The Product Experience

Getting real with jobs to be done – Bob Moesta (President, CEO, The ReWired Group)

• Mind the Product

Share episode

We've all heard about the Jobs to Be Done framework - but do you know how to really make the most of it? We went straight to the source - Bob Moesta, who developed the approach alongside Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen - to really get into the approach.

In this episode, we cover:

  •  How to get started with JTBD - and what to do after you've conducted a bunch of interviews.
  • Case studies, including SAAS, candy bars, and selling houses.
  • When not to use the approach
  • And the mistakes that most people make.


Featured Links: Follow Bob on LinkedIn | The Re-Wired Group | Jobs To Be Done website | Buy the'Never Split The Difference'  book by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz | Buy the 'Job Moves' book by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Speaker 1:

If you've heard of Jobs to be Done, you've probably also heard of Bob Mester, who not only is the co-creator of the technique, but has some amazing stories and insights around it. This week, we chat to Bob all about Jobs to be Done, and if you haven't heard of the technique, then this is the perfect place to start.

Speaker 2:

The product experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.

Speaker 1:

Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world and online.

Speaker 2:

Create a free account on the website for a fully personalized experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There's probably one near you, bob, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited to have you. It's well past due. Yeah, thanks, randy. Thanks for having today. We're really excited to have you. It's well past due.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thanks, Randy. Thanks for having me on Excited to be here and talk to the audience, like the people that mind the product Amazing.

Speaker 2:

So your name is very well known in this community, but I'm sure there's a couple people listening who don't know you. Oh, I'm sure there's a lot of people. Well, let's get a quick intro, so tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you first get into product and what are?

Speaker 3:

you doing now, so my mom would tell you that I was into product the day I was born. She basically said I was an engineer out of the womb. I was breaking things by the time I was three or four, fixing things by the time I was six, building things by the time I was eight or ten. And so I started building stuff very, very early in my life. I'm an electrical engineer. I have a mechanical and chemical master's, and then I've studied at Stanford, the design program, and I also studied at Harvard, and so to me, I've been wanting to build my entire life and I continue to build to this day. I've worked on over 3,500 different products and services, ranging from the guidance system for the Patriot Missile to Pokemon, mac and Cheese and just about everything in between.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic and the thing you are probably most known for is jobs to be done, so can you just give us a quick, short history of how this came to be.

Speaker 3:

So the history of that is, though I was a very product-oriented or engineering-oriented kid, I was not a very safe kid.

Speaker 3:

I had three close head brain injuries by the time I was seven years old and I can't read and I can't write, and so part of it is I consider it the greatest gift I ever got, and so part of it is I consider it the greatest gift I ever got.

Speaker 3:

Most people call it dyslexia, and the reality is that because I can't read and write, I could never understand the customer's information that I would get, because I'd get it all from marketing and I'd get it in PowerPoints. It made no sense to me, and so constantly asking people, you know what? Like, how do I actually talk to people who actually want to consume things? Because I was told very young that basically build it and they will come. Well, that's just a lie. It doesn't happen that way, and Jobs to be Done was basically born out of this notion of what causes people to say today's the day, they need something new. If we can actually understand what causes people to change where they're struggling moments in their lives, and that the basic premise that people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life, and that's really what the whole method and kind of philosophy is kind of wrapped around this notion of being customer-centric from their perspective as opposed to through our product.

Speaker 2:

And it's a great approach. It's one, you know, we've all used plenty, but we've also seen people, you know, use it wrong from the perspective of, you know, any framework, any theory is great, but not when it's used as this, you know, to the exclusion of common sense or anything else. So I'm curious.

Speaker 3:

There's a dilemma. There's a dilemma when you try to build something new, like again, I'm not a market researcher, I'm an engineer and I'm trying to build a way to do market research, if you will, and our product research, and I have to make it sound different enough, but I can't make it sound too different. And if I make it sound so simple, so the whole notion of jobs to be done is people have hire your product, right, that's a very simple, simple idea, but when you get down to the nuances of it, it's actually very, very complicated and it's not to say it's hard to do and you have to be able to listen really, really well, which most people can't.

Speaker 2:

So what do most people get wrong about? Jobs to be done.

Speaker 3:

So I think there's two things that they get wrong. One is I call this hypothesis building research. Most people come in with a hypothesis and then try to do the research to prove the hypothesis, and so jobs to be done can be like oh, I think people will hire it for this, and so you talk more about the product than you talk about their lives, and so a lot of times what happens is you get misoriented and you see the customer only through your product. It's almost like the product is the lens by which you define your customers, as opposed to understanding. Your customers exist whether you're there or not, right? And so I think the first thing is that they hypothesize what it is. They sit in a conference room and guess what the jobs to be done are and then try to prove that. I think that's the first one.

Speaker 3:

The second one is that I think the other challenge is this notion of how do we ask, how do we understand what people are saying and what do they mean? And so you end up realizing that most people use this layer of language called pablum, where they just how was your day? Oh, it was good, but it really wasn't good, but you said it was good. So you're lying, and so how do you actually get past the understanding of what people say to what they really mean? And so that's the second really kind of big mistake that people make. And then the third one is that what's what I'll say?

Speaker 3:

My little test is that almost every job has a degree of irrationality to it, and what I mean by that is that, if I look at it from a very objective perspective, it's like nobody would do this and do that at the same time, but the reality is is that it's most of the time the irrational becomes rational with context, and the more you can understand their situation. What they did doesn't seem irrational, it's the fact that we didn't understand their situation, and so that's. The other part is, most people try to think about just the outcomes people want, as opposed to realizing that context and outcome go together and they determine value.

Speaker 1:

You know when you think of Jobs to be Done, when you talk to people about Jobs to be Done you kind of mentioned a few things there around you know helping the sort of research side of things and understand customers, understand their problems, understand what they're trying to hire your product for and also just understand them as individuals. That's right, the key point before you even think about your product. That's right. Do you see it as a like? This is probably a bit of a weird question, but do you see it as a framework, like do you see it as a kind of as a thing that you follow, or is it? Is it more of a philosophy?

Speaker 3:

It's a great question. To be honest, I just got out of five job interviews this morning we did over the last since this morning and, to be honest, I see it as a framework. I see it as a way in which to follow kind of a very specific protocol to actually extract the information and the intent of what consumers mean and what they want to do and what they're struggling with. So, yeah, I do see it as a very, I see it as a method, in that sense, where you can be very rigid. I also see it, though, as a philosophy, in terms of a way to think about where opportunities lie and how to actually innovate, because I think it provides a lens around. This aspect of the struggling moment is the seed for all innovation, and if people are really struggling with something, that's when they're going to change, and so what I've been doing for the last 40 years is studying people who struggle and ultimately reach for something, and so I want to be the next thing they reach for, and so that's how I think about it, as a philosophy in that aspect. And then, at the same time, so it goes from a point of view or a specific perspective on something down to kind of like here's a way in which to gather the data down to here's the math we use to actually check and do the analysis. So it's all three of those things to me the data down to here's the math we use to actually check and do the analysis. So it's all three of those things to me.

Speaker 3:

And I think it started primarily first as a method, because it was my workaround or my hack, because I couldn't read and I couldn't understand the market research reports I was getting, because all I heard was make it easier, make it faster, make it more fun and make it cheaper. That's all I'd get and I'm like, okay, what does any of that mean? Right, if I want to make it easy, it turns out there's 22 dimensions of easy, and I can't do all of them with the money and the time I have. So which, which, which versions of easy do you want me to work on?

Speaker 1:

And so this is where I that's why I ended up kind of creating. This was because I could never get to the specifics I needed to build a better product, and when you see people starting to kind of use jobs to be done, do you find that it starts?

Speaker 3:

with. You know the method or the philosophy. So it usually starts in three let me think three, maybe four areas. One area is it starts in market research. So I have people who basically have looked at different industries or different segmentations. They've done needs, data analysis, they've done all these different things and what they've realized is they've run out of room and they can't see opportunity anymore. They need a new way to look at the market. And so sometimes I have marketing.

Speaker 3:

People come right, the majority of the people that come are come from product, because product, you know, and I've done the job, I do the job, I love this job, but it is a little bit like herding cats, and so the whole aspect of being able to kind of get marketing and engineering and product everybody on the same page is kind of like that's usually where people are doing.

Speaker 3:

So what happens is they're not buying the method, they're buying a language, a way in which to actually have a common set of language across functionally about the customer.

Speaker 3:

That then allows us to align and move faster, and so that's the second reason. The third reason really comes in when the fact is is like we keep building stuff and nobody ends up buying it or it doesn't end up being successful and people don't end up using it, and so it's like help us fix the. You know it's like we're launching things but they're not being, they're not actually good things. Help us make better things, and so that's like the third kind of reason why people get it, but it comes from all across the organization and that's where I've been doing work with engineering for a long time and product but that marketing has got involved. I have a book out on sales. I've been teaching I'm actually flipping the whole lens on sales to say stop thinking about selling your product and think about helping somebody buy your product and by framing it that way, you actually have very different answers than trying to sell them something.

Speaker 2:

Bob, when we talked to Prep for this episode, you said one of the key problems is you know, we can teach people how to do active listening, yes, or we can try to. We can teach them how to do the interviews, but then you get to a certain point. You have the stories and they don't know what to do with the stories. They don't know how to work with marketing, with sales, and you're just going into that. So give us an example, if you don't mind.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so what happens is you end up getting like what happens is people tend to abstract the stuff too high, and so what ends up happening is so, for example, marketing wants features and benefits, right, which are very, very high, and they want us to say the roadmap is full of features, but when you start to really look at it, through jobs lenses, what you want to do is the roadmap should be the struggling moments you're going to be addressing over the next 24 months, and not be solution focused but problem focused, right, and so part of this is teaching the language across functionally to be able to do that, and so part of this is so, for example, just working with a software company that does basically it's a fintech firm, right, and part of it is that they actually have to. They sell to banks, and then they have businesses use their software at the same time, and so they actually have two sets of jobs they have to actually align with. And so you have to actually figure out what are banks struggling with and what are they buying, and then, ultimately, what are the small businesses struggling with and what are they buying? And ultimately, you have to align those two, and the only way you can do that is by having common understanding of the jobs that people are trying to get done. Otherwise, it's literally always seen as a give and take, as opposed to making explicit trade-offs of how do we align those things.

Speaker 3:

My favorite example is if I design like I work for a toy company, right, and if I built the toys that parents wanted, kids would never play with it. And if I built the toys that kids wanted, like the flamethrower I wanted when I was a kid, my parents would never buy it, right. And so you start to realize that at some point in time you've got to be able to build alignment around it, and so it's not only alignment between, let's say, the buyer and the user, but then the alignment between marketing and sales and product and engineering and everybody else. And so that's really the thing. To me that's surprising is, I did this primarily because, as an engineer, I kept asking people what they wanted. I'd build exactly what they said they wanted, and then they'd tell me, no, I didn't really mean that, right. And so that's where this kind of rooted from. But now it turns out that this is being used in kind of all the different facets of a business and, to be honest. It can start in any one of them as well.

Speaker 2:

So you were telling me a while back about how you did this with an example of this with Snickers. Oh, you want to?

Speaker 3:

hear the Snickers story so there was basically back in the 90s I had the opportunity to work on the flagship product of Snickers and at the time it was basically not doing very well. Sales were flat and they were trying to look for basically either a new market or a way in which to add some new features to it, to basically make it better. I knew nothing about candy at the time. I had actually just gotten let go of one place where I was working on the guidance system for the Patriot missile and doing different things for the DoD and my friend asked me to come look at Snickers and to be honest, I went and looked and the first thing I did is I went and saw how it was made and tried to understand kind of all the details of it. And then they took me to kind of the ideal customer profile. They talked about targeting, they talked about all the segments they had, they talked about all these different things and I couldn't make sense of it and ultimately what happened is is I ended up like at the airport I was in Newark where the plant was, and I ended up getting out of flight and it being delayed, and so I'm standing outside of the kiosk and the person in front of me buys a Snickers bar, and so I just sit down next to him watch him eat it and I figured out the fact of like why in the world did he eat that Snickers now and why not something else?

Speaker 3:

And so you start to realize that there's this underlying causation of what happens when people basically eat a Snickers bar. Typically, they missed the previous meal, their stomach is growling and bothering them to the point where they can't focus. They're not performing very well, they need to eat something. They've got a bunch of work to still do and they need something to keep them going through a busy kind of draining moment. And ultimately it's like refuel me as fast as you can. So think of it as like what they do on the F1. How do I just take the food and put it in me?

Speaker 3:

And you start to realize that in 1996, we realized that it didn't compete with candy bars. It competed with an apple and a Red Bull and a whole bunch of other stuff that had nothing to do with candy. And so we realized it was a fuel bar. And by changing that and realizing that you're not you when you're hungry and it's about you getting back to you, ultimately we were able to take it from about $600 million to over $3 billion in sales. And so you start to realize, once you understand the job it's supposed to do, as opposed to trying to make it compatible with all the other features, because, again, if you look at the candy aisle, snickers is actually not really that good of a candy.

Speaker 2:

Right, and was it just the messaging that you changed, or did you tinker with the product itself?

Speaker 3:

Because at some point, think of the first bite of a Snickers. It's almost food-like. When you bite it, it's actually the first thing you get is you go through the chocolate and then you get into the peanuts. You bite it. It's actually the first thing you get is you go through the chocolate and then you get into the peanuts and what you start to realize is the peanuts are really, really important because it makes it food-like. But at the same time we realized it had to actually masticate into a ball.

Speaker 3:

So we took the caramel and made it a higher melting temperature so it would be stickier. So the higher the melting temperature of caramel, it gets sticky. The lower the melting temperature it literally coats your mouth, and so by changing the layering and changing some of the ingredients, we're able to make it more food-like. So when you swallowed it it would sit in your stomach and absorb the acid. And so it was all about changing and making the product do the job and fit into that situation, as opposed to trying to design a product and then find people who actually need it Like to me. I think about it as I'd rather go find a struggling moment and a problem that is worth solving than literally go build something and then find of the 8 billion people in the world who needs it. That's a lot of work.

Speaker 1:

Do you find that people are getting better, though, at focusing on the jobs of the customer?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I feel like we're moving past the ideal customer profile, we're getting past some of the personas. What I would tell you is, if you've got nothing, ideal customer profile is good, a persona is good, but the fact is, once you get to jobs, you run out of room with those two frameworks, and so that's where jobs is more about who, when, where and why. If I have those four aspects, I can then tell you what I need to build. But most of the people, they have a who, but they don't have a when, where and why. And that's what jobs is kind of adding as part of the ingredients to making jobs a little different than everything else, because it's taking into account all of those things to kind of build segments or buckets of what we should actually build for and one of the things you mentioned as well with the, the snickers work that you did, is the way that you think about the the personas or the way that you think about your target audiences.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so do you feel like the jobs framework replaces personas or does it sit alongside it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I see it as sitting alongside of it. Personas are useful in some contexts because think of it as almost like different cultures, different languages that they speak, and so sometimes you actually need the job. The mechanism of why they want something and the context they're in is the same whether I'm 25 or whether I'm 60. And so it depends on what I want to accomplish, and so sometimes I might have to talk to a 25-year-old a little different than a 60-year-old, though the product does the same job, and so you still need to understand those kinds of things as you go through it. And so I think of jobs as like a complement to personas, or personas as a complement to jobs.

Speaker 2:

This episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform.

Speaker 1:

Do you find yourself bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's happening inside your product?

Speaker 2:

With all the tools you need in one simple platform. Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product.

Speaker 1:

And then turn those insights into action so you can nudge your users to adopt valuable behaviors. First, pendo is built around product analytics, enabling you to explore how your users behave and what they're experiencing, so you can make strategic optimizations.

Speaker 2:

Next, Pendo lets you deploy in-app guides that lead users through the actions that matter most.

Speaker 1:

Then Pendo integrates user feedback so you can capture and analyze how people feel and what people want.

Speaker 2:

And a new thing in Pendo session replays a very cool way to experience your users' actual experiences.

Speaker 1:

There's a very good reason over 10,000 companies use it today.

Speaker 2:

Visit pendoio slash podcast to create your free Pendo account today and try it yourself.

Speaker 1:

PS. Want to take your product-led know-how a step further? Check out Pendo and Mind, the Product's lineup of free certification courses Free Everyone loves a freebie led by top product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career.

Speaker 2:

Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast.

Speaker 1:

I'd love to know, like in your experience that you know, your tons of experience you've got working with Jobs to be Done like. What's your sort of favorite story where you've uncovered something really surprising by using this framework?

Speaker 3:

So one is where I built houses right, and one of the there's two or three really big insights that I kind of gathered from that. One of it was so I built houses for basically first-time homebuyers, divorced family with children and then downsizers Think of like your parent and one of the things that I realized is that as you look at people and understand what causes them to downsize, go from the house you grew up in to kind of this new condo that is like a whole new form of living, like there's a whole bunch of things that have to go on. But one of the things I realized that was very insightful was the fact this is like most people at that age, when they're in the space of trying to think about downsizing, they all read the obituaries every day. And so I moved my advertising from the real estate section to the obituaries every day. And so I moved my advertising from the real estate section to the obituaries. I literally got a 38% increase in traffic and I got a 70% reduction in my cost, because the people who advertise in the obituaries are only funeral homes and lawyers Right. So that was one insight, I think. Another insight, another insight I got from the same thing was most people would love the idea of moving and they finally would say, all right, I'm at terms with it, like we got to move. But there's frictional forces that kind of keep people from doing that. And one of them was how do I take 40 years of stuff and fit it into a place that's half the size of my other place? And so you start to realize that one of the things we did is we actually brought in basically designers and movers and put stuff in storage and part of our package of you buying a home from us included basically moving and two years of storage and a place to sort everything when your kids came to visit, and so that helped. That increased sales over 20%. And so again, it's these things where I kept thinking about having to. What would I do to the home? But ultimately what I realized is my home was good enough. I needed to actually change the way I marketed and sold it, and so those were the kinds of things where we ended up doing it.

Speaker 3:

One of the other things is they all said that they didn't want a dining room at all, and because at some point they say it's time for me to give up on the holidays. Somebody else should be doing the holidays, not me. And so they literally go. I don't want to take the dining room table with me, but it turns out if they didn't have a place to put the dining room table, they weren't going to move because it was the emotional bank account of their life and they weren't going to put it to goodwill, they weren't going to put it out on the street. So ultimately, what you found is people going like oh, my niece, sarah, took the dining room table and then we moved.

Speaker 3:

I was like wait what? And then I heard it twice and then I heard it like 10 times. I'm like something's up with that dining room table. And so I took the second bedroom, which was a suite, and made it a little smaller and actually put a, put a small dining room table at like it's almost like a place where it's a shrine but you could never eat there. And an 18% increase in sales. That's amazing, right, and this. So this is actually learning how to do the. They told me they didn't want to do dining room, yet If they didn't have a room, they weren't going to move, and so you had to actually figure out how to play that that. You know, it's what they said versus what they did is what I had to actually focus on, which is if they didn't know where's it going to go, I had to put the dining room table back.

Speaker 2:

In makes sense. So you, these are great examples, but they're you're talking about snickers, you're talking about houses, you're talking about things that, for the lack of a better way of putting it, they're legacy tech or legacy products. I'm curious about all the old school stuff.

Speaker 3:

But let's be clear, I've worked with people like Basecamp and Twitter and Meta and Intercom and Autobooks, and so right now I work with Techstars and I help Neil Salas Griffin out of he's out of Oakland in San Francisco, but basically I've been helping him for 10 years on startups and software. So this is all really really relevant to software. But what's interesting is if I talk about it in software first, most people lose their because they'll think that I'm not that techie right and ultimately they're not going to learn anything. But if I talk about some basic things that they know, which is usually moving and parents and Snickers and they kind of get it, then they go all right now, how does this apply to me? I love where you're going.

Speaker 2:

Randy, yeah, I just want to hear you say something about it, because I know you do this you know you do this, but I want to make sure everyone else knew. You did that too.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is where. So, for example, I've done like again. The one was a FinTech that basically is called AutoBooks, and one of the things we've done there is basically Chris Speck, who is one of my co-founders of the Rewire Group, actually went, ended up kind of having three children and realizing he couldn't travel, and so he ended up becoming head of product over there and he really built out the product as it relates to how do we help small businesses get paid through SMS, and so there's different ways in which they actually bolt into big banking systems so they can actually do what PayPal and Square does, more or less.

Speaker 3:

But at the same time, you have to actually figure out why would the bank really want this? And so it turns out that we actually had to do interviews around this to actually understand. For example, there were three reasons why the bank would want this. One is it can help increase their deposits. Two is they actually have a very aggressive digital banking strategy and this becomes part of it. Or three is that they have a very strategic focus on small to medium businesses to help drive themselves as a bank, and if they have one of those three situations going on, they would entertain even talking to autobucks If they didn't have any one of those three. They would never listen to them. So we changed the whole sales process to fix that and we changed basically the marketing process to actually figure out how to cultivate people into those three jobs and, to be honest, in 12 months they almost 10x'd both revenue and banks at the same time by just focusing on kind of what bank? What progress were banks trying to make, as opposed to trying to convince banks that they needed them Right From a product perspective.

Speaker 3:

We've done things like at Basecamp, where you hear about struggling moments and at some point in time, I worked with Ryan and Jason since almost 2009, 2010. And we had one situation where people kept saying they wanted a calendar in Basecamp and we kept trying to say, well, to build out a calendar was a very big deal and ultimately we said, all right, well, what do they want in the calendar? How do we actually listen to them? And so what we ended up doing is, before we actually had it, we went and talked to people about, kind of, why do they need a calendar in base camp? What are the moments and the situations and the context that wrapped around it that says that, like the calendar I have, doesn't work, and what we ended up finding was is that the bulk of these requests all came from the notion of they're trying to to actually assign a resource, like a conference room, and they don't know what's available, not available, and so ultimately, they couldn't figure out how to schedule.

Speaker 3:

So what happened is is what they were trying to see, what times were available, and in Basecamp, all we did was keep track of what tasks you had and when you were going to do it, and maybe the meetings you had. But we didn't actually have a calendar, and so all we ended up doing was looking at their solution. We were able to come up with a solution that was almost, you know, it took us like three weeks to do it, versus almost, you know, a year to do it, which was this aspect of taking the calendar and reversing the meeting. So if it said, hey, I have these meetings, okay, let's take this minus every day, and you say here's what you have open, and so ultimately, we just created this view so you could see what was available right Now.

Speaker 3:

The crazy part is, everybody said thank you for building a calendar, but the reality is you didn't have to go out and build something like that, because at some point you actually understood the degree of what they meant by calendar and why and where and when and what they were trying to do with the calendar, and so ultimately nobody wanted a second calendar. They just wanted to be able to do these other tasks. But the language they had was all about a calendar and ultimately there was no language to talk about what they really needed. That's what you find most of the time is they don't have the language to actually tell you what they want.

Speaker 2:

Meeting room bookings and calendars are so deceptively hard. I've spent way too many years on that.

Speaker 3:

It's almost as bad as the old school telephone systems Ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

I think we've had a a slightly adjacent um problem with interviewing our customers at bbc maestro, where a lot of them tell us that they would like community features and they're like, yeah, we really think that you need to build a community and and have community features. I think it'd be amazing for the product. And then I always ask them, like so, would you use it? And they're like, no, I wouldn't use it, but other people would definitely really value it. Well, I was just going to say I think you know the, the key to this and the key to doing jobs to be done really well is that conversation and and having that conversation really well. So what are your kind of like top tips for, for really, you know, uncovering the right information in those discussions?

Speaker 3:

so I'll give you the the greatest resource. So I learned actually criminal and intelligence interrogation methods, uh, back in the late, late 80s for this specific purpose. So I literally went and learned from a detective and a CIA, a retired CIA agent. Basically, how do you know people are lying and how do you know when they don't know they're lying, but they you know. There's this notion of I'm not going to answer the question or I'm going to give you the wrong answer. There's a whole bunch of different forms of lying, but the person who wrote the best book on it to date is Christopher Voss. It's called Never Split the Difference and inside it is everything that I learned 30 years ago and what I'll tell you is it's kind of amazing.

Speaker 3:

But the two big things to me, the two big tips I will give you, is, when interviewing customers, I absolutely never want them to tell me yes because, yes, I have no follow on. I want them to say no, that's not it. Oh, then tell me more and they can tell you more. So you always go for the no. So if you're going to ask an open, like a yes, no question, you want them to say no to the question. You don't want them to say yes, because the moment you say, oh so, it was this and this and this, they'll say yes, and then you have no, there's nothing else to do, right?

Speaker 3:

The other thing is to teach people how to be comfortable, and you do that through mirroring, and what happens is you mirror people's pace and language, and so the way we do these interviews is so, for example, the first five minutes we get some background information from them, but what we're really doing is getting the language that they have and trying not to violate or introduce new language till they run out of language. And so part of this is and we mirror their pace, we mirror, kind of, how they speak, so we basically that mirroring aspect makes people very, very comfortable to tell you, you know, to tell you more emotional and social things than just the functional things, and so there's lots of literally good tips in there of how to listen with intent, as opposed to just taking the transcript and finding the words, because, again, two people can say the word easy, but they actually mean very, very different things, right? And so you have to realize that at some point, deciphering all that takes time and energy.

Speaker 2:

Bob, we've talked about all the places where it's great to use this and how to use this. I'm curious. You know there's got to be some places where it's contraindicated, where you know jobs to be done is something that people try to fit in but it's not really the best solution. Can you give us a couple examples of what that might be?

Speaker 3:

I would tell you that this is based on the premise of choice, that people have the ability to choose, and so when there is no choice or there's the fallacy of choice, right.

Speaker 3:

So, for example, like, think about your insurance. You have car insurance, you have health insurance right, and most people buy their car insurance and most people get their health insurance from their employer. And you start to realize that at some point you know more about your car insurance than your health insurance. But yet your health insurance is way more important. Why is that? It's because you actually picked your car insurance. But you chose your health insurance because you just get good, better, best, and because you really don't have a choice in it and you don't have any. There's no real economic understanding of it. The fact is, you just accept it for what it is and move on, and so it doesn't come until you're sick that you actually do it. But so part of this is to realize that when there is no choice, it's very hard to do jobs to be done, because people don't really have motivation to do it. It's just like it's obligated to do it. And so it's like why are you doing this? My boss told me to do it. Why are you doing this Because my employer told me to do this. Why do this? Because the government told me to do this. So anytime you're basically not given real choice. The fact is is you can't use jobs.

Speaker 3:

So it's like insurance is hard work because it's all fear-based. It's not saying it's not needed, but it's a tough one to apply it to. But for the most part I've applied it across the, I'll say, half the stuff in the grocery store, a third of the stuff in Home Depot and hundreds getting close to thousands of software companies. So it's very, very applicable. And even in not-for-profit world right, I've done it in not-for-profit, I've done it in like. So, for example, I've done independent schools. What causes a parent to pull their kid out of public free school and send them somewhere to put more and pay more money, Like I can't actually do jobs on? Why do kids send them kids to the public school? Because it's obligated, Right, and so these are the kind of places where where there is choice is where jobs is actually uses is very, very useful and you told me you're working on a different application right now, something that seems really relevant to people.

Speaker 2:

There's a book you're working on.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I've been. So I've been helping people, I think for a long time, but I've been helping people with their career for probably at least 15, 20 years, and about 10 years ago I realized that people randomly don't change from one company to another. There's a cause to it. It could be the past company, it could be the next company, but there's something going on that basically says today's the day I quit this job and go to that job. And so I basically have outlined and done over a thousand interviews of people of why they switch from one place to another and whether it's a lawyer becoming a judge, an executive starting a not-for-profit, to somebody working at Chipotle and moving to McDonald's, and just understanding what are those things that happen that cause you to do it and seeing the patterns in it.

Speaker 3:

It's called Job Moves and the nine steps to basically help manage your career, and it's really about it comes out in November, but it's really about trying to understand, like, where do you want to go? Or, if you're a manager, how do you understand the progress your employees want to make? Because at some point in time, when they stop making progress is when they will leave, and so if you don't help them get better at something or be better at something in their life. The fact is is the reality is they're not going to stay, and so part of it is being able to understand that part of it and understanding the motivations of what causes people to say, today's the day, I want a new job. And understanding the motivations of what causes people to say today's the day, I want a new job. And then, conversely, what it does is it helps people who want to build teams. How do you build your team? Wrapped around this notion of how do I attract the right people, as opposed to how do I just pay more money.

Speaker 1:

And is that book available now?

Speaker 3:

That book is out in November, and is that book available now? That book is out in November and I have two co-authors out at Michael Horn and Ethan Bernstein. They're both from the Harvard, one's from the Harvard Business School, one's from the Harvard Education School. Again, as a dyslexic, I can do all the research, but I have a hard time writing the book. So I find people that help me collaborate to write the book.

Speaker 1:

Nice.

Speaker 3:

Well, it sounds like a great collaboration and it'll be out november.

Speaker 1:

We're just finishing up we will keep an eye out for it? Um, and I just have one last question are you seeing much kind of application or use of ai to improve the way that people are using jobs to be done?

Speaker 3:

So what's interesting is, I think, ai like if you're trying to use AI to get to the jobs, I think that I find that it's actually misinterpreting easy and so it won't actually know the 22 dimensions of easy, right, so it'll just say easy and then there's no depth behind it. So trying to get to that is really really hard. But I think once you have the interviews and once you have kind of the language that people are using, the fact is you can use that to help with actually see it. But I don't see it as people trying to.

Speaker 3:

When people are trying to shortcut jobs and not do the interviews and again just get it from reviews and things like that, there's so much context overlapping that the words don't mean the same thing. And the way that the GPTs work is they're doing it contextually, but the fact is they're doing it contextually by words and so not by concepts. And so what happens is again that word easy can be used in so many different contexts that they don't understand which one that they're talking about it in. And so what? I would tell you it's evolving, but it's not moving as fast as I think it should be.

Speaker 1:

I sort of have this utopia like vision of product management in a few years time, where we don't we just sit around drinking tea and, you know, walking our dogs, and then we just press a button and go turn all of this data and information into a product all of this data and information into a product.

Speaker 3:

So I think, I think the reality is, is that what ai is going to do is it's going to take away the non-thinking work? Because the thing is, is the harder work to do is the thinking work, and ai cannot do the thinking for us. Ai can do the research, ai can do the compiling, but ai can't come up with the next new theory. And so part of it is to realize, because half of putting together, building a new theory or a new thing, not the fundamental premise of how it's actually wired is it's not wired for anomalies, if you will.

Speaker 1:

Makes sense. Bob, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's been really great hearing all about your kind of views on jobs to be done and getting some of your advice and insights. That's been fantastic.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, lily, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

The Product Experience is the first and the best podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, lily Smith and me, Randy Silver. Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Speaker 2:

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based band PAU. That's P-A-U. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both Product Tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via Product Tank Regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Speaker 1:

If there's not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Forward slash product tank.