Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy
Alan Klement
Summary
This book dives deep into Customer Jobs theory and Jobs To Be Done. Essentially, rather than a product solving a person's problem, if you think of it from the customer's perspective, they are hiring your product to do a job for them. The goal of any job someone hires a product for is to improve their life.
Through both diving into the concepts as well as case studies, Alan effectively cements home what this framework of thinking about building products is and how important it is to know what job your customers are hiring your product for.
Contents
Quotes
Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras—build better photographers.
—Kathy Sierra
Doctors treat patients successfully because they understand that the pains and discomforts that patients express are not the problems; they represent the patients’ interactions with their own bodies. Similarly, the needs, wants, and desired outcomes that customers express do not represent their problem; they represent interactions between the customer and the system of progress. Therefore, customers’ stated preferences are unreliable and why customers’ “needs” and “wants” keep changing.
“At 37signals [the former name of Basecamp], we’ve been thinking more about why people hire our product—or what people are hiring our product to do.” I remember at the time thinking, Man, I’ve never thought about it like that before.
Keep your mind open to what counts as competition. I recently talked with a woman who told me about switching from her morning coffee to a kale smoothie with a shot of wheatgrass. Who would’ve thought a cup of coffee and a kale smoothie could be competitors?
Questions you should be able to answer after reading this book
My thoughts
This was my first real foray into customer jobs theory (despite it being used at Dropbox). It is really interesting framework to think about product development and your customers. Just having a framework is very helpful relative to trying to figure all this stuff out on your own;