For a thoughtful approach to product growth and development, it’s critical to know the tasks and contexts that create the jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) handled by your product.

Why is the answer so important? With it, you can:

  • Define all key elements in the growth model: target market, product/market fit, and product/channels fit.
  • Identify direct and indirect competitors used to solve those JTBDs.
  • Find where your product’s growth is coming from: how the market for solving those JTBDs is shifting and what people are switching away from when they choose your product.
  • Discover why people are switching from other products to yours. In other words, find your product’s added value relative to the alternatives.

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Objective and methods

Objective: Determine jobs-to-be-done and contexts for which your product has achieved product/market fit.

The results will help us to answer important high-level questions:

  • What JTBDs does your product solve for users? In which contexts?
  • What other ways exist for solving those jobs?
  • From which alternatives is your product taking away JTBD “workshare”?
  • What is the product’s added value compared to those alternatives?
  • How could that added value be increased?

Methdology: In-depth interviews.

Users to interview: Users who are benefiting from the product and successfully use it to accomplish JTBDs. At the start of the interview process, you usually don’t have enough information to identify who exactly these users are. A logical starting place is with users who have performed actions that bring them value.