43- Focus on customer goals, not your product

In many companies, designers do not prepare the product roadmap. We are handed a feature list and expected to just do it. But we’ve all been in situations where we felt that what we are working on just isn’t right. But how do you push back?

How do you correctly recognize what to create? Does a hobby runner want a better running shoe? Or do they just want to be faster? Or to lose some weight? If we understand what people really want, we can work on the right solution.

A great framework that helps us with that is Jobs to be Done. It promises to identify the customer jobs (i.e. customer goals), prioritize our product roadmap, and help us better communicate with business colleagues.

To help us better understand this framework, we spoke with Jim Kalbach, a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He recently wrote a book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which is coming out in early April.

We spoke about:

• Jim’s first encounter with the framework,

• how he uses it in his design work,

• and how it can help us drive product prioritization and business strategy talks.