Just because there is a better product or a better way of doing something, it doesn’t mean that customers will embrace the new solution. If a new offering doesn’t fit with ingrained behaviors and expectations, customers will be reluctant to change and will look for reasons not to shift to a new solution.
It is well-known that a large percentage of Startups fail. The same is true of new product development in established organizations too. The entire venture capital industry is based on this premise of failure. Failure is widely celebrated, scars of wars fought and lost. And yet it doesn't have to be that way. There is a better way, one that offers structure and rigor and predictable success -- Jobs To Be Done and the Product Success® framework.
Product Management is the art and science of getting under your customer's skin. There is no tool better than JTBD to accomplish that. JTBD encourages understanding the complete user experience and the various components that make up the situation surrounding the "hiring" and "consumption" of a product. Product management is less about the product, it is certainly not about maintaining a feature backlog, but solving the right customer problems (jobs) in the most effective way.
The holy grail for Startups is to reach Product-Market Fit (PMF). This a validation of not only the fact that the startup is tackling a problem worth solving, but also that the solution to the problem is being accepted by the market. PMF is not an event per se, and it needs to be evaluated in the larger context of the opportunity. Here are some metrics to take into account when trying to understand the PMF puzzle.
Interviewing customers is an integral part of JTBD and other customer development methods. A list of questions that entrepreneurs need to answer during the problem interview phase when doing early customer discovery. It’s important to have a plan and follow an interview script to gather consistent data points on all your prospects.
