What Should Go First on Your E-commerce & DTC Roadmap? Use Jobs to Be Done to Decide

Direct answer: Put the feature or fix at the top of your roadmap that removes the biggest obstacle in the customer's actual purchase and repurchase journey. Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) frames the task as identifying the progress a customer seeks when they choose a store. The first roadmap item should address the largest friction in that cycle. For most DTC brands, this means addressing discovery, checkout, or repurchase loops before adding net-new features.

Percision applies JTBD analysis to help teams surface and rank these priorities.

Why DTC roadmaps drift toward the wrong things

E-commerce roadmaps accumulate requests from multiple teams. Each request can appear reasonable on its own. JTBD supplies an external reference point: whether the item advances the job the customer has hired the store to perform. Different customer segments often operate under different jobs, so equal treatment of every segment tends to produce a broad backlog without clear sequencing.

A concrete JTBD walkthrough for E-commerce & DTC

Step 1 — Write the job statements. For each core customer segment, complete the sentence: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]." Percision templates support consistent capture of these statements across teams.

Disclosure: This article reflects Percision's approach to roadmap prioritization.