our JTBD Product Management: An Education Market Example series. If you haven't read them already, check out Part 1, Part 2, and our Cheat Sheet. With this series, we're presenting you with an overview of how the Jobs-to-be-Done framework can help you view product management and product development through a different lens -- one which focuses on the customer, the job they are trying to get done, and their unmet needs.

We've been using the educational publishing industry to bring this thinking to life, but the ideas presented here can be applied to any industry where you're tasked with creating new products, or adding new features to existing products.

In today's post, we'll talk about how to prioritize your roadmap, align your team and develop your minimum viable product.

Prioritizing Your Roadmap

When you spend all day, every day thinking about your product, it's only natural that your success metrics will be product-centric. For example, if you're building an education app roadmap, you might optimize for an increase in "time spent in app" or "frequency of sessions." Any feature that would make these metrics go up would be high priority.

However, if you've read the previous entries in this series you know that the customer's satisfaction with getting the job done is your ultimate target. When developing a roadmap, Product Managers using Jobs-to-be-Done prioritize features that serve the most important and least satisfied customer needs.

If we're working on the job "learn a subject," we might find that "minimizing the likelihood of having a question that can't be answered in the moment" is very important and not satisfied. Interestingly, a feature serving this need might cause users to spend less time in our educational app because more of their questions are answered right away and they are learning the subject faster. The app is increasing value for the customer even though a commonly used KPI is decreasing.

Prioritizing by customer needs leads to releases that deliver value to users and avoids those that could be great for the business but irrelevant to the users.

Aligning Your Team

Designing, developing and bringing a new product to market requires a team of skilled individuals who are committed and focused on a common goal. You're going to be challenged with a host of difficult decisions, from feature prioritization to scope to where to invest resources. Even the best teams can be challenged by these situations, especially when the time for discussion ends and choices need to be made.

All too often, this is when the course is determined not by data, but by The Boss, who makes a suggestion that's really more of a directive. Since she's in charge, the HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) rules. As a result, your team is left in a state of frustration. Everyone is left to argue for their ideas on what to prioritize and the result is time and money wasted, a dysfunctional team, and customers who are potentially confused by, or unsatisfied with, your product.

So, how do you get team alignment? By removing the personal and focusing on the measurable. When you measure things like speed and accuracy, you eliminate opinion or hunches. If the research shows that students learning algebra have an unmet need to "reduce the time it takes to learn how to factor quadratic equations" and it currently takes days, everyone can get behind an idea that reduces that time to hours or even less. When you align the team around customer needs, opinions matter a lot less.

Delivering the MVP

The idea of delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) to market as fast as possible is so widely accepted, it's nearly conventional wisdom. But, how do you know which features belong in the MVP? What makes your product viable?

You and your team may bring years of training and experience to the task so you could rely on intuition. Or you could attempt to estimate the impact on your business and include the features that will generate pageviews, more time spent in your app or repeat visits -- whatever your KPIs are. Or you could show the MVP to your customers and say, "Do you like this?" If they say, "Yes," are you ready to go?

When scoping your MVP, Jobs-to-be-Done thinking prompts the question, "What features will have the most impact on my customer's needs?" For example, Britannica may have shown new editions of its encyclopedia with "even more volumes" to its customers. They may have said, "Great! We love information. Bring on more volumes!"

But do the extra volumes help reduce the likelihood that a student's question can be answered in the moment? Does it reduce the time it takes to find the definition of an unfamiliar word?

"Liking" a product is not the same as having it serve your needs much better than previous solutions.

Jobs-to-be-Done assumes if you create value for your customer, value for your business will follow. The features that belong in your MVP are those that serve at least one important and unsatisfied customer need. It's best if your MVP meets the most underserved need, i.e. the one with the highest opportunity score. If your MVP doesn't serve an unmet need, you're not ready to ship. If your MVP includes features aligned with over-served needs, you may have to re-think your roadmap.

That wraps up our JTBD Product Management introductory series. We hope you've found it informative and that it has sparked questions, such as "Is our company defining our market as a product or a job?", "Is someone out there getting our job done better with a different product?", and "Do we agree on what a customer need is and does our MVP meet at least one?"

If you feel you could benefit from implementing the thrv approach, 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. Be sure to check the thrv blog regularly for more ideas, stories and insights on how to implement the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.