Giving personas some context with Jobs To Be Done Framework (JTBD)

• Bananas or doughnuts?
• Depends. 

Factors like these are the driver of most of our day-to-day decisions. Whether online or offline, our behaviours are strongly dependent on the context we’re in.

Doughnuts for ten

Let’s imagine we own a bakery famously known for making doughnuts in town. We’re in the process of building an app to even out the demand we see at the shop which is very high in the morning but quite low throughout the day. The feature we’re building is to schedule orders so instead of buying doughnuts in the morning, customers can order them to be delivered midday when they’ll be eaten. 

There’s one type of customer in our persona list called Jane. Yes, it’s the same Jane I mentioned above. By looking at our data we see that Jane comes to the bakery in the middle of the day every few weeks and buys a box of doughnuts. 

So the challenge for us is to understand why our heroine, Jane, bought a box of doughnuts in the middle of the day? How can we, as a bakery serve her better and potentially make her spend more and often with us? The classic persona structure falls short to explain why and how we might do this. 

Understanding Jane with Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) 

The JTBD, on the other hand, can help us understand Jane’s purchasing behaviour and build the app to serve that particular “job” the box of doughnuts is doing.

By asking questions like: What was Jane after when she walked into the bakery? Where else could she have that done? What need/ job was she trying to get done? 

It turns out the campaign Jane was leading hit a major milestone that day and she wanted to celebrate with her team. So the job was to celebrate and do something nice for her team. She was on her way to lunch thinking about it and walked into the bakery to get some treats, it just as well could have been cookies from the coffee shop across the road. 

By rephrasing the user story this way, you open up possibilities to the way you can solve the same problem. 

How to write user stories for Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

Instead of going for the classic, which is full of assumptions and irrelevant facts that get dragged in by the persona, 

As a _(user)_ , I want to _(action)_ , so that _(outcome)_ .

Try rephrasing the user story to include context. It becomes something like this 

When _(context)_ , I want to _(motivation)_ , so I can _(outcome)_ .

(for more on this check out Alan Klement’s blog post on Replacing the User Story with the Job Story)

You’ll see that understanding the motivation and context gives a fresh perspective as to what products/services you could include, independent of the app, when and to whom to market them and how to talk about it. You might also find that the Jane’s and the John’s who were different personas are actually trying to “do” the same job.

So what?

We should start thinking of the context users of our product/service are in when they are using a particular feature. Writing the user story in a way to capture it will help with generating alternatives to how to help them accomplish that job and give ideas on how we can measure the impact that feature is having. From idea development, to measuring success the JBTD framework will be the window to a specific user journey. 

How do you write your user stories? Have you used JTBD? Let me know @sinemerdemli on Twitter. 

References

• A great intro to the framework:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84LymEs67Y
• Wonderful resource on all things JTBD
  http://jobstobedone.org/
• Re-writing user stories for JTBD
  https://jtbd.info/replacing-the-user-story-with-the-job-story-af7cdee10c27#.pvkh9ji0a