Your product connects with frustrations

In digital products, the dominant perspective is usually the supply perspective This is reasonable considering that many digital product organizations, although they want to put the customer at the center, tend to keep them on the periphery or not at all.

It's also the perspective that dominated industries prior to the digital market, with customers less exposed to constant dynamism and exposure to different options on a permanent basis. It's quite natural to find marketing, sales, business, and press teams moving within this perspective. The movement goes from the company to the customers.

In contrast, the demand perspective takes the opposite path, from customers to the company. Possibly the framework that has most popularized this approach, equipping it with various tools, has been the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework.

This framework incorporates a small theory about how we choose, placing each person in a sort of dynamic system of forces. On the one hand, every person is always something relative to the past, present, and future. And your product participates in their life within that structure.

Contexts, therefore, become very relevant. Each person, and the organizations where those people make decisions, are driven by forces that encourage change but also by forces that hinder it.

When did your heart break?

Therefore, they choose you not so much for what you offer, but for how what you offer connects with a latent frustration.

This is a very relevant finding, especially for organizations that have become feature factories with management teams disconnected from their own customers. A fairly common situation.

From this perspective, it makes sense—as some companies that stand out for their well-received products do—to lead your product not from the features but from the frustrations.

The more substantial the decision (taking a subscription that you can cancel at any time is not the same as hiring a new tool to consolidate data), the more sense it makes to focus on the frustrations. If your average ticket is very high, you already have the reference.

Only from them does it make sense to go to the functionalities.

In the JTBD framework, the origin of a future decision to change is called a Push Moment, since it is what guides you toward that future option. Once you understand this, you can start getting marketing, sales, business, etc teams to start selling for that moment of frustration and stop selling functionalities.

It's clear when Figma, for example, is presented like this: "Tired of uploading files and syncing versions?" Or Notion connecting with this other very common frustration in all organizations: "Messy docs and scattered knowledge?"

Our decisiones play within a system of forces.

The best way to understand these crucial moments has been invented for a long time: talk to those people. The structure of JTBD interviews is intentionally open and non-prescriptive, because it seeks to understand the ingredients of frustration and the contexts in which they occur.

This is an approach we practice in the Tramontana Institute product management program, and one I personally always favor in my teams. Even in those that don't have such weighty elections and, therefore, not as much of a frustration burden.

It's an approach that favors conversation, contact with people, and product teams focused on creating meaningful experiences.