Browsery DVD Au34 tat

Browsery DVD GV1790.N373 N37 2015

Browsery DVD ML394.R663 2015b

Browsery DVD ML422.K37 H473 2016

Browsery DVD M1500.R63 C3 2017

Browsery DVD GV1790.F736 2016

Browsery DVD W125 lie

Browsery DVD ML3508.8 N49 2018

Browsery DVD ML419.C645 C43 2017

Browsery DVD M1366.J39 2018

Janik, Erika, author

Autor: Königsperger, Marianus, 1708-1769
Erschienen 1747
BSB-Signatur 4 Mus.pr. 44470

URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11148805-6
URL: http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11148805_00001.html/

Autor: Kobrich, Johann Anton, 1714-1791 [Komponist]
Erschienen 1753
BSB-Signatur 4 Mus.pr. 44441

URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11148801-5
URL: http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11148801_00001.html/

Autor: Rathgeber, Valentin, 1682-1750
Erschienen 1727
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URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11148806-1
URL: http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11148806_00001.html/

[U.K.] : 20th Century Fox, [2007]

[China] : Beauty Culture Communication, [2014]

[U.K.] : Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, [2019]

[U.S.A.] : National Geographic, [2017]

Saint Augustine, Florida : Gozillaflix, 2015.

[Germany] : International Historic Films Inc., [2007]

[U.K.] : 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, [2018]

[Japan] : J Works Film Initiative, [2001]

[Japan] : Kadokawa Shoten, [2012]

[U.K.] : Universal Home Video, [2019]

[France] : Pathé, [2005]

[Brooklyn, New York] : Do The Right Films Entertainment, [2017]

[U.K.] : BFI, [2020]

[U.S.A.] : Cohen Media Group, [2019]

Leonard, John A., author

Powell, John, 1955- author

Meyrick, Julian, author

Jankélévitch, Vladimir, author

Juslin, Patrik N., author

Gibson, David, 1957- author

Eriksson, Maria, 1969- author

Lutterbie, John Harry, 1948- author

Charles, Jack, 1943- author

You’ve done everything you thought was possible to address your website’s JavaScript problem. You relied on the web platform where you could. You sidestepped Babel and found smaller framework alternatives. You whittled your application code down to its most streamlined form possible. Yet, things are just not fast enough. When websites fail to perform the way we as designers and developers expect them to, we inevitably turn on ourselves:

“What are we failing to do?” “What can we do with the code we have written?” “Which parts of our architecture are failing us?”

These are valid inquiries, as a fair share of performance woes do originate from our own code. Yet, assigning blame solely to ourselves blinds us to the unvarnished truth that a sizable onslaught of our performance problems comes from the outside.

When the third wheel crashes the party

Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it.  JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.

But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces. If a third-party provider adds features to their product, you bear the brunt. If they change their infrastructure, you will feel the effects of it. Those who use your site will become frustrated, and they aren’t going to bother grappling with an intolerable user experience. You can mitigate some of the symptoms of third parties, but you can’t cure the ailment unless you remove the solutions altogether—and that’s not always practical or possible.

In this installment of Responsible JavaScript, we’ll take a slightly less technical approach than in the previous installment. We are going to talk more about the human side of third parties. Then, we’ll go down some of the technical avenues for how you might go about tackling the problem.

Hindered by convenience

When we talk about the sorry state of the web today, some of us are quick to point out the role of developer convenience in contributing to the problem. While I share the view that developer convenience has a tendency to harm the user experience, they’re not the only kind of convenience that can turn a website into a sluggish, janky mess.

Operational conveniences can become precursors to a very thorny sort of technical debt. These conveniences are what we reach for when we can’t solve a pervasive problem on our own. They represent third-party solutions that address problems in the absence of architectural flexibility and/or adequate development resources.

Whenever an inconvenience arises, that is the time to have the discussion around how to tackle it in a way that’s comprehensive. So let’s talk about what it looks like to tackle that sort of scenario from a more human angle.

The problem is pain

The reason third parties come into play in the first place is pain. When a decision maker in an organization has felt enough pain around a certain problem, they’re going to do a very human thing, which is to find the fastest way to make that pain go away.

Markets will always find ways to address these pain points, even if the way they do so isn’t sustainable or even remotely helpful. Web accessibility overlays—third-party scripts that purport to automatically fix accessibility issues—are among the worst offenders. First, you fork over your money for a fix that doesn’t fix anything. Then you pay a wholly different sort of price when that “fix” harms the usability of your website. This is not a screed to discredit the usefulness of the tools some third-party vendors provide, but to illustrate how the adoption of third-party solutions happens, even those that are objectively awful

So when a vendor rolls up and promises to solve the very painful problem we’re having, there’s a good chance someone is going to nibble. If that someone is high enough in the hierarchy, they’ll exert downward pressure on others to buy in—if not circumvent them entirely in the decision-making process. Conversely, adoption of a third-party solution can also occur when those in the trenches are under pressure and lack sufficient resources to create the necessary features themselves.

Whatever the catalyst, it pays to gather your colleagues and collectively form a plan for navigating and mitigating the problems you’re facing.

Create a mitigation plan

Once people in an organization have latched onto a third-party solution, however ill-advised, the difficulty you’ll encounter in forcing a course change will depend on how urgent a need that solution serves. In fact, you shouldn’t try to convince proponents of the solution that their decision was wrong. Such efforts almost always backfire and can make people feel attacked and more resistant to what you’re telling them. Even worse, those efforts could create acrimony where people stop listening to each other completely, and that is a breeding ground for far worse problems to develop.

Grouse and commiserate amongst your peers if you must—as I myself have often done—but put your grievances aside and come up with a mitigation plan to guide your colleagues toward better outcomes. The nooks and crannies of your specific approach will depend on the third parties themselves and the structure of the organization, but the bones of it could look like the following series of questions.

What problem does this solution address?

There’s a reason why a third-party solution was selected, and this question will help you suss out whether the rationale for its adoption is sound. Remember, there are times decisions are made when all the necessary people are not in the room. You might be in a position where you have to react to the aftermath of that decision, but the answer to this question will lead you to a natural follow-up.

How long do we intend to use the solution?

This question will help you identify the solution’s shelf life. Was it introduced as a bandage, with the intent to remove it once the underlying problem has been addressed, such as in the case of an accessibility overlay? Or is the need more long-term, such as the data provided by an A/B testing suite? The other possibility is that the solution can never be effectively removed because it serves a crucial purpose, as in the case of analytics scripts. It’s like throwing a mattress in a swimming pool: it’s easy to throw in, but nigh impossible to drag back out.

In any case, you can’t know if a third-party script is here to stay if you don’t ask. Indeed, if you find out the solution is temporary, you can form a plan to eventually remove it from your site once the underlying problem it addresses has been resolved.

Who’s the point of contact if issues arise?

When a third-party solution is put into place, someone must be the point of contact for when—not if—issues arise.

I’ve seen what happens (far too often) when a third-party script gets out of control. For example, when a tag manager or an A/B testing framework’s JavaScript grows slowly and insidiously because marketers aren’t cleaning out old tags or completed A/B tests. It’s for precisely these reasons that responsibility needs to be attached to a specific person in your organization for third-party solutions currently in use on your site. What that responsibility entails will differ in every situation, but could include:

• periodic monitoring of the third-party script’s footprint;
• maintenance to ensure the third-party script doesn’t grow out of control;
• occasional meetings to discuss the future of that vendor’s relationship with your organization;
• identification of overlaps of functionality between multiple third parties, and if potential redundancies can be removed;
• and ongoing research, especially to identify speedier alternatives that may act as better replacements for slow third-party scripts.

The idea of responsibility in this context should never be an onerous, draconian obligation you yoke your teammates with, but rather an exercise in encouraging mindfulness in your colleagues. Because without mindfulness, a third-party script’s ill effects on your website will be overlooked until it becomes a grumbling ogre in the room that can no longer be ignored. Assigning responsibility for third parties can help to prevent that from happening.

Ensuring responsible usage of third-party solutions

If you can put together a mitigation plan and get everyone on board, the work of ensuring the responsible use of third-party solutions can begin. Luckily for you, the actual technical work will be easier than trying to wrangle people. So if you’ve made it this far, all it will take to get results is time and persistence.

Load only what’s necessary

It may seem obvious, but load only what’s necessary. Judging by the amount of unused first-party JavaScript I see loaded—let alone third-party JavaScript—it’s clearly a problem. It’s like trying to clean your house by stuffing clutter into the closets. Regardless of whether they’re actually needed, it’s not uncommon for third-party scripts to be loaded on every single page, so refer to your point of contact to figure out which pages need which third-party scripts.

As an example, one of my past clients used a popular third-party tool across multiple brand sites to get a list of retailers for a given product. It demonstrated clear value, but that script only needed to be on a site’s product detail page. In reality, it was frequently loaded on every page. Culling this script from pages where it didn’t belong significantly boosted performance for non-product pages, which ostensibly reduced the friction on the conversion path.

Figuring out which pages need which third-party scripts requires you to do some decidedly untechnical work. You’ll actually have to get up from your desk and talk to the person who has been assigned responsibility for the third-party solution you’re grappling with. This is very difficult work for me, but it’s rewarding when good-faith collaboration happens, and good outcomes are realized as a result.

Self-host your third-party scripts

This advice isn’t a secret by any stretch. I even touched on it in the previous installment of this series, but it needs to be shouted from the rooftops at every opportunity: you should self-host as many third-party resources as possible. Whether this is feasible depends on the third-party script in question.

Is it some framework you’re grabbing from Google’s hosted libraries, cdnjs, or other similar provider? Self-host that sucker right now.

Casper found a way to self-host their Optimizely script and significantly reduced their start render time for their trouble. It really drives home the point that a major detriment of third-party resources is the fact that their mere existence on other servers is one of the worst performance bottlenecks we encounter.

If you’re looking to self-host an analytics solution or a similar sort of script, there’s a higher level of difficulty to contend with to self-host it. You may find that some third-party scripts simply can’t be self-hosted, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the trouble to find out. If you find that self-hosting isn’t an option for a third-party script, don’t fret. There are other mitigations you can try.

Mask latency of cross-origin connections

If you can’t self-host your third-party scripts, the next best thing is to preconnect to servers that host them. WebPageTest’s Connection View does a fantastic job of showing you which servers your site gathers resources from, as well as the latency involved in establishing connections to them.

Preconnections are effective because they establish connections to third-party servers before the browser would otherwise discover them in due course. Parsing HTML takes time, and parsers are often blocked by stylesheets and other scripts. Wherever you can’t self-host third-party scripts, preconnections make perfect sense.

Maybe don’t preload third-party scripts

Preloading resources is one of those things that sounds fantastic at first—until you consider its potential to backfire, as Andy Davies points out. If you’re unfamiliar with preloading, it’s similar to preconnecting but goes a step further by instructing the browser to fetch a particular resource far sooner than it ordinarily would.

The drawback of preloading is that while it’s great for ensuring a resource gets loaded as soon as possible, it changes the discovery order of that resource. Whenever we do this, we’re implicitly saying that other resources are less important—including resources crucial to rendering or even core functionality.

It’s probably a safe bet that most of your third-party code is not as crucial to the functionality of your site as your own code. That said, if you must preload a third-party resource, ensure you’re only doing so for third-party scripts that are critical to page rendering.

If you do find yourself in a position where your site’s initial rendering depends on a third-party script, refer to your mitigation plan to see what you can do to eliminate or ameliorate your dependence on it. Depending on a third party for core functionality is never a good position to be in, as you’re relinquishing a lot of control to others who might not have your best interests in mind.

Lazy load non-essential third-party scripts

The best request is no request. If you have a third-party script that doesn’t need to be loaded right away, consider lazy loading it with an Intersection Observer. Here’s what it might look like to lazy load a Facebook Like button when it’s scrolled into the viewport:

let loadedFbScript = false;

const intersectionListener = new IntersectionObserver(entries => {
  entries.forEach(entry => {
    if ((entry.isIntersecting || entry.intersectionRatio) && !loadedFbScript) {
      const scriptEl = document.createElement("script");

      scriptEl.defer = true;
      scriptEl.crossOrigin = "anonymous";
      scriptEl.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0";
      scriptEl.onload = () => {
        loadedFbScript = true;
      };
      
      document.body.append(scriptEl);
    }
  });
});

intersectionListener.observe(document.querySelector(".fb-like"));

In the above snippet, we first set a variable to track whether we’ve loaded the Facebook SDK JavaScript. After that, an IntersectionListener is created that checks whether the observed element is in the viewport, and whether the Facebook SDK has been loaded. If the SDK JavaScript hasn’t been loaded, a reference to it is injected into the DOM, which will kick off a request for it.

You’re not going to be able to lazy load every third-party script. Some of them simply need to do their work at page load time, or otherwise can’t be deferred. Regardless, do the detective work to see if it’s possible to lazy load at least some of your third-party JavaScript.

One of the common concerns I hear from coworkers when I suggest lazy loading third-party scripts is how it can delay whatever interactions the third party provides. That’s a reasonable concern, because when you lazy load anything, a noticeable delay may occur as the resource loads. You can get around this to some extent with resource prefetching. This is different than preloading, which we discussed earlier. Prefetching consumes a comparable amount of data, yes, but prefetched resources are given lower priority and are less likely to contend for bandwidth with critical resources.

Staying on top of the problem

Keeping an eye on your third-party JavaScript requires mindfulness bordering on hypervigilance. When you recognize poor performance for the technical debt that it truly is, you’ll naturally slip into a frame of mind where you’ll recognize and address it as you would any other kind of technical debt.

Staying on top of third parties is refactoring—a sort that requires you to periodically perform tasks such as cleaning up tag managers and A/B tests, consolidating third-party solutions, eliminating any that are no longer needed, and applying the coding techniques discussed above. Moreover, you’ll need to work with your team to address this technical debt on a cyclical basis. This kind of work can’t be automated, so yes, you’ll need to knuckle down and have face-to-face, synchronous conversations with actual people.

If you’re already in the habit of scheduling “cleanup sprints” on some interval, then that is the time and space for you to address performance-related technical debt, regardless of whether it involves third- or first-party code. There’s a time for feature development, but that time should not comprise the whole of your working hours. Development shops that focus only on feature development are destined to be wholly consumed by the technical debt that will inevitably result.

So it will come to pass that in the fourth and final installment of this series we’ll discuss what it means to do the hard work of using JavaScript responsibly in the context of process. Therein, we’ll explore what it takes to unite your organization under the banner of making your website faster and more accessible, and therefore more usable for everyone, everywhere.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about these plays:

• How to create a jobs-driven roadmap
• Using job stories to solve specific design problems
• How to architect the structure of a solution
• Testing assumptions directed by JTBD

A software company I once worked for held what were called “hackweeks” once a quarter. This was a time for developers to work on “whatever they wanted,” as it was framed. Give engineers time to play around with technology, and they’re bound to find the next innovation, or so the theory went.

Hackweek was a big deal for us. Dozens of people organized it, and every developer in the company stopped work to contribute to the effort. It was costly, but we were committed to hackweek. After all, new software offerings come from new development, right?

Here’s how it went: small teams formed to cobble together starter projects representing the use of some new technology. At the end of the week, a panel judged the dozens of concepts that emerged, and the winning “solutions” were rewarded.

But in our case, hackweek was like shooting a shotgun in the wrong direction while blindfolded and hoping to hit the target. The result was inevitably a collection of concepts looking for a problem to solve. It was innovation theater at its best.

To be fair, not all hackathons are bad. Some organizations coordinate hackathons with strategic imperatives or with customer needs. And sure, it’s also good to flex creative muscles and practice collaboration across teams. But given their cost and imprecision, hackathons are often largely ineffective in producing usable concepts.

The problem is not a lack of ideas—companies are usually swimming in them. Like ours, many organizations have a Darwinistic outlook on innovation: generate more and more ideas, and the best will surely rise to the top. Said another way, when looking for a needle in a haystack, the best approach is rarely to add more hay.

The problem is knowing which ideas to pursue. The goal of innovation activities shouldn’t be to collect as many ideas as possible, but instead to get to the right ideas—the ones that matter most to the people you serve.

But more than that, the real challenge is in overcoming the natural forces in organizations that keep good ideas down. Chief among these is uncertainty, a leading deterrent to innovation. New ideas are a gamble for risk-averse managers, even if well-expressed in a high-fidelity prototype.

JTBD provides a way to increase your chances of success by first identifying the right problem to solve. Then JTBD gives you decision-making criteria for moving forward: bet on solutions that address unmet needs to create profitable differentiation.

Focus first on getting the main job done for the individual and fulfilling their needs in relation to the job. From this perspective, hackathons and other idea-generating efforts can be framed by JTBD as both inputs and outputs in terms of how concepts are evaluated.

After understanding the job landscape and defining the value you’re going after, you can continue using JTBD thinking to align teams around the design of your solution. Create a roadmap based on your JTBD landscape to set a common direction. Then use job stories to get everyone on the same page and tie local design efforts to the big picture and to architect the solution structure. JTBD can also guide the experiments you conduct to test your team’s assumptions.

Create a Development Roadmap

At its highest level, a roadmap is a sequence of development events—the relative chronological order in which features and capabilities will be built. Roadmaps serve as a central point of reference for teams to align their efforts. They show the path forward without defining individual tasks.

In the age of Agile and Lean efforts, roadmaps have gotten a bad reputation. People are quick to point out—and rightfully so—that long-term plans inevitably fail: priorities change, unforeseen challenges arise, and timelines slip. The solution, they might argue, is to have no long-term plans and to work on short initiatives with the flexibility to change as needed.

But while providing decision-making power to local development teams makes sense, overall alignment is still needed. An alternative way of viewing roadmaps is to see them not as a definitive project plan, but as a vision of how you’ll create an offering that customers will value. Roadmaps are not unchanging predictions of future activity, but a way to provide transparency for the sequence of steps your team will take to design solutions.

The information in a roadmap helps the entire organization get aligned, not just developers. It’s a strategic communication tool reflecting intention and direction. More importantly, road mapping isn’t just about the artifact: it’s about getting a common understanding of where you’re headed. In this sense, the roadmap occupies the space between the vision and detailed project planning.

JTBD can help create roadmaps that focus on the value that the organization intends to create and deliver for customers. The trick is to get the right problem to solve. Use the insights from your JTBD investigation to formulate roadmaps that are grounded in real customer need.

Mapping the Road Ahead

For a concrete approach to road mapping, I recommend the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched by C. Todd Lombardo, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Conners.^[1] In it, the authors clearly articulate the steps to creating meaningful product roadmaps.

JTBD plays a key role in aligning to customer needs, as the authors write: “We recommend starting with the chunks of value you intend to deliver that will build up over time to accomplish your visions. Often this is a set of high-level customer needs, problems, or jobs to be done.”

Their approach breaks down the four key elements of a good product roadmap:

• Product vision: The vision outlines how your customers will benefit from your offering. How will the job performer benefit from the solution? What will getting the job done look like after the solution is in place?
• Business objectives: A roadmap must be aligned with the organization’s strategy and objectives. The goals of the business are important for measuring progress.
• Timefames: Rather than committing to specific dates, good roadmaps sequence work and set broad timelines for completion.
• Themes: These are the key problems that customers face when completing a job, or clusters of needs that align to the overall solution to be created. JTBD helps frame the themes of your roadmap in particular.

Figure 5.1 shows an example from their book of a basic roadmap overview for a fictional company, The Wombatter Hose, illustrating these main components. Note the disclaimer, as well, indicating that the roadmap is subject to change.

Putting it all together, the process for creating a JTBD-driven roadmap can be broken down into four phases.

Step 1: Define the solution direction.

Define the various elements of your overall product strategy to get agreement on how you’ll be using them. In addition to your solution vision, also define the following together with the team:

• Mission: What are your business intentions? The mission is about what your organization wants to ultimately achieve.
• Values: What are your beliefs and ideals? What is the philosophy of your organization and solution? Values define the philosophy of the team and what it believes.
• Business objectives: What are the specific goals your offerings will accomplish for the organization? Frame these in terms of outcomes, not outputs.

Step 2: Determine customer needs to pursue.

Next, decide on the customer needs to pursue. Here, the authors of Product Roadmaps Relaunched stress the importance of grounding the roadmap in actual customer need. JTBD is central to this step. They write:

“Identifying customer needs is the most important aspect of your roadmapping process. Roadmaps should be about expressing those customer needs. Therefore, most items on your roadmap will derive from a job the customer needs to accomplish or a problem the customer must solve.”

As outlined in Chapter 2, “Core Concepts of JTBD,” needs are hierarchical—from high-level aspirations to main jobs and sub-jobs to micro-jobs. Figure out the top-level jobs to explore and then drill down into the specific themes to target.

The “value themes,” as they are called, might come right from the job map. Locate the areas of highest underserved needs and use those stages as the categories of your roadmap themes. Or you can cluster needs to form themes that don’t necessarily follow the chronology of the job map. The important point is to ground the division of the roadmap in real-world observations of the customer’s job to be done and align the timeline to it.

Step 3: Set a timeline.

Next, create a sequence of value themes that your team will work toward. Timelines can be absolute, relative, or a mix of both. Absolute timelines with specific dates carry the risk of changing, which, in turn, can cause confusion or missed expectations.

Relative timelines give more flexibility but still provide insight into what’s coming and why. There are various terms to use, but the timeline is often broken into three phases for near-term, mid-term, and long-term. Examples include “now, later, future” or “going, next, later” or something similar. Find what works best for you.

Step 4: Align development effort to the roadmap.

Finally, conceptualize specific solutions to design and create. Use job stories to tie the overall project intent to customer needs, outlined in the next section. Then conceptualize solutions around getting the entire job done or the parts of it determined to be most strategically relevant to your business.

After a roadmap is created, you may then need detailed project plans to track progress. A simple Kanban board can serve that purpose in many cases. Or, for more complex software development efforts, tracking software may be needed. In Agile efforts, epic planning and then sprint planning come after you have an overall roadmap.

Tying the overall plan to customer needs gives the design and development teams the feeling that they are building something that matters to customers. Staying focused on customer needs helps avoid building things your customers don’t want. The nature of a job stays the same, even as features may shift. Grounding the roadmap in JTBD ensures that both its longevity and ability to absorb will change.

Learn More About This Play

Lombardo, C. Todd, Bruce McCarthy, Evan Ryan, and Michael Conners.^[3] Product Roadmaps Relaunched. Sebastopol, CA:O’Reilly, 2018.

This book distills a wealth of practical information into a compact guide on roadmapping. The authors go to great lengths to provide numerous examples and stories from real-world cases. They use a realistic, modern approach for creating a roadmap that is driven, in part, by JTBD.

Align Teams to Job Stories

Agile development enables teams and organizations to work in a flexible way. The approach started in software development, but has spread to other domains, including government and the military. The principles of Agile development can apply to just about any field.

A key part of Agile is to break down efforts into individual units of work. User stories are short descriptions of features and functionality written from the perspective of the end user. Teams can focus on only a small part of the whole and make progress in a controlled way.

User stories are commonly written in a three-part format. The first element indicates a user’s role in the system. The second points to a capability that enables the person to get a task done. The last part often describes a benefit or reason for using the capability.

Although specific styles can vary, a typical user story resembles something like the following:

As a <role> I can <capability>, so that <benefit>

Examples of use stories in this format include:

• As a system admin, I can specify files or folders to back up based on file size, date created, and date modified.
• As a user, I can indicate folders not to back up so that my drive isn't filled up with things I don't need to be saved.
• As a user, I want to update the name of a document so that I can categorize it.

For any given system, there may be hundreds of user stories. Some can be quite granular, such as describing a single button and why a user would click it. Stories are then organized into a backlog or repository of functionality to be built. Teams break off logical groups of user stories in sprints or two- to four-week cycles of work.

Job Stories

Although user stories are good for breaking down work, they typically fail to connect the solution being built with user needs. They lack an indication of why someone would behave in a certain way and what they need to get a job done. In fact, often user stories are derived from the capability being built, not from observing actual behavior.

Job stories are an alternative to user stories. They follow the tradition of breaking down efforts into smaller pieces, but through the JTBD lens. The technique was first pioneered by the product development team at Intercom, a leading marketing communications solution. They wanted to avoid leading designers with a preconceived solution, as well as tying development to the company vision and strategy.

Paul Adams, an Intercom product manager, wrote about job stories for the first time, saying: “We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome.”^[4]

As a result, their job story format also has three parts. But instead of focusing on a generic role, like a “user” or an “admin,” job stories begin with a highlight on the situation and context, not the individual:

When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].

Examples of job stories include:

• When an important new customer signs up, I want to be notified so that I can start a conversation with that person.
• When I visit someone’s profile page, I want to see how many posts they have in each topic so that I have an understanding of where they have the most knowledge.
• When I have used the application multiple times, I get nudged to contribute so that I am encouraged to participate.

JTBD author and leader Alan Klement has done the most work refining the job story format.^[5] He believes that adding more information about the circumstances shows causality better. Focusing on the context shifts attention from a persona to the situation. Klement advises that you avoid writing vague situations, but instead be as specific as possible.

For instance, consider these three possible situations for the first element of job stories:

• When I’m hungry…
• When I’m lost…
• When I want to check my email…

Instead, Klement recommends describing the circumstances in rich detail:

• When I’m hungry, running late to get somewhere, not sure when I’m going to eat again, and worried that I’ll soon be tired and irritable from hunger…
• When I’m lost in a city that I’ve never been to, don’t know the local language, and am worried that I’ll be wasting my time in places I don’t want to be in…
• When I want to check my email, but don’t want anyone around me to know I’m checking my email because they’ll think I’m being rude…

Each of these example situations provides more context for designing an appropriate solution.

Working with Job Stories

Job stories are modular, giving designers and developers the flexibility to solve problems in alternative ways. Job stories are grounded in real-world insight, and they are more powerful than user stories in guiding solutions. But creating job stories is more free-form than other JTBD techniques. Still, there are patterns that you can follow. Using the elements from Chapter 2, I suggest the following structure for job stories:

When I [circumstance + job stage/step], I want to [micro-job], so I can [need].

Examples:

• When I am one of the top posters while updating my social media feeds daily, I want it to show on my profile so that I can increase recognition as an expert on the subject.
• When I run out of materials needed while completing an art project, I want to find alternative materials so that I can maximize the number of uses of my current supplies.
• When preparing for my commute and running late, I want to know the current weather along my journey so that I can minimize the chance of arriving wet.

Consider the last example. The first element combines information about the circumstances (running late) of getting the main job done (commute to work) within a stage of the process (prepare for commute).

The second element points to an even smaller step or micro-job (check forecast). It should be formulated without reference to specific technology, but should be specific enough for designers and developers to create a specific capability.

Finally, the last element can be taken right from your list of needs. In this case, the job performer (commuter) wants to avoid showing up to the office wet (minimize the chance of arriving at work wet). You can leverage the elements your JTBD landscape already uncovered in research directly in the formulation of the job story statements.

In researching this book, I’ve come across various alternative approaches to formulating job stories. Andrea Hill, a prominent advocate of JTBD on social media, suggests a slightly different approach. She sees the middle element pointing directly to a feature or solution of some kind, thus explicitly crossing from the problem space into the solution space. Her basic format is as follows:

When I [circumstance], I want to [solution capability], so I can [need].

A job story for the previous example of commuting to work might then look like this:

When I’m preparing to commute to work, I want to have weather forecast notifications pushed to my phone, so I can minimize the chance of arriving wet.

Steph Troeph, research and JTBD instructor in the UK, approaches job stories in yet another way. She thinks of them with this formula:

When I [circumstance], I want to [job], so that [benefit a solution offers].

Regardless of your interpretation, the key is to find a consistent structure and stick with it. The form you end up with needs to be appropriate to your team and your situation.

Jobs Stories in Action

Ultimately, job stories tie a local design and development effort to a broader JTBD framework. Because the format of job stories includes contextual details, they are portable. In other words, a job story should make sense without having to know the larger JTBD landscape or job map. As a result, job stories have a more “plug-and-play” versatility that is often required for Agile designs and development teams.

For instance, Agile planners can manage a backlog of job stories much in the same way that they would manage user stories. If a given sprint gets slowed down or changes direction, stories not addressed can be carried over to the next sprint. Having a smaller, self-contained description of the smaller job to be done has advantages during the design and development phases.

But to be clear: I have found that job stories typically do not replace user stories for development completely. Instead, job stories guide and frame the conceptualization of a solution rather than track implementation. They serve best as a design tool to create or determine concept direction and design. Developers and engineers will likely still need user stories to measure the burndown rate and overall progress.

Your job map provides an overall orientation to your JTBD landscape and allows you to zero in on a specific area for design and development. A roadmap gives you a high-level sequence of development with the rationale for planning activities. Job stories are more specific and guide the local design and development of features and capabilities.

Follow these steps to create job stories based on your JTBD research:

Step 1: Understand job stages and circumstances.

Base the relevant jobs and circumstances on previous interviews and observations. For each area of development in your solution, consider the steps in the main job. Then drill down and list the smaller and smaller steps as micro-jobs, using the rules of formulating JTBD. Also identify the circumstances that apply to that part of the main job in particular.

Depending on the depth of your prior research and how well you and your team understand the job, you may not need to do more research to create and validate job stories. It’s never a bad idea to speak with people again and drill down on specific problems and objectives they have. During additional interviews, ask “how?” until you get more granular in understanding of subgoals and objectives.

Step 2: Formulate job stories.

As a team, write job stories that are specific to your design and development effort. Decide on a consistent format for the job stories and stick to it.

Strive to come up with unique, mutually exclusive stories that target specific jobs and circumstances. Avoid redundancy. For instance, in the previous example, you probably don’t need separate stories for commuting by train versus commuting by car. Develop the job stories that matter the most and focus on a limited set. You may end up with anywhere from three to eight job stories per project or sprint.

Step 3: Solve for the job stories.

Make job stories visible and transparent to the entire team to solve for the job stories. For instance, post a relevant list of job stories in a brainstorming session for everyone to see. Or list job stories at the beginning of a design critique so that the team has context for making comments. Use JTBD to guide design and development decisions.

It’s also possible to then use the job stories to review the appropriateness of your solutions. First, the design team can use the job stories relevant to a project as heuristics. They should constantly ask if their designs are meeting the user’s goals set out in the job stories.

Then you can test solutions with users against the job stories. Show users your solutions (e.g., as a mock-up or prototype) and ask them how well each addresses the job stories. This can be done in an interview-style fashion or with a survey. The job stories ultimately become a measure for success of the designs before anything is built.

Job stories let you take a step back and look at the context of the job while designing a product or service. In this respect, job stories fill an important gap between the observations of customers and solution development, connecting insights into customer needs to individual features and development efforts.

Related Approaches: Needs Statements

Design thinking is a broad framework for creative problem solving. It is rooted in human-centered methods that seek to develop deep empathy for people and then to devise solutions that meet their needs. In design thinking, it is important to define the problem to solve before generating options for solutions.

One technique to encapsulate insights from research is to generate need statements, greatly resembling job stories in form. But these statements differ from “needs,” as defined in Chapter 2, in that need statements in design thinking are not specifically limited to the outcomes of a getting a main job done, and they can be aspirational in nature.

Need statements in design thinking also tend to be much more focused on a persona or an individual rather than the circumstances. For instance, writing for the Norman Nielsen Group, Sarah Gibbons refers to need statements representing a point-of-view for the user of a system:^[6] “A user need statement is an actionable problem statement used to summarize who a particular user is, the user’s need, and why the need is important to that user.”

Like job stories, need statements have three components: a user, a need, and a goal. The user corresponds to a goal-based persona based on research (as outlined in Chapter 4, “Defining Value”). A need is expressed independent of a feature or technology. The goal is the result of meeting the need. Gibbons provides an example:

Alieda, a multitasking, tech-savvy mother of two, needs to quickly and confidently compare options without leaving her comfort zone in order to spend more time doing the things that really matter.

Note that the insight at the end of this statement, “doing the things that really matter,” is very broad and hard to measure. Job stories, on the other hand, favor a more specific context and outcome. For instance, rewriting the above example through the lens of job stories might yield something like the following:

When I’m multitasking and in a rush, I need a familiar way to quickly and confidently compare options so that I can minimize the time spent on finding a solution.

Like need statements in design thinking, job stories also avoid the mention of features or technology. Yet, they are much more specific to a given job and its context. While both a need statement from design thinking and a job story can feed into the creative generation of solutions, job stories will provide more direct guidance without prescribing a solution.

But the definition of a need in design thinking can vary greatly. For instance, IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking approach also includes guidelines for generating statements.^[7] Not surprisingly, there are three parts: a user, a need, and a benefit. Here’s an example from the IBM site:

A developer needs a way to make sense of minimal design so that they can prototype faster.

This example is much more specific than Gibbon’s approach, yet still avoids mentioning a specific solution. There are no aspirational elements, such as “pursuing lifelong dreams,” sometimes found elsewhere in design thinking. IBM’s approach to need statements is closer to the job story approach, but is also light on describing the circumstances of use.

In some sense, the differences between job stories—even with the variations in format—and need statements points to a key distinction between JTBD and design thinking. The former focuses much more on the circumstances than the person’s state of mind or psychology. Where design thinking seeks to gain empathy for the individual as a starting point, JTBD seeks to understand the circumstances of accomplishing an objective before factoring in emotional and personal aspects.

Learn More About This Play

Klement, Alan. “Replacing the User Story with the Job Story.” JTBD.info (2013); “5 Tips for Writing a Job Story,” JTBD.info (2013); “Designing Features Using Job Stories,” Inside Intercom (2015).

Klement has done the most extensive work to develop the job story technique. These three articles outline the basis for creating them. The technique has evolved slightly, but Klement points clearly to how he’s updated his approach. Klement and others have posted widely about their use for development efforts, but start with these resources.

van de Keuken, Maxim. “Using Job Stories and Jobs-to-be-Done in Software Requirements Engineering.” Thesis, Utrecht University, 2017.

This thesis project offers a detailed investigation of how job stories are applied to date. After illustrating the history of job stories, Van de Keuken presents the results of his original research variations in application of job stories as seen in practice. This work contributes greatly to making job stories a more formal part of software requirements engineering.

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