The document discusses how product managers should focus on understanding the "jobs to be done" (JTBD) by customers rather than individual features. It emphasizes that products naturally tend towards disorder and mediocrity over time, so product teams must fight entropy by using JTBD to maintain clarity on customer needs and prevent feature creep. JTBD provides a framework to understand user problems independently of technological solutions and helps prioritize the smallest improvements that provide the most value. The document advocates using JTBD to guide product strategy and development instead of focusing on a feature roadmap.

1. Why Product
Managers Should
Own a Job,
Not a Set of
Features

2. Let’s start on a pessimistic note

3. “It's all one ghetto,
man. A giant gutter
in outer space.”

6. Product Entropy
The natural state of products is to
proceed to a state of disorder.

7. The natural state of products is to proceed to a state of mediocrity.

8. Our values are in part
an attempt to combat
that pull.

9. At the personal level

10. with hacks

11. At the company level

16. At the
product level

17. Fight
Entropy
Intercom’s
story with jobs
How to
start
JTBD
Feature
Focus

20. Your product strategy becomes
“Fill out the feature matrix”

22. Don’t make products that people have to
take crap out of just to be able to use it
Credit: @Mr_Mike_Clarke

27. http://www.productstrategymeanssayingno.com/

28. How do you divide up your app?
credit: Ryan Singer, feltpresence.com

29. credit: Joshua Porter

30. Use Jobs To Be Done
as a framework to fight feature focus

31. Fight
Entropy
Intercom’s
story with jobs
How to
start
JTBD
Feature
Focus

32. https://youtu.be/f84LymEs67Y

33. The milkshake story

35. “We care so that you
can eat with confidence.”

36. 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…

37. 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.

39. 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.

40. Fight
Entropy
Intercom’s
story with jobs
How to
start
JTBD
Feature
Focus

41. We’ve bet the company on JTBD

43. http://jobstobedone.info

44. http://jobstobedone.info

47. Existing
customers

48. Existing
customers
Prospective
customers

49. ACQUIRE
Chat with visitors on
your website to help
them become
customers

58. Team Users

59. Team Inbox

60. Team Messages

64. PLATFORM
DELIVERY
CHANNELS
PATTERNS
ACQUIRE
Chat with visitors on
your website to help
them become
customers

66. #1 FEATURE REQUEST

68. 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.

70. Focus on the smallest unit
that will give the most value
in the shortest time

71. Questions support teams have

72. TrendsPatterns
Customer
Perception
Team
Performance

76. We thought this was a map

77. I want to impress
people at an expo
I want to impress
people on Twitter
I want to impress investors

78. 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

79. A worse “map”, does a better job

84. Make internet business personal

87. recording video recipient
user
recipient
recipient
Turns out this was hard to do
Video Provider
Transcoding service
(e.g. AWS Elastic Transcoder)

90. 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.”

91. Fight
Entropy
Intercom’s
story with jobs
How to
start
JTBD
Feature
Focus

92. https://medium.com/@marksweep/how-to-introduce-jobs-to-be-done-to-your-organization-de7800ee313b

95. https://medium.com/the-job-to-be-done/replacing-the-user-story-with-the-job-story-af7cdee10c27

96. https://medium.com/the-job-to-be-done
http://jobstobedone.org/
http://jobstobedone.info/

97. “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%

98. Thank you!
Intercom: http://intercom.io
Blog: http://blog.intercom.io
Me: @brian_donohue
http://intercom.io/pmbook