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How’s jobs to be done much different from people just talking about what should the key features of our app be?

One big benefit of personas is towards bringing the ideal customer into the room when making decisions. Comments from those involved in building the software along the lines ‘well I wouldn’t use that feature’, shift to ‘well what would Anne want?’. Without personas embedded bias of the product team remain unaddressed and undifferentiated.

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Before you can talk about what the key features should be, you should identify what jobs the customer is hiring the product to do. That anchors the discussion; otherwise you'll be talking in a vacuum about whether to build feature X or Y without anchoring it to a job the product needs to do.

The jobs to be done framework too brings the customer into the room. If we're building a photo editor, and I say, "I wouldn't use a feature that makes lips red and removes pimples", then we can talk about the job the photo editor is being hired to do, like "make me look pretty on Instagram". I can put forward my bias like "I don't care about that" and someone can counter that.

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