How the Jobs to Be Done Framework Keeps Your Product Focused

People love adding features to apps and software. It feels productive! But nine times out of ten, it’s how good products lose their focus. 

That’s why the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework has always resonated with me. It’s popular in the business and product world and is a creation of the late Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School. He argued that people don’t buy products, they buy the outcomes those products make possible. In the classic example, people want a hole in their wall—not a drill. They hire the drill to do the job of creating a very precise hole.

Following this logic, we should be thinking about what jobs our audiences need done and craft our products accordingly. That’s JTBD.

This can be a very stark and humbling lens through which to examine your product. You are dropping any illusion that customers use your product due to anything but pure utility. That’s not to say a product cannot be differentiated beyond its JTBD, but that the job is the foundation upon which everything else is built. If you’re not helping your user get that job done, your product is going to get fired.

Why JTBD Matters for MVPs

One of the biggest challenges we see with new customers here at Fabrik Labs is their desire to add more and more features to their MVP. It’s a genuine challenge to bring something to market with fewer features than you know it will ultimately contain. It feels like you’re skimping. Like people will see it as less than it needs to be. 

This is where JTBD comes in and how it helps you avoid overbuilding. If you’ve done your research and spoken to your target audience (you have…haven’t you?), you know their jobs that need doing. Even if you didn’t pose the question that way, you can see it when you review the data from a high enough perspective. You can even see what jobs are mission-critical versus which are nice-to-have. This is where your MVP needs to focus. 

Think about an online learning platform. Its users don’t need badges or leaderboards at launch—they need a fast, reliable way to access lessons and track progress. That’s the job to be done. Make those mission-critical jobs—the 20% of tasks that take up 80% of their time—the focus of your MVP and mercilessly cut everything else. 

If you’re not helping your user get that job done, your product is going to get fired.

When you launch your MVP, your users will see how laser-focused it is on making that critical task easier. They’ll love it and want that kind of treatment for the other tasks that take up their time. They can still tell you that the product is incomplete, but they’ll see the promise and be clamoring for more. 

Build What Matters, Not What Flatters

Consider this compared to the alternative—your MVP covers a breadth of features, some well and some not-so-well. Are you certain those not-so-well features won’t also be the mission-critical ones? What do you think the impression will be of a product that does a lot of things middling well? JTBD keeps you honest—it forces you to build what matters, not what flatters.

The next time you’re undertaking a redesign or building a new product or app from scratch, consider taking a Jobs to Be Done approach. It’ll help you and your team refine the essential aspects of what you’re building and take you that much further towards a successful launch.