Software companies are always faced with the question of whether to add one more feature. The answer they arrive at is usually yes. When you’re good at building software, you want to solve every problem in the world with software. At Intercom, we’ve learned to appreciate where our product’s jobs stop. If you follow Jobs-to- be-Done too rigorously, you can end up attempting to solve the entire working day of your cus- tomer through your product. You might start as a time tracker, add invoicing, then payroll, and before you know it you have perfect solution for a very small set of users. You have to learn where your product stops. • • • The most important thing a product manager does is decide where their product stops and some- one else’s product takes over. If your product does too little then it isn’t worth the cost of installation, let alone the actual purchase price. Similarly if a product does too much, it will clash with some other pre-existing software or workflow users are already happy with. It’s a Goldilocks problem – you need to find the product that’s just right. Understanding your product’s workflow Take a time-tracking product as an example here. At an absolute minimum, time tracking is just the sum of a list of numbers. Now, if that was all a software product had to offer, it would be useless. Excel or Google Sheets does that job already. It’s at this point we realize simplicity is overrated. Even the best designed interface can’t help a product that isn’t earning its keep. At a maximum, time tracking can involve project management, budgets, contractors, invoicing, receipt tracking and employee monitoring. Applications incorporating so many surrounding tasks tread on the toes of products already in place; in this case, Xero, Wrike, Basecamp, Teamwork, etc. Products exist to solve problems that occur in a workflow. They have a start and end point within it. To understand where these points should be, you must understand the entire workflow. Let’s break it down for a team ordering lunch every day. 24