You’re relying too heavily on your own vision. You’re not really listening to your users and you’re building something you think people want. This is confirmation bias at play — the human tendency to cherry-pick information that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs while ignoring information that doesn’t. If you haven’t gotten out and deeply understood who you are building for and what problems they experience, you are more likely to run into this problem. Another variation happens when translating research-based practices into consumer experiences (common in health and education products) — just because something is proven to be healthy or lead to good outcomes doesn’t ensure people will be motivated to try it out.
You’re more focused on the excitement of the technical challenge than your users. Often, eng and design teams may get excited about a specific project because it’s a new challenge to create. But just because it’s new and fun to build doesn’t mean people will actually use it. This tends to be one of the more common pitfalls of hardware teams, which have an especially high cost to getting their products wrong.
You can’t crisply articulate your value prop, and everyone on the team looks at it a different way. We’ve all been there — product sees the value as X, marketing sees the value as Y, eng sees the value as Z. This happens when you don’t have a shared sense of empathy around the problems users face. It makes it tough to drive alignment and focus on what features matter the most or how to align product features with go-to-market need
WHY YOU CAN’T JUST WING IT: THE CASE FOR USING A FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS
ENTER THE JOBS TO BE DONE FRAMEWORK: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT TAPS INTO WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT
BUILDING BETTER PRODUCTS STARTS WITH A GOOD JTBD STATEMENT — HERE’S YOUR ROADMAP
A good, crisp JTBD statement captures underlying motivations, triggers and context for the problems your user faces. This statement can be foundational for your entire product and GTM planning, from focusing your PRD or product spec, to identifying your channels and marketing messages.
A good statement will help remove bias, build empathy for users and bring alignment across product, marketing and eng teams. When you have a well-crafted (and well-communicated) jobs to be done statement, the following things start to fall in place: An increased focus across your team on solving the most important problems by using shared language for how you all understand what problems to prioritize A higher likelihood of delivering new value to people by solving real problems, which should translate into positive leading indicators of important product metrics (like higher engagement and stickiness of your product) A stronger understanding of competition for your product, by understanding more about the situational context and full set of alternatives that people “hire” to do that job.