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/

How do you divide up your app?

credit: Ryan Singer, feltpresence.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