3 Steps to Prioritize JTBD in Product Development

by Himanshu Goyal Digital Consultant

In the current fast-paced, digitally-charged world, businesses need to keep an eye out for hidden opportunities in product development to drive innovation and success. A surefire way to do so is by understanding your customers on a deeper level — analyzing what their pain points are, determining which product features they value the most, and making difficult decisions to best fulfill their unmet needs.

To be able to develop solutions that solve specific customer needs and augment overall user experience, it is imperative to explore the true motivations behind your customers' purchase decisions.

This is best achieved with the help of a Jobs-To-Be-Done framework implemented throughout the lifecycle of product development.

However, with limited time and resources to accomplish a slew of influential tasks, how do you prioritize JTBD at every step?

Let's find out.

How do you prioritize JTBD in product development?

With numerous customer JTBDs in every market, how do you decide which of those are most crucial for the long-term success of your business?

The answer lies in User Research.

One of the most effective ways to plan for long-term business needs and streamline research, design, and product development is to leverage conduct in-depth surveys.

Ask your customers what jobs they are to get done, and how effective they believe the existing solutions or services in the market are.

Here are the steps to follow to leverage surveys to conduct user research:

1. Leverage Persona Identification

This involves determining if the participants of your survey match your target audience and are eligible to provide useful JTBD feedback.

It's a good idea to remove upfront any participants that don't match your target persona.

Thereafter, ask them questions that include:

● What is your job title? What are your job responsibilities?

● Which department or industry do you belong to?

● Which services are you currently using to get a job done?

● Are you benefiting from one of your products or services? If so, how actively do they do so?

And so on.

2. Employ a Ranking Scale

You might leverage the Likert Scale or another stack ranking scale to get an idea about how satisfied customers are with existing solutions.

Create a series of JTBDs and get participants to rank them to assess their level of satisfaction.

Use clear and impactful wording to highlight the job to be done. For example, if the JTBD is "resize the picture."

Some questions you should be asking include:

● How important is it to you to reduce the time spent on resizing a picture?

● How satisfied are you with the time it currently takes to resize a picture?

Include a ranking scale from 1 to 5, with 1 indicating they are not satisfied and 5 indicating they are completely satisfied.

Ask questions in a random order; it will help you glean unbiased insight.

Based on this, shortlist the top 3 ranked JTBDs and create survey questions around those:

● How satisfied are you with the X solution? How well does it help you get job done?

● What are some other JTBDs you would have liked to see mentioned in this list?

3. Evaluate survey results

Once you have your survey responses, synthesize your data and extract insights that will help you achieve your goals. You can seek assistance from your UX researcher to jot down insights related to the ranking of JTBDs, importance of key tasks related to those JTBDs, task categories that weren't mentioned in the list, and so on.

Following this, you can collaborate with your design and engineering teams to create a solution or service that will be most effective at helping customers get a job done.

Leverage user research to prioritize JTBD

Determining which JTBD deserves your immediate attention can be tricky; there may be a higher number of JTBD in a specific category, which might make it difficult to determine which areas require designing and engineering efforts.

Leveraging surveys helps prioritize the most critical Jobs-To-Be-Done, which helps steer companies in the right direction. It is critical to understanding customer needs better, improving user experience on the whole, and even setting strategic goals for long-term operational efficiency.