Companies plan their revenue growth by using product roadmaps. The idea is to build a roadmap that will accelerate revenue growth and create equity value faster. Apple had a roadmap, and BlackBerry had a product roadmap. One was extremely successful, and the other famously failed. So why do so many product roadmaps fail? How come so many new product features fail to generate growth? And what can you do to determine how much revenue growth and equity value your roadmap will generate?

If big businesses like Kodak, Britannica, and Blackberry can fail and go bankrupt, it means that anyone can fail. How can your team mitigate the risk of investing in the wrong product?  

Better product roadmapping is the answer.

How do you know if your company needs an improved method of product roadmapping? How do you know if you should be using JTBD for product roadmapping?

If any of the three points below ring true, you know that your approach to roadmapping needs some fine-tuning:

1. The business value or revenue projections on your roadmap feel like wild guesses.

2. Your roadmap appears to solve problems for your business, but not your customers.

3. Your roadmap is a list of ideas that have not been validated with customers – either you aren't sure the problem is worth solving for customers, or you don't know if the solution is good enough for them to switch to your product, and pay for it.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) can help you determine if your features will generate revenue by focusing on customer value. This is what separates a JTBD roadmapping from other methods. 

What is Jobs-to-be-Done?

Jobs-to-be-Done (also known as JTBD or Jobs Theory) is a method for delivering customer value and generating growth for your company that is rapidly being adopted, and for good reason: it is proven to work.

The Jobs-to-be-Done approach helps coordinate your product,marketing, and sales teams around your customers’ needs. Your team uses the needs to identify growth opportunities and prioritize your roadmap. 

Using JTBD for product roadmapping: How to focus your roadmap on the customer

Focusing on your product without understanding your customer’s unmet needs is a mistake. Blackberry is an excellent example. Blackberry lost focus of customer needs when they focussed on optimizing the keyboard. They believed that customers wanted phones with keyboards and lost track of the unmet needs guiding the purchase. People wanted to get multiple jobs done while mobile, many of which do not require a keyboard. This is why the iPhone and Android ultimately displaced the Blackberry: because customers could do more with them, i.e. they could satisfy more needs in more jobs.

To avoid a similar fate and identify the revenue potential of a roadmap, you can identify the problems people are trying to solve (now known as Jobs-to-be-Done) independent of your product. This is how you use JTBD for product roadmapping. Identifying your customer’s problems will help you see better solutions – that may rely on new tech – coming before they displace your product in the market. Kodak was the king of film (a product), but fewer and fewer people wanted film each year when phones enabled them to share memories (the JTBD) faster and more accurately on the Internet. Britannica led the encyclopedia market but people stopped searching through physical books when they could find information online much faster and more accurately.

It is critically important that your team put your customer’s unmet needs at the center of your product roadmap. This enables you to more accurately calculate revenue potential from your investment in your product roadmap.

JTBD helps you more accurately project the revenue potential of your roadmap because it assesses if you will help your customers get their job done better at a price they are willing to pay. Your customer’s struggle to get their job done is what causes them to make a purchase of a new product or feature. If your product helps customers overcome their obstacles to getting the job done, customers are likely to hire your solution.

To calculate the revenue potential of a roadmap you need to know:

1. If your existing customers, leads in your pipeline, and customers in the market are willing to pay to satisfy the unmet needs in the job your roadmap ideas target.

2. If your roadmap ideas will satisfy the unmet needs faster and more accurately than the solutions customers are already using in the market.

Validate customer value using Jobs-to-be-Done

Customer value is a function of the improvements your product makes to speed and accuracy. People switched from records, to CDs to iPod to streaming services because each product got the job of “creating a mood with music” done faster and more accurately. Calculating the customer value of features on your roadmap is the only way you’ll be able to calculate revenue projections with higher accuracy.

You can test your roadmap feature ideas with leads, existing customers, and customers in the market. Show a concept sketch or a prototype, and ask if they believe that your idea will satisfy the target need faster and more accurately. Would they buy it? This type of prototyping validation is more accurate because you are not just asking about the feature idea, you are specifically asking if the feature idea satisfies the unmet need faster and more accurately. This is a critical step to improve the revenue potential of a roadmap. All the ideas on your roadmap should be validated against customer needs.

When validating your roadmap features, don’t ask your customers, “Do you like this feature?” or “Is this a good feature?” because this method of validation can deliver a lot of false positives. A customer will not necessarily know how it alleviates their struggle or that they might be willing to pay for it. Ask them if the feature idea helps them get the job done faster and more accurately.

Conclusion

You need to know the revenue potential of a roadmap before you invest in it. A reliable way to calculate the revenue potential of your roadmap is to tie it to customer value, which can be quantified using Jobs-to-be-Done. With thrv, your customer value becomes the center of your product roadmap and the basis for ideation on new features. Want to learn more about using JTBD for product roadmapping? Contact thrv today.