I finished reading Jobs to Be Done. i think it’s taken me five months. I got it from the library just before the pandemic started.
It’s a book about coming up with products by starting with examining what exactly people are trying to do and are having trouble with, whether they realize it or not.
It made a lot of sense, but I think I would have gotten as much out of a blog post with these ideas as with an entire book. A lot of what it talks about makes intuitive sense, but the backup for most of their recommended techniques are single anecdotes, so I don’t really know how much weight to put on them.
Still, it is a core concept that I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about explicitly. Whether this is due to its uniqueness or my naïveté, I don’t know. Regardless, I can’t say it’s been a waste of time to think about this way of designing a bit per week over the last several months.