Prerequisite 3 - Customer-Centric Framework

A PoR is only effective if it prioritizes what your customers will actually buy and use

To build a useful Plan of Record (PoR), you need more than a list of features and ideas—you need a structured understanding of your customers. This means defining the work through a customer-centric framework that guides both discovery and requirements.

This framework becomes the shared language of your product and engineering teams, and ideally your whole company. It ensures that work items entering the PoR are grounded in actual customer needs—not internal assumptions or top-down wishful thinking.

Your Framework Should Inform Requirements, Not Just ROI

Let’s clarify an important distinction: your customer-centric framework is not the same as the tools your CFO uses to evaluate return on investment (ROI).

ROI analysis helps justify investments. But it doesn’t define what the customer actually needs—or what they’ll pay for and use in their context. When product work is prioritized solely based on market size or hypothetical returns, the team often ends up building features that never get adopted.

This is especially common during major tech shifts—like the rise of generative AI—where teams rush to invest in what’s trendy, rather than what’s truly useful. The result: lots of shiny demos, very little traction.

Use a Framework That Starts with the Customer’s Job

The best way to avoid this trap is to base your prioritization on the jobs your customer is trying to get done in their world, using their language. That’s why I recommend Clay Christensen’s Theory of Jobs to Be Done.

Here’s how Christensen describes it:

“You don’t have to leave your fate to luck. Successful innovations don’t result from understanding your customers’ traits, creating jazzy new bells and whistles for your products, catching hot trends, or emulating your competitors.
To elevate innovation from hit-or-miss to predictable, you have to understand the underlying causal mechanism—the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances. Welcome to the Theory of Jobs to Be Done.”
(Competing Against Luck)

Start With the Job. Prioritize From There.

Customer frameworks like Jobs Theory allow you to capture what your customer truly needs—and that’s the foundation for creating product work that matters.

Later in the PoR process, you can evaluate the impact of that work using market size and ROI frameworks. But those are downstream from the customer’s job to be done—not a substitute for it.

Up Next: In the next post, we’ll examine the fourth and final prerequisite for an effective PoR: Cross-Functional Team Structure.