How to Make Product Tradeoffs that Customers Love
One of the most persistent challenges product teams face is making tradeoffs when deciding which features to prioritize in product development. With limited resources, time constraints, and competing stakeholder demands, the ability to make informed and effective decisions about which features to include, modify, or exclude is critical to a product’s success. This challenge often leads to tension within teams, as differing opinions and priorities can create roadblocks to progress and the dreaded “Franken-product.”
The challenge of making tradeoffs is fundamentally rooted in the difficulty of understanding what truly matters to the customer. Without a clear understanding of customer needs, teams may rely on subjective judgment, gut feelings, or the loudest voice in the room to make decisions. This approach often results in feature bloat, missed opportunities, and products that fail to meet market demands.
JTBD: A Systematic Approach to Feature Tradeoffs
The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework provides a structured and reliable process for making product feature tradeoffs. It’s based on the insight that customers “hire” products to get their jobs done. A “job” is a problem to solve or an objective to achieve. When we have problems and/or objectives arise in our lives, we look around for a product or service to “hire” to help us get the job done.
Here’s how JTBD can help product teams make tradeoffs more efficiently:
1. Prioritize Based on Customer-Centric Criteria: JTBD begins with identifying the specific functional, emotional, and social jobs customers are trying to accomplish and the criteria they use to measure success at each step along the way of executing a core functional job. These unambiguous, solution-free need statements can be then quantitatively ranked based on their importance and the degree to which they are currently satisfied.
Those jobs and/or criteria that are important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity it presents for innovation. This enables companies to identify and rank the opportunities in the market with precision and statistical validity (if desired): we guarantee it. This is how leading product innovation teams objectively determine which features will deliver the most value.
For example, providing this capability to a leading off-road vehicle manufacturer enabled them to identify and rank all the unmet needs among well over 100 with precision. This data-driven approach provides an objective basis for prioritizing features—those that address the most critical and underserved needs should take precedence. JTBD is a great resource allocation tool.
2. Eliminate Subjectivity and Bias: By grounding decisions in the actual needs of the customer, JTBD reduces the influence of internal biases, opinions, and assumptions. Teams can avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing features based on what they think customers want or what internal stakeholders believe is best. Instead, decisions are based on concrete data about customer needs, leading to more confident and defensible tradeoffs.
3. Facilitate Clear Communication and Alignment: One of the key benefits of using JTBD for feature tradeoffs is that it creates a common language and understanding within the team. When everyone is aligned on the customer jobs and criteria for success, discussions around tradeoffs become more focused and productive. This alignment reduces friction and ensures that all team members are working towards the same goal—delivering maximum value to the customer.
4. Enhance Speed and Agility: With a clear, objective framework for making tradeoffs, teams can make decisions more quickly and with greater agility. JTBD provides a repeatable process that can be applied throughout the product development cycle, enabling teams to experiment rapidly by testing individual feature’s ability to address already known unmet customer needs.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of product development, the ability to make effective tradeoffs is essential for success. JTBD offers a reliable and systematic approach that empowers product teams to prioritize features based on customer needs, eliminate subjectivity, and align their efforts. By adopting this approach, teams can make tradeoffs more efficiently, ultimately increasing success rates, quickening time to money, and executing innovation as a repeatable business process.
