For product executives, product prioritization frameworks are like direction signboards. Your product manager’s product prioritization framework determines the company’s long-term growth and ultimately the equity value you can create for your company.

As a product organization, you receive an endless stream of feature and product development ideas. You've got creative product ideas coming in from the head of the company, more so if you are owner-led. Ideas roll in regularly during brainstorming sessions and in customer feedback received from miscellaneous sources (like complaints and reviews). You also likely have ideas generated by customer and market data.  And good product teams keep tabs on what the competition is doing, which adds a few more feature ideas to your stockpile. With all those inputs, you need an efficient prioritization technique. Your chosen method should help you prioritize profitable products and features that will accelerate your growth and create equity value faster.

With Jobs-to-be-Done, product teams can break down customer jobs into a series of job steps and define the struggles that the customer faces at various job steps. Once you understand where your customer struggles, you have your priorities laid out for you. An unmet customer need is a struggle that no solution on the market is able to solve quickly or accurately enough for customers.

Using Jobs-to-be-Done to build foolproof product prioritization frameworks

The first step is to determine your customer’s Job-to-be-Done. A JTBD is a customer goal or problem they need to solve with an action verb and an object.

For example, customer jobs-to-be-done might read like: “creating a mood with music”, “getting to a destination on time”, or “optimize cash flow”.  Notice that these are customer jobs because they are customer goals independent of any solution. You should identify your customer’s job-to-be-done without mentioning any product or solution. So “streaming music” is not a good JTBD statement because it mentions a product (“streaming”). In contrast “creating a mood with music” is a stable definition of the customer's Job-to-be-Done. Streaming is just the most recent solution in a long line of products that have changed over time (e.g. records, cassettes, CDs, MP3 players).

A  customer’s job like “create a mood with music” or “get to a destination on time” might sound simple, but the steps involves in actually completing the job are very complex. Every job has between 15-20 steps and 100 customer needs. “Getting to a destination on time” includes a step to “plan the stops” which has six needs including “determine the optimal sequence of stops” and “determine the route to the stops.”

Your prioritization technique should be based on your customer’s struggle.

Once you understand all of the steps and needs in your customer’s job-to-be-done, you can identify which needs are unmet by asking customers which job steps take the most amount of effort. Customer effort scores have been shown to be better predictors of customer growth, retention, and upsell than Net Promoter Scores and satisfaction scores. This makes sense because when customers struggle to get their job done (when they struggle to achieve their goal or solve their problem) this is when they look for and purchase a solution that gets their job done faster and more accurately.  This is why CDs were replaced by the iPod and the iPod was replaced by streaming services. In each evolution, the new product got the job of creating a mood with music done faster and more accurately than the previous solution, even if those solutions (like the iPod) had very high NPS scores and very high customer satisfaction.

With the Jobs-to-be-Done product prioritization framework, the next step is sizing the market. This is why Jobs-to-be-Done is the most effective prioritization method for product development: by putting the customer’s job-to-be-done as the focal point, the customer need becomes the metric for prioritization.  The customer’s willingness to pay is directly linked to their need, which means that if you prioritize a bigger need, you improve your chances of profitability.  At the end of the day, you want to make sure that the ROI promised by the new product or feature justifies the input cost and business impact that it has today.

Jobs-to-be-Done is also an excellent prioritization technique

when you want to avoid constant debate and disagreement within the team. It is the best solution when product managers need to respectfully decline ideas that might rest on what is popularly known as HIPPO or the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It wouldn’t be unheard of for a top-down idea to be a bad one. In fact, even Amazon, which usually gets things right, found itself with a product that was an epic fail when it followed a top-down approach to product prioritization instead of following the data. The failed Amazon fire phone that cost Amazon a loss of $170 million was actually a top-down idea from Jeff rather than a customer data-prompted product development. Bezos apparently micromanagedthe development of the phone right into failure. 

The Jobs-to-be-Done approach to product prioritization frameworks uses quantitative techniques and customer surveys to provide insights on the customer needs that should be prioritized and can therefore help put only the most profitable ideas at the forefront of development and investment.

What makes an effective prioritization framework?

Your product prioritization framework must help you to navigate the complexity of customer jobs. You also need to maintain a pulse on the market so that you are in touch with where the biggest struggle lies and, therefore, where the biggest opportunities lie. Remember that customer jobs like “create a mood with music” have seen many solutions come and go from record players to tapes and cassettes, walkmans and mp3 players, and now streaming services. If you intend to stay relevant, it makes sense to survey your customers and have those data-driven insights dictate your product prioritization framework.

About thrv and Jobs-to-be-Done

The thrv app has an in-built survey tool that automatically uses survey data to prioritize unmet customer needs in your customer’s job-to-be-done. The app prioritizes these needs based on what’s in the market, the size of the market and the intensity of the customer need. Product, marketing, and sales teams that use thrv can generate growth on three horizons:

1. Short-term growth by creating marketing and sales messaging that connects your solution to the unmet needs of your customers and the leads in your pipeline

2. Medium-term growth by aligning your product roadmap with the unmet needs of your customers and the leads in your pipeline

3. Long-term growth by aligning your product innovation with the unmet needs of new customers in the market

To learn more about thrv and our Jobs-to-be-Done approach, contact us today.