We’ve all seen it: the perfectly groomed backlog that somehow leads to a product that misses the mark. We followed the “As a user, I want to…” template, we prioritized, we shipped. So what went wrong?
Lately, I’ve seen a ton of discussion around shifting from traditional User Stories to a Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach for framing our work. The difference is subtle but profound. Instead of focusing on a user’s request for a feature, JTBD forces us to uncover the underlying motivation and the progress they’re trying to make. The focus shifts from “what they want to do” to “what they want to achieve.”
This isn’t just an academic exercise. Adopting a JTBD mindset fundamentally changes roadmap conversations. It elevates discussions from a checklist of features to a strategic plan for helping users succeed. When your team understands the “job” a customer is “hiring” your product for, every design and engineering decision becomes clearer and more impactful.
Of course, identifying these core jobs requires deeply synthesizing user feedback from interviews, support tickets, and surveys. It’s about spotting the patterns in the noise, which is where tools that centralize user insights, like we’re building at https://leera.io, become indispensable for building a truly outcome-driven roadmap.
So, how is your team approaching this? Are you strictly using user stories, have you adopted JTBD, or are you using a hybrid model?