Understanding Customer's Jobs, Pains, and Gains

As a product manager, you need to become an expert of customers and you can only do this by fully understanding their jobs, pains, and gains. Understanding the customer will help a product manager, not only in writing a better user story but also to influence or even create a buy-in from stakeholders.

Creating a customer profile is pretty similar with user persona. Customer profile has 3 key components:

• job or things that user wants to accomplish, 
• pain or any obstacle that hinder user from accomplishing her job, 
• and gain or outcome or benefit that user want after accomplished her job and this may include emotional gain.

So whenever we're writing requirements in PRD or JIRA ticket, do remember to also write the gains and pains, even before writing the jobs or acceptance criteria. This will help the product team to understand what exactly our customer goals and pain points before creating or thinking the solution.

“Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.”
― Russell Ackoff

References:

• Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want