Bob Moesta: Jobs-to-be-Done in the Enterprise

Bob Moesta and Professor Clayton Christensen were the original thinkers behind Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), a framework adopted by companies including Apple, Intercom and Gitlab that allows you to rethink how you design and build profitable, scalable, repeatable products. JTBD is widely applied to product development but is increasingly being applied to sales, marketing, hiring, customer success across the enterprise.

In this session, Bob shows why the Jobs JTBD framework can change your company’s thinking and explain how you can use JTBD in practice in your organization.

He also explains why working with Autobooks on their JTBD inspired business transformation was such a powerful project that will be covered in the conference in the Autobooks Case Study Sessions at BoS USA. You will see how product, engineering, sales and marketing across an organization were transformed using JTBD and demand-side sales thinking.

Slides

Transcript

Bob Moesta

Down from 136 slides to 88. I’m pretty proud of that. We’re gonna have some fun today. Today’s talk is a little bit of a refresh for those who have never heard of, or have heard of jobs be done. But don’t don’t remember all the language. It’s an introduction for those people who have never heard of jobs to be done. And then I’m going to kind of pass some of it to Chris and Justin, and Derek and Kyle for tomorrow. So this is like an intro to some of the stuff they’re going to talk about in terms of implementing this stuff. But I’m gonna give kind of the basics and the fundamentals, and a couple of fun case studies. So I want to talk about jobs to be done across the organization. It’s been applied in product, it’s been applied in sales,  has been applied in, in mostly product, I’d say, right, but there’s some other places like HR, like in finance, like in the cafeteria, and all these different places. And so I want to share with you kind of the breadth of kind of how it’s been applied. Okay, a little bit about me is is I’m an engineer, first of all, my mom would tell you, I was an engineer out of the womb, I was breaking things. By the time I was three, I was fixing things by the time I was five, merely to get out of trouble. But I love to take things apart. And I’ve I’ve worked on and over 3500 different products. And I’ve been I’m one of the Co-architects of the Jobs To Be Done Framework  with Clay Christensen. The other thing you should know is that I’ve had three close head brain injuries. And I cannot read and I cannot write. I had them before I was seven years old. And so I consider that the greatest gift I ever got. Because as the the students this morning talked about being curious. I’m extremely curious, like to the point of, you know, that little kid that asked you 1000 questions, you’re like, Oh, my God go away. That’s me. I do that every day. Just get used to it. I’ve worked on things like Basecamp, and QuickBooks and the guidance system for the Patriot missile and poke them on mac and cheese. And I’ve worked I’ve done seven startups. I’ve done software, I’ve done hardware, I grew up in the hardware business. So I understood kind of all the stuff we’re talking about between hardware and software, I spend most of my time in software right now I ended up I teach at the Kellogg School. And then I run a small design agency where I advise people like auto books, which we’ll talk about tomorrow. So let’s go some foundations of jobs to be done.

Understanding customer struggles to build better products

Here’s the basic premise, the basic premise of jobs we’ve done is that people don’t buy products. They hire them to make progress in their life. Right? And it’s really set up by this whole notion of this river, right, is that people don’t randomly switch  from some other product to your product, or from your product to somebody else’s product. It’s not random. It’s caused. And so part of this is to understand what causes people to say, Today’s the day they need a new payroll software, they need a new, they need a new widget, right? It’s not random. And so it requires two aspects. One is the circumstance, the situation, the context that somebody’s in, that determines if they’re if there’s no contact, there’s no struggling moment. My belief is your customers can’t even see your product, to have to struggle to create the space in the brain. But here’s the other part is they can struggle. But if they have no notion of what progress looks like, they just bitch. They just complain. Right? And so part of this is to understand how do we actually figure out kind of like, in this case, what’s the idea that pulls them to the other side? So I’ve been studying for over 30 years, what causes people to say, Today’s the day I’m not going to do this anymore? I’m gonna do something new. There’s a little twist to it, though. So one of the things is I’ve been dyslexic. I was told that I was either going to be a construction worker or a baggage handler at the airport when I was 18 years old. But I happened to meet four really important people who poured a whole bunch of knowledge into me to make me an innovator. And one of them was Dr. Deming. Does anybody know who Dr Deming is? Who’s Deming ?

Audience Member

He wrote about how to transform the facilities in Japan in 6 weeks.

Bob Moesta

Exactly. So he’s actually the father of the Toyota Production System. He ‘s the father of lean, if you’ve heard of Six Sigma, you’ve heard of TQM. All of that is Dr. Deming. And so one of the things that I learned when I was in Japan was, they can’t so I happened to be an intern for him when I was 18 years old. And we went, he took me to Japan, and I learned a bunch of different methods and tools, but one of the things they talked about was being able to find what they call is technology agnostic requirements from the customer. I’m just gonna repeat that technology agnostic requirements for what does the customer want without telling me what they want? Right? So here’s the thing is what I boiled that down to is this is if you tell me the situation you’re in, and you tell me the outcome you want, how many different ways can I get across that river? How many different ways 235 100,000? Infinite. Right. So if I want to get across it, I can teach them to swim, I can get a boat, I can build a bridge, I can dig a tunnel a whole bunch of different technologies. But if I don’t understand the context of how fat. Well, what’s going on, and why you need to leave the A side and what you’re hoping for on the B side, I can’t determine value. So I don’t know what to build. But the moment that I figure out the circumstance and the progress that I can I call that a job, I then can figure out, right? Oh, that might go away. And the whole key is this, is the struggling moment.

Here’s the thing is the struggling moment is the seed for your customer to say today’s the day I have to do something different. And so ultimately, we want to be able to find where do customers struggle? Why do they struggle? What progress are they trying to make? And how do we figure it out? Right. And the person who helped me kind of solidify all this is Clay Christensen. So I think, Surinder that who who somebody talked this morning about Clay Christensen in the in disruptive innovation, I had the I the luxury of being able to work with Clay for 27 years, I got four hours a quarter. But he said this to me, and it literally parted the waters. He said, “Questions creates spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into”. The reason why it was so powerful to me is this whole aspect of literally being able to say, “What question does a customer ask themselves before the moment they buy my product?”. And that ultimately, if they don’t have a space in their brain, I talk about my product that literally bound and Clay would say, “It bounces off their head and hits right the floor.”. So ultimately, we have to understand what are the questions that they’re asking themselves to actually get your product in? Right? So my I’m from Detroit, my hometown hero, Henry Ford. Right? He’d say, “If I asked people what they wanted, they want faster horses.”. And my, my follow up question would be is, “What would you do with faster horses? What could you do if you had faster horses that you can’t do today? How much is that worth to you to have faster horses?”. Right? So ultimately, most customers don’t know what’s possible. But they do know the outcome they want. And so part of this is being able to extract that outcome very, very importantly, right? The thing that I learned, though, is that every time I go to talk to a customer, they lie to me.

Understanding market demand and product development

They lie often. They don’t lie with malice, though. They just forget part of the story. And they just tell me what I want to hear. And so when I went to actually learn about this, I realized that I had to figure out a different way, besides just asking him, “What do you want?” Because every time I’d ask them what they want, I’d go build it. And guess what they’d say? “Nope, that’s not it. Go back.”. I did it enough to kind of go like, okay, something’s wrong. Right? And Drucker, he said it the best. He said, “What companies think they’re selling, and what customers think they’re buying is not the same.”. By the way, he said that in 1950, it’s still true today. Alright, so here’s the thing. To talk about this, I want to talk about the four key frameworks that help us understand what is the job and how to actually find a job.

Four Key Frameworks to Use Jobs-to-be-Done

So we can actually build better product. Okay, so it’s not imposition, if you will. One is called supply side versus demand side. We’re going to talk about the forces of progress. We’re going to talk about the timeline and then we’re going to talk about the sources of energy.

So engineering school, how many people are engineers in the room? My peeps, here’s the thing. I believe that they told us the greatest single lie that has driven me crazy for my entire life. And it is “Build it and they will come”. It is a lie. I’m here on this stage to tell you today, if somebody ever tells you build it, and they will come that it’s a lie, right? Because what happens is, is that it doesn’t take into account demand. Right? So there’s two sides of the world, there’s the supply side of the world, right? Which is basically where we have companies and we have products, and we have systems. And as engineers, we build shit. Right? On this other side is the demand side, this is where people are out there struggling with something and say, Today’s a day, I need to do something, and they’re pulling stuff from the supply side to the demand side. But the reality is, there’s this big wall, that’s 10 feet thick, at 100 feet high, that separating the supply side from the demand side. And that ultimately, to be honest, I grew up on the supply side, I have a product. Basically, I have a strategy, I have suppliers, I basically build something that I basically say that product will come in, do I actually figure out sales and marketing, so features and benefits. And then I also figure out the experiences and answers. And then what I do is I drill a little hole in that wall, and I look through it. And I say “Who wants this product?”. So now I have to go and find of the 8 billion people in this world, which 10 need my product. So I have to go literally scour everything, right? So I climb up that wall. And I instead of drilling through it, I literally go to the top and I start to look down on the market. And when I look down in the market, what do I see, I see markets and segments and personas and all these aggregations to it, right? But ultimately, it’s a very different view when you hop over that wall and go to the bottom level, right? And so if you flip over that wall and you start to look at this, you start to realize that one is people don’t randomly do anything. And that it’s some point in time for people to switch products. One is to have to be doing something already. Here’s the thing is most people will say doing nothing is still a competitor to doing something, right? And that ultimately that struggling moment is caused because of the context in their life has changed. And when it changes enough, they kind of go like, “Alright, I need something else.”. And then ultimately, the fact is, is that they they seek new desired outcomes. And they go like, “Alright, I need this.”. And then they look for candidates, but nothing does it exactly the way they want it. And they have to make trade offs. And they have hired fire criteria. Right. And then what they do is they climb up that wall and look over and they see the brands and products. They don’t know how half this stuff works. My favorite is asked my kids how does a car stop? They have no idea drives me crazy, right? But the reality is, is that what we have to do is be able to understand both sides of this market. Right? So I worked with a mattress firm. Anybody heard of Casper? Right? So they were actually producing a bunch of products. They were private label manufacturer of mattresses. But one of the things you do is you start to ask the question, what causes people to say “Today’s the day I needed need a new mattress?”. How many people bought a mattress in the last year? How hard was it to buy a new mattress? What?

Audience Member Pretty easy. 

Bob Moesta How’d you do it? Where’d you get it from? 

Audience Member Amazon.

Bob Moesta Amazon. What did you buy?

Audience Member I don’t know, king size because the queen is too small. 

Bob Moesta The queen was too small. And did you have a king sized frame?

Audience Member No. I bought a frame too.

Bob Moesta He bought a frame too. And did you move into a new house? 

Audience Member Yeah.

Bob Moesta Did you actually have an empty roof that you needed a bed for? And so you took your old bed, put it in that?

Audience Member We have a lot more space

Bob Moesta Than you had before? Yeah. And so part of this is to realize that it’s the causation to say what caused them to do it. So part of it is his situation of moving. Right. But what is the struggling moment that people have that say today’s the day I need a new mattress? You can still sleep on it. So what do you do? You buy a topper? You buy new sheets, we’re gonna buy these things because ultimately you’re struggling to sleep. But the man how much was your mattress can ask?

Audience Member I honestly don’t know.

Bob Moesta

Don’t even know how price sensitive is that when he doesn’t even know what it cost, right? But here’s the thing is that ultimately, most people have to go into a store at least when when they started it was a store it was called like the mattress firm. Has anybody been into a mattress firm? Holy crap, how intimidating is that? You walk in, there’s 50 mattresses, there’s two people, you and the salesperson and you don’t know what to get and they give you two minutes or 30 seconds on each mattress and then you got to pick and you literally have no idea what you’re picking. And so you say like I’m out or you finally buy something and it’s like oh, that didn’t work. But as we started to go through this, one of the things you started to realize is that it was just too complicated. So ultimately, they didn’t build the best mattress. What did Casper do? Anybody bought a Casper mattress. They made it easy to buy. They literally made a good, better, best, three way three sizes, or no four sizes. twin, full, queen, king. And then they had a good, better best. And they basically said, these are the things, here’s the features, here’s what it is. But what’s the biggest thing they did? They vacuumed it and they put it in a box and they shipped it to your house, right? Now at the time. Did we need another Mattress Company? Do you know how big Casper is now? They’re a billion dollars. And when they started, we didn’t need another mattress firm. And what did they actually do? They focused on the struggling moment that the customer had how many people want a mattress but actually don’t know how to buy it. That’s the problem. That’s what they went after they didn’t go after building the best mattress to be honest, their mattresses aren’t even that good. But they’re better than the old one. This is the key, being able to understand what are the struggling moments around it, we keep the lie we were told “Build and they will come.”. And the corollary to that is make it better and they’ll buy more. Both are false. Both are false. And so part of this is to realize that we need to actually understand the demand side and understand the requirements that then help us with the supply side. Another company that’s really good at this is QuickBooks. Right? QuickBooks found actually QuickBooks owned by it was Intuit. And they found people using in Quicken to run their small business. And they’re like, why would somebody use a personal finance software to run their business? Any ideas? They hated debit credit. But it was just easy enough. And the last thing you want to do is hire somebody to run their books because they if they’re going to hire somebody, they want to hire another Baker, they want to add another painter or another person to cut the grass, whatever it is, but they don’t want to hire someone to do the accounting. And so you start to realize that if they bet built the best accounting package in the world, turns out nobody would buy it. Because most small business people don’t want to be accountants, they want to be small business people. Right? And so you start to realize all it had to be was easy enough that I could do it. And ultimately, their entire product line and their whole product roadmap was based on struggling moments.What’s the struggling moment I’m going to solve, what’s the next struggling moment I’m going to solve, what’s the next struggle I’m goin to solve. Nothing about technology. And so part of this is that they’re using the market to decide what to do next. And they’re trying to understand it through the frame of jobs to be done. Right? Again, struggling moment, if you take nothing away from this talk, it should be focused on the struggling moments, find them in your customers lives because those are the triggers that cause them to say, “Today’s a day I got to do something different.”. And hopefully they pick you. Right? But this isn’t new. Right? Ted Levitt said this in 1960, “People don’t want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole.” When I was in Japan, I learned a method called the Five Why’s,  right. Turns out five why’s Why do I need to drill I want a hole? Why do I have a hole I want to plug? Why do I want to plug I want a lamp? Why do I want a lamp? Well, I want to read better. You know what I’m gonna go work on the Kindle. And so part of this is to realize that we need to get enough distance from our product and understand how it fits into people’s lives. And that’s how we build better product. Right? As engineers, we’re afraid of people. I’m afraid of people. I’m terrified to be on the stage. But Clay convinced me that if I don’t come on the stage, nobody will learn what I’ve learned. So I have to be up here. But the reality is like we need to basically understand and interact with people because people are what buy, companies don’t buy, right? Organizations don’t buy, people buy, and people have context and they have outcomes. And the more we can understand what that is, the better we can build our products, alright? this framework you’re gonna hear tomorrow is that right guys? You can hear some of that tomorrow or no? Yep, so you’re gonna hear this also from audiobooks, but there’s a key framework called the forces.

Forces of Progress

Think about it as like so I built homes, right? I built homes in Detroit about 1000 homes. I had three target markets downsize basically first time homebuyers. People moving from apartments to basically the first home, divorced family with kids. And then downsize. There’s thinking of your parents. All right. And if your parents are going to move from the old way the house you grew up in to the new house, the new condo, that’s my 16 154 square foot, two bedroom, two and a half bath, first floor laundry. Amazing condo, right. And I thought it was going to be pretty easy being Head of Sales and Marketing, but it was actually really hard. So here’s the thing, there’s four forces that cause your parents to move. The first one is what we call the push of the situation. What would go on in your parents lives to say, “Today’s the day we’re going to sell the house you grew up in.”? What would cause them to literally start to look for a new house? The stairs? Mom blew out her knees skiing, and now she can’t go up and down the stairs. What are we supposed to do? What else? Yeah, all the kids moved out. I’ve got I’ve got four bedrooms that are sitting there empty. Why do I have all this space? What else? The kids live so far away and the grandkids are there. I don’t want to be there. Right has nothing to do with my new house. We have to understand when when there’s no push, there is no change. So we need to understand what’s pushing people to say, “Today’s the day.” and it’s not one thing. It’s multiple things. The second thing is that then they’ve walked through my condo, your parents walked through my condo, two bedroom, two and a half bath. First floor laundry, gourmet kitchen, amazing attached condo, by the way. So the half to see the idea, because this is where your parents will just complain about the house. Because they really don’t really want to move. But they’ll just complain and complain ugly until they see the condo. And then all of a sudden, it creates a poll. What would be the things your parents would love about the condo? No maintenance, I don’t have to cut the grass. I don’t have to go out. What else? No stairs, single floor, basically the new kitchen. Boy, I don’t have to redo the whole house. By the way, the old house needs a roof. Right. So all of a sudden these things start to pile up. And so I call this the fuel. This is the fuel that causes your parents wanting to move. But that’s not the whole story. Because there’s these other forces. There’s two other forces. One force is the anxiety of the new. Your parents are basically worried about “Who’s my neighbors?”, “Where’s the grocery store? How are we going to sell our house? Oh, my God, like, what are we going to do with all our stuff? Right. And the habit of the president is that is the thing that basically is the thing they love about the old house, I know the neighbors, right where the kids gonna stay when they come to visit. And ultimately, what we have to do is get them to reconcile that the top two forces, the fuel has to be greater than the friction. So one of the things that I like, and to be honest, what I was taught in business school, was just add more features. If I add more features, guess what they’ll do. They’ll buy. To buy granite, I’m gonna give you free granite, you’re gonna buy? Stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, I keep adding all these things to try to attract them. It didn’t work. Right? So here’s the thing. What I end up doing is not working on the features, but actually reducing the anxiety. So I included moving and two years of storage. Because your parents have 2000 or 3000 square feet of house, and my condo is only 1654 square feet, and they can’t make the decision of what to get rid of without you. So the moment that I actually said ,”You know what? Moving and start oh, by the way, storage is across the street, I build a storage facility across the street from the development, 22% increase in sales.”. I had nothing to do with building my product to make my house better. Have to be able to understand how do we actually reduce friction. So sometimes it’s about the friction and not about the fuel. Right? So as you see what causes people to do this, you start to see the clues. And again, understanding the causes of what happens, right. The key is nothing’s random. I, in my house, the word “random” is a four letter word. I know I can’t spell it. So it doesn’t matter. But it’s, but the reality is that all you do is when something is random as you wait. You try to find probability. It’s all based on the past and what happened to somebody else and doesn’t happen to somebody new like you can’t predict. But if I understand the forces, I understand what causes people to do this. I can start to say what happened to them is going to happen to somebody else. For every one person who’s made it there’s 10 behind them who didn’t make it happen, right? And so it’s all caused. And so the last frame or the second, the last framework is called the timeline.

Understanding customer needs and aligning products to meet them

And that when people make progress, they follow a very specific timeline. And what I mean by this is that there’s phases of thinking. First thought: First thought is exactly what Clay said, “Questions creates spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into.”, right? Their first thought is like, “Oh, my God, this is this is horrible.”. “Oh, my gosh, we have to it’s time for us to move”, then they move. This is where they become problem aware solution unaware. That’s passive looking. Passive looking is where now they go through life with this hole, that now of sudden you can see, think of it this way. When you lease a car, you don’t notice anybody’s car until your lease is almost up and you go like, “Oh my God, that’s a nice car. That’s a nice car.”. That’s what passive looking looks like. So how do people passively look for your product. And then once they become problem aware, and they become solution, a little aware, they have to go to active looking where they’re going to look at multiple things. I hate active looking, because this is where they’re like kids in a candy store, oh, my God, it has to have this, it could have this, I want that. They want everything, but they haven’t put anything together. This is where they’re gonna put an RFP that has everything. And then they’re gonna come back and go like, Oh, it’s too expensive. Right? The key is to get from active looking to deciding and deciding is the most important part is that your customers have to make trade offs. What are the trade offs they have to make in order to stop doing what they used to do and hire you? And so ultimately, you need to help them frame the trade offs, because 60% of B2B proposals go unanswered with no decision, 60% of them. Because we don’t help the customer make trade offs. Here’s the thing, when you go to make a decision, here’s the crazy part, it’s so irrational. You give somebody three things. What’s the first thing somebody does when you give them three things, you say? You’ve got to decide what’s the first thing they do? They eliminate one. And so they have this one over here that they eliminated. So A they eliminated they got B and C left. And so the logical thing to do is say I got B and C left. I’m going to compare A, B and C. And I’m going to decide. But that’s not what people do. They actually compare B to A and C to A to decide which one is closest to A. And so they eliminate the two and so they end up with the one that they want. And they’ll say they’re picking it. But when you actually slow them down to say, How did you pick that one? They didn’t pick it, they eliminated to it. And that’s why you need to actually have trade offs. Now, why is this important as an engineer, when I’m building product, I can never, I never have enough time, I never have enough money. I’ve never have enough performance, I can’t do it all. So I make trade offs all the time in the product every single day. But I need to make sure my trade offs match the customer’s trade offs. Because if they don’t, that’s where I have a great product that gets killed because I made the wrong trade offs that don’t reflect their values. And so understanding the timeline is more important. Derek and Kyle are going to talk about this tomorrow when we talk about how they think about the sales funnel. They’ve reframed the sales funnel to be this. Where are they in their buying timeline? Not where are they at our sales funnel. Sales is actually a supply side concept. How should I sell? The whole aspect is is how do they want to buy? What causes them to buy? Very different question than selling. And so we think about this as a series of systems, right? As you think about the system’s first thought, making the space in the brain, passive looking, learning, it’s about being becoming more and more problem aware. Is this something I need to do something with? And what are the potential solutions? Active looking, seeing possibilities, right? Deciding making trade offs? First use: first use is so critical that most people try to come up with the KPI that somebody has when they buy my product. Right? But what is the very first sign that somebody knows that your product is helping them in the first minute, in the first hour, in the first day? What is the thing that gives them confidence that they made the right decision? Half the time we’re thinking about the final outcome, but there’s a series of outcomes we have to go through to get to that final outcome. How do we help understand what that is? And then ultimately, I’m going uses about creating the new habit. Because the thing is, is if if I don’t build it into an ongoing habit, it’s gonna be a struggling moment. And guess what? We go all the way back to the beginning to basically creating a space to look for something new. Here’s the other thing, is this is not, it’s presented in a linear way but I needed a new payroll system. Right? I had a few few errors. I literally looked at possibilities. I got to deciding I got a couple proposals and then guess what happened? The pandemic happened. So what happened? Where did I go? I went back to passive looking. I didn’t go away. It’s just now a lower priority on my priority list. And it came, it came back. But I had to adjust for it. This is where we don’t, has anybody heard of ghosting? We think ghosting is like, we’re not that important to people. They’re not ghosting, you it’s like half the time you give a great demo and you raise 15 things that they didn’t think about, they move back to active looking and you don’t even know it. They’re like they won’t pick up the phone. They won’t pick up the phone because they got to answer a bunch of stuff on their end. Ask them. That’s the crazy stuff. Last thing, when we talk about a job, people tend to think of what we call the functional things, the steps. Here’s what it’s supposed to do, right. But there’s other aspects of the job that’s just not more than functional, it’s the social aspects and the functional and the emotional aspects.

Social, Emotional and Functional Motivational Energy

Again, I think I’ve told this already, but it’s like somebody sent me went to buy a payroll system. And they said, “Every time I go to sell a payroll system, everybody is so functional about it’s got to do this and this and this and features and, and they’ll say there’s no emotion in buying a payroll system.”. I’m like, “Really?”, I said, alright, because what they’re doing is they’re talking to people who already have a payroll system, and it works fine. But let me talk to a few people who has payroll system doesn’t work. Is that emotional? It’s very emotional. So you start to realize that it’s a very different game. And so understanding how people make the trade offs between functional, emotional, and social are really, really important. The cool part about what out of us is going to talk about tomorrow is that they actually have two sets of jobs. They have a set of jobs for the small businesses that they serve. And they have a set of jobs for the banks that have to sell to, and they’re completely different. But they have to alot almost like thread the needle. But once you figure out how to build the alignment, you grow like crazy. So let me give you a couple examples. I’m gonna go past this one, we’ll come back to this one. Some case studies. Product, go to market, human resources. My favorite is somebody good friend of mine now is Andrew Glazer basically learned about jobs wanted to apply it was in product but was a little bit afraid to do it. So he went back and said, “You know what, I want to apply this the cafeteria breakfast.”. And he went in, he literally interviewed people to say, “Why don’t you eat breakfast here? Where did you eat breakfast? What did you want for breakfast.” And he found out the number one criteria for breakfast is 90 seconds or less. If they can grab it in 90 seconds or less, they’d grab it. And what happens is that the cafeteria had everything be custom. And it took like 10 to 12 minutes to cook it out. And so most people wouldn’t show up at all. So they started making protein shakes and everything you could fit in here and it’s like five bucks for this for this weight of this thing, right? Turns out he ended up almost for axing the use of the cafeteria for breakfast. He said, Okay, now we can apply it somewhere else. So I’m going to talk about Intercom because Intercom’s a really good simple example for it.

Building a product that solves customer problems

And then what I want to do, so wait, the clock is not running. Is that okay? Thank you, because I will literally go until that clock says zero and it’s not even moving. How many people know intercom? What is intercom? It’s one Oh, support check. Okay, that’s one what else? I didn’t I couldn’t I’m sorry. I just couldn’t hear. Anything else. How many people own intercom? What do you use it for? US a bunch of different things. CRM communication with current customers. What else? Website has got chat in it. It’s got it’s got it’s got a whole bunch of different things, right. What’s interesting is does, does and Owen Owen was the other co-founder. In 2010, they had sold their second startup and one of the things they realized that was just so hard at the time was like when they went to sell how to bundle all that data backup to basically put it into one place because they had like, at some point they had, you know, an email server they had chat they had they had all these different but nothing put it together. And so this crazy idea of how Do we actually just put all this stuff in one place? We’re gonna call intercom does everything perfect? But it’s kind of like the iPhone is like, it’s gonna do these three or four things really, really well. But it’s but it’s all kind of put together. 15 minutes left. Wow. All right, I gotta pick it up. Yep. This is what the website looked at, when they when they, when they launched it, the whole thing is, is “Get all your data in one place.”. And the first year they launched 2012. So it took them from 2010 to 2012 to make to basically build the product. The first year, they got about 2,000,000 and a half million. And then they got, I don’t know, they get to three and a half. And then the year two, they got about a million and a half. And they started to plateau out. So they’re the 5 million in sales. And they called. And so I sat down with Designo and said, Let’s just talk to 10 people, 12 people who bought intercom figure out why they did it. Not a lot. You don’t need a lot, but you need in depth. So these are our 90 minute conversations of like what was going on in your business that says today’s the day you need intercom. And it turns out there are four very, very different reasons why people did it. One was helped me a quote, people are coming to the website. But they’re not they’re not back converting. Help me acquire.

Jobs-to-be-done in Sales and Marketing

Some people said, no, no, no, I don’t have a acquiring problem. It’s like people, people are there. People are coming and they’re buying but like, I got to get them engaged. I can’t bored them. They’re forgetting where to go. Now the group is like not I bought it to actually learn about where people are struggling so I figure out what the next feature set I need. And there’s a third or fourth group that said, oh, yeah, no, we use it for support. Like we they were literally confused because they figured they understood the first one. And the second one, the third one was a stretch. But the fourth one was like, what does this have to do with support? And it turns out that as we started to listen to it, we heard more and more stories, they all kind of fell into one of those four patterns. And so the first thing they did, so they did this in 2013 in the first quarter, and by the by, is that right? No 2014. And one of the things that they end up doing is by 2014, they end up basically treating as packages. Right? The crazy part is that they started to realize that people were not even solution aware. So all they started to do is is advertise those struggling moments that people had of when they fit. And they are ticketed so well, the people go like, Oh my gosh, I need this. Right. And so they started with this packages, they quickly turned it into product. The craziest part is how they built product is they didn’t build anything more. They literally said if I’m in this situation, and people are trying to acquire what is the work that I need. And what would happen is they go off. And and they literally just stripped out all the other features that weren’t needed to do that job. And so they didn’t actually build product, they stripped back to pry almost like sculpted back to four products. Right? Here’s the crazy part, they went from 5 million to 75 million in 18 months. Part of it was the positioning, part of it was the fact that it was focused on a very specific outcome that people needed. It was also focused on the context. And then they started to integrate. And what they did is they constantly focused on the struggling moments that people had in using their product or other things around their product, and just kept adding. Right. They raised money and they became, they not only spent it on tech, but they also spent it on becoming experts in the struggling moments that their their customers had. And ultimately, 2019, they moved, they had their second round of funding and they changed their positioning a little and they started to plateau again. So 2019, they basically went back to the original positioning, started to grow again. And within six years, they got to about a billion to five and in valuation. Part of it is and that to be honest, when I went to work with them, they gave me a contract this thick, they had the right to take my first child, which I wish they would have taken him. But the reality is, is at some point in time, they ended up writing a book about it, they end up talking about it, they will tell you that that jobs is at the foundation of how they’ve been able to build their their platform, if you will. Right. And so part of this is to realize that once you understand the jobs it makes it easier to not only build product, but also on positioning and and marketing. I got 10 minutes, 11 minutes. This is the next place I want to talk about where it is done because I think it’s it’s just it’s wide open. I’ve been asking CEOs for the last 15 years, founders, “What is the biggest thing you struggle with top three things?”. And what happens is almost all of them say talent, retaining them, recruiting them figuring it out, how do we actually make this work?

Finding progress through employee struggles

Alright, so I just took jobs to be done, as it looks like what causes people to buy your product to say what causes employees, to buy your company, to literally decide to work for your company, and what causes people to leave your company, but not in the form you guys do where you say, oh, let’s do a post mortem figure out why somebody left. 9 times out of 10 people, this is so funny. People say, I got more money. And my data would tell you that that less than 50% got more money that say they got more money, it’s just the quickest way to shut you up. Right? So part of this is I want to share with you kind of what I’ve learned on this one. So Michael Horn wrote a book called Choosing College with him and Ethan Bernstein, who is at the Harvard Business School, who was Clay’s first PhD student, came to me and said, Hey, let’s apply this to careers. Right? And so again, if we think about it, as employees don’t, they don’t, they don’t just go to companies, they hire companies to basically make progress in their life. Very simple. And so what we did is I went off and interviewed almost 1000 people. To be honest, I’ve been coaching people for a long time. I’ve been doing this for a long, long time. And I realized, like, Okay, how do we formalize this, but we talked to judges, we talked to people who worked at Chipotle to go to McDonald’s, like, anybody who switched a job. I was literally like, Why in the world did you say “Today’s the day I’m going to leave this job and go to a new job?” Right? And out of it, the funniest part is almost everybody would say, “Tell me about your last job that you got.”, “Oh, I got so lucky.”. Everybody assigned it to luck, having to be the right place having to have a meeting with this person, I wasn’t really looking for a job, and it landed in my lap, like all this crap, right? But when you actually unpack it all, and you get to it, it’s actually very, very reasonable, right? And so we literally went in to try to find the forces of what causes people to do that. And here we go. This is one you’re gonna want to take a picture of, because this is this is like, if you have if you’re hiring, or you’re looking, or you’re you’re trying to understand why you’re dissatisfied at work, this next slide, is it. Ready? So here’s the thing is, before I do it, how many people have switched jobs in the last two years? Okay, perfect. I want you to think back to the moment that you quit. Or the moment that you move to the next company, right? And I want you to tell me, I want you to read this list. And I want you to just hold up on your hands, how many of these things were a factor in helping you decide that you should leave that old company to go to this new company? Ready? How many? Just raise your hand. 4, 5, 5. Which ones? 10, 12. Here’s the thing. It’s not random somebody leaves your company. It’s not random somebody comes to your company. If you actually know the patterns, you can start to recruit in the right way. Right? How many? How many do you have in the last two jobs which have not put on your hands? How many 7, 7, 9, 3, 4, 3? Here’s the thing. If there’s no push, they don’t even look. So the reason why you’re taking a picture of this is when you sit down for a review with with somebody you’re working with. You need to ask him, is there anything on this list? That is actually true for you right now? Because if it is they’re looking, what I will tell you is what I asked my kids, I have 28 to 24. I have four kids. And if I asked them and they name four things on that list, I say, “How was your day?” If they name any four things on that list, I know they’re looking for a new job. That’s how powerful that is. So same thing on the other side. What are you looking for? Here’s the crazy part. Almost everybody says it’s more money. You’re shaking your head. No, it’s not. This is the thing is is when you unpack it, more money means respect. More money means I have heart larger responsibilities more, more money never came out as a reason to why people needed to change it was because I have more responsibility. It’s because I don’t I don’t have the respect, I need money. It was a surrogate for something else. So as you looked at the new job, how many of these things were part of you looking for that new thing? Right. So, here’s the crazy part, though I’ve got, I think it’s 13 or 14 pushes, and 12 polls, there’s all these possible combinations and stuff, right? But when you literally listen to people’s stories, and you code them to say, what was part of their story, it turns out, there’s only four patterns. These are the four reasons why people leave and find a new job. Right? So, I can’t read them. So, I know what they are. But I know job two is a good one, because so I worked with a work with a health care organization up in Bozeman, Montana. And they were finding it the hardest they could ever do to find doctors to come up to Bozeman, Montana. And you’d say like, how is that possible is Bozeman, Montana, right. But it turns out is very hard to find people to get up there because at some point, they didn’t pay as well. And they only gave them four days of work a week as opposed, so they can have three days off. So we went off and interviewed, the last five doctors that came to Bozeman health. Turns out, there’s a pattern. They were working 80-90 hours a week, they were on the verge of losing their families, they were in a very busy hospital in LA or Dallas, or Atlanta, or Chicago or New York. And the fact is, is at some point, they wanted to reset their entire life. And so we built a campaign that just went after people who were in those situations. And to be honest, we now have a running list of people that are on the waitlist to come to Bozeman, Montana. But we needed to find out what caused them to do that. And then how do we recruit? Right. And so this is where again, using the same notion of product, but now applying it to HR.

Because at some point, here’s the crazy part, this is the thing that I like, when you start to think about the process on the supply side, we have a job opening we call HR, they say we’re hiring, they write a job description, and they put it out there, right? And then on the other side, somebody has to go like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t really like my job anymore. Okay, I got time for a new job. And then I gotta go through this whole process.” And you start to realize that, that the two sides are actually disconnected, just like that wall. And what you end up with, is, is is a two sided market. So here’s the thing, how’s the job description made? Copy, some say copy, copy and paste. Now you can use chat GPT, right. But here’s the thing is, is how many times we write a job description, but like, “I don’t know, let me go look and see what everybody else has.” And then you literally build a list. And then you then you get together and go, like, what else should be on it. And then you start to add all these other things to it, like, oh, gosh, they you know, they, they got to do this and this and this and okay, and then then you start to say, like, we got all these ideas, and we’re gonna put it back out here. And we build the we build the job description for the product manager. It kind of looks like a unicorn. They gotta do all these things. Right? And then if you think about the resume, what’s a resume? It’s little snippets of time of stuff you did that literally everybody makes you say that you did it, though, everybody knows we only do things with people. None of that we did by ourselves. But when we write the resume, the resume ends up coming out and looking like Wonder Woman. And then we actually then assume that Wonder Woman and the unicorn are the same person. And they’re not. Is this resonating at all? And you start to realize, this is why it’s a two sided problem, because what happens is the employer side is we have just crappy job descriptions. Five years experience, what the eff does that mean? And why can’t I have somebody who has four years experience with three years experience, but they actually are just smarter? Because we’re lazy, and we won’t unpack what five years experience is to us. Right? At the same time, on the candidate side, they don’t know what they want. And so they literally look to each job and go like, “Oh, that would be a fun job.”, “Oh, my God, that was me.”, “Oh, that would be a horrible job,” but they have no idea how to actually look at themselves and figure it out. So what we’ve done is we’ve gone off And to be honest, I’ve built prototypes on both sides of this. And what we need to do is flip the lens, we got to flip the lens from, how do we hire to fill a position to how do we actually understand the progress that employee wants to make. Because at some point in time, if we can build job descriptions and job positions that help people make progress, they will stay longer. Because here’s the thing, the secret is this, as long as they’re making progress, they won’t leave. The moment they get bored, the moment that they’re not challenged, the moment that the disrespected the moment, that’s the signal that says I gotta do something else. And so asking them about their progress and caring about them, like you care about your customers is just as important. So how can we help? One, start thinking about your customer, your employees, and the progress they want to make. I know I’m over wherever, whoever is going to come out and yank me I know, I’m over. Am I, am I gonna get it? Okay. And so part of it is unpacking. What are the things that give you joy? What gives you energy? What things suck your energy? How do I dimensionalize that? So I know, what are the things that I have to do? Because look, there’s no job, that’s perfect. You still have to make trade offs just like a product. How do you make those explicit? The number of people who are literally willing, so like I just helped an entrepreneur, basically, switch companies. And one of the things he did is he, he could have made more money, but he decided to take less money. So he could actually be closer to the founder, because he wants to be a founder someday. And he’s willing to take a lesser position. So he gets more experience, and less money. And I told him to make that explicit, to say I have another offer to make more money. But here’s why I’m coming here and I want to do this. And they actually adjusted the job description to fit what his progress wanted to be. So instead of just not telling them, he told them, and it made it better. Right? It’s about being explicit about what progress you want to make as an employee, or what, what you as an employer, what progress you want to enable people to make. Right? This is Russ, Rusty, he went through the whole process, I’m not going to go through it, you’ve got the idea. Right? It’s literally mapping, it’s using the timeline to map what, where do you get energy from the last positions? What things suck your energy? How do we actually take an inventory of that? How do we then look at the activities you’d like to do the activities you don’t like to do? And look at the plus and minus on both sides? The balance sheet. How do I build a balance sheet for the job that I wanted to go do? Right? And ultimately, finding the dimensions? Benchmarking is a whole process for this. Here’s the thing is, hold on. Here’s what happens. You need to ask better questions, you need to actually care about the progress they want to make. If you don’t ask, they will leave. If you ask, you can actually reshape the work so they can be more satisfied and that makes it more productive. Let’s be clear, I, as an engineer, I want, I want nothing to do with HR. I’ve always gotten in trouble from them. They’re like the principal’s office. But the reality is, is that we need to do what what happens is people are trying to get more resumes. They’re trying to actually do build efficiencies in the in the HR process. But the reality is, is it’s not effective anymore. We have to take a step back and really look at this. Right? So let me just move. I know I’m over. But one more. I’ll cover this in the after session. Just kidding.Here we go. Three things. One, find struggling moments. You’re customers have them. You have them. Your employees have them. Every struggling moments are where all innovation should be focused. That’s where, where we’re going to make progress. Two is, think progress and not product or service. What’s the progress we’re trying to make? What’s the progress they’re trying to make? What progress are they trying to, that will help them center everything else? And the last thing is identify the trade offs. What are the things that you’re willing to give up? Like I love the fact that we saw Southwest because southwest is my favorite example. They suck at food and menus and snacks. They suck at it. But it’s not a reason for people not to fly Southwest. This is where we think we need to be great at everything and the reality is we don’t need to be great at everything. We need to be great at the things that are important to them to make progress. Last story, Clay said, Clay used to ask me all the time, “What’s the greatest innovation you’ve ever worked on?”. Like, my first answer, “The next one, of course.”. He says, “No, no, no, no. Scenario, okay? You’re dead. You’re on the pearly gates…”. So Clay was Mormon. I was I’m Catholic, he’s always been trying to convert me. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, I’m like, “Okay, I know where this is going.”. He’s like, “See, Peter has a list. There’s a list, what’s on the top of his list that’s going to get you into heaven?”. Like, holy crap, like I? Well, next time, I start to think about it. And I go, like, alright, I worked on Pokemon Mac and Cheese. And I’d have to tell you, it is delicious. But I believe I will go to hell for that. The guidance system for the Patriot missile was very, very complicated, like, like, from a technological perspective was amazing. Again, probably going to send me to hell. And then it came to me. It goes back to Dr. Deming, in in in 1987. When I met Dr. Deming, he would travel around and the whole thing was reducing product development cycle time from 72 months to 36 months, and we go visit suppliers to help in the process of doing that. And my panic moment was, he was 85. I was 19 or 20. And is one of those things where like I had to drive, that’s how bad it was. And my panic moment would be we’d be going running to the airport, we’d be late because he would always over talk. And that’s where I get it from, I think but the same time he he ends up like driving into the gas station and freak out. And I started to go like, “Rush. Which side is it on? Where is it?” And he’s like, “What are you looking for? What’s going on?” Like, I pull in, I pulled the wrong side. And then I finally go like screw it. I’m just going to pull it over to the side damming into the front seat. This is a problem. We need to solve this problem. This is struggling. I’m like, oh my god, can I just get to the airport, please? Right. And so ultimately, he were doing a review with my boss. He basically says we need to get you call me the kid because he couldn’t remember my name. He said, he said we need to get the kid to work on the gas tank problem. I’m like, “What’s problem is that? It’s like, you know, the guessing problem like, oh, please no. And so I did get excited. This is the funny part. 1987, right. 1992, five years. And I came up with the books, I came up with a little arrow that helps you basically determine which side the filler cap is on your gas tag, which will be gone. And I don’t know, 10 years or so because we won’t have guests cars. But that is my thing. If you want to learn more about what I do, two books, there’s a podcast called the circuit breaker. And that’s it.

Mark Littlewood

Okay, let’s get some roving mics up. We’ve got a few minutes. Because I’m giving it time is just a concept. It’s just a concept.

Bob Moesta

The good questions get books.

Mark Littlewood

Well, I think there was a pretty good question earlier on. Which one from these guys.

Bob Moesta

Down here?

Mark Littlewood

Because yeah, asking the audience questions at the end of your talk. That’s pretty fierce move right?

Bob Moesta

I think that was great. We’re gonna give them we’ll get we’ll get you all books. Any questions or comments? A lot of this will be covered with application. No question. Oh, we got one back here.

Mark Littlewood

No, don’t do that.

Bob Moesta

Sorry. I didn’t see you there.

Audience Member

What job do these little plastic things on the cupholders do? It’s been bugging me all day. 

Bob Moesta

What little? where?

Audience Member

Somebody in here knows on every cup holder in here, there’s little cup holders.

Bob Moesta

Hold on I gotta come down and look now.

Audience Member

They’re fragile for that though, right. 

Bob Moesta

Oh, they’re probably pegs the cover over? It’s what I would think is it they have they have holes, What do you put a tarp on it so people can’t use. This is what I would guess.

Mark Littlewood

Okay, stick your hands up if you got questions because I want to get some mics out. So we’ve got one down here. Great. Go ahead.

Audience Member

So you talk a lot about having a product ready and then the customer has to be ready to pull.

Bob Moesta

Yes.

Audience Member

But what is the secret to making sure the customer knows your product is ready when they start looking.

Bob Moesta

That’s right. So part of this is in Derek, Derek and Kyle talk about this tomorrow. But the fact is, is is what you learn are the things that have to happen to them and that’s how you learn where to be and when to be. Because it’s about where and when, and, and you know, the why. So it’s ultimately. So for example, one of the things I learned is that most of the people had a very awkward conversation about moving and downsizing when one of their friends passed away. And so I moved my advertising from the real estate section to the obituaries. You laugh. But the reality is, it was a 70% increase in my in my traffic and a 35% reduction in my in my cost, because who advertises the obituaries besides funeral homes, and lawyers? And so this is the kind of thing where it’s just you start to realize where to be and where you have to be that started the conversation. Very, very different place. Other questions? Yep. Oh.

Mark Littlewood

Justin.

Audience Member

We got good question. If you don’t have a product in market, yeah, yes. And like you have like an idea, like, you’re passionate about something. Who do you interview? Yeah, there’s nothing to hire.

Bob Moesta

So, I the way I frame that is, if I build the product I want to build. What are people going to fire? Right? So think of like Facebook Marketplace. It’s like, how do I go study Etsy, and and, you know, Craigslist, and eBay, and what causes people to use that. And then I can go build Facebook Marketplace. So it’s about understanding what people are going to fire so that I can actually build a better product for.

Audience Member

Going with your real estate versus, real estate versus obituary. Yeah. How do you, if you are not the person in charge, walk into a room full of people in charge who don’t have time to understand everything you’ve been through and say, I’m gonna move all our ads to the obituaries.

Bob Moesta

Yeah, I had to do that. By the way. They’re like what like that. Like, that’s not what polti? Does. polti does it this way, we got to follow polti. Right. So the first thing I did is I interview the executive, to just tell me about something, they bought because they’ll say, “Oh, I just bought a new bike, like, oh, I wanted to exercise it, blah, blah, blah.”. And when you actually then do the real interview with exercise had nothing to do with why they bought a bike. And so you start to realize, like, if I were to survey, you click this and this and this, that’s why I need to do something different because it’s there. The other part is I always set it up as a test. You got to prototype it. And then the other thing is, is to interview somebody who bought a house in front of the executive team, because then they’ll actually understand like, “Oh, it’s this whole story. It’s not this one thing.”. So that’s typically how I tried I tried to get the executive or the people who are basically get to hear that to hear the stories.

Mark Littlewood

What’s your job function? What do you do? Great. So because there’s a sales demand side sales book, and there’s learning to build book we’re gonna give it? No, I think they should have a product book if there are sales.

Bob Moesta

There you go. Mark’s choosing. That’s fine. Other questions? Yep. Down here.

Audience Member

Yeah, I w,as wondering, and maybe this is in the book, but how you, obviously, you’re doing a lot of qualitative methods. Yes. I was wondering, I have a research background, of how you brighten that to business folk. Yes. In a more accessible way. This like, yeah, too lengthy, but eliminates bias. I see a lot of people try to do surfaces, insights, but a lot of bias.

Bob Moesta

So in the, in the, when we do when we do the interview, we actually do an hour to do the interview. And then we do an hour after the interview to parameterize the interview, like what were the pushes, what were the poles? What were the anxieties? What are the habits? What were the trade offs? I mean, very, very disciplined EQ. So there’s no discussion guide. It’s literally the forces and the timeline. And so when we get that, though, is we’re treating each story as its independent. And then we see the patterns. And so the way we play it back is like I almost gave you the the causal mechanisms of what pushes people to leave, I show them that and then I play the tape. Right? And so that that way, they get a feel for it, and they get to understand it’s like, it’s sets of things that have to happen to make people want to change.

Audience Member

What’s your role?

Bob Moesta

Research.

Mark Littlewood

CEO? Does that sales? Give her that one. We’ll give her a choice. All right. Anybody else? Sir? Go? Yes.

Audience Member

We got here. Yep.

Audience Member

Can you hear me? Yeah. So on both sides. Yeah. Based on your supply and demand? Yes. What typically causes a pivot.

Bob Moesta

Haha, that’s great. So two things. Two things cause a pivot one is, is the market itself is that you’ve either over, over indexed on one side or another and it’s like the pivot is like all of a sudden the struggling moment is very different. So for example, one of the pivots I did in the homebuilding business, is I realized I I wasn’t in the building business I was in the roofing business. It has helped people move from their old home to the new home. But I could actually fix their old home too. So I end up working out over 500 used homes and build rebuilding them and selling them for people so they can move into my home, but then people that couldn’t buy my home. Right. And so the pivot comes from understanding where the market is and where the struggling moments are. And and also where the, where the, where the technology lies.

Mark Littlewood

So we’ve got one more book, right.

Bob Moesta

So give him that. Next question.

Mark Littlewood

Final question.

Bob Moesta

Yep. Yep.

Audience Member

Thank you very much. So curious on the functional dimensions, socia,l emotional. Yeah. Budget like commenter said, when I remember there was a fourth one in the innovators dilemma, which was financial, the financial trade off. And game.

Bob Moesta

Yeah, I think of the financial as functional. So like, as an engineer, it’s like anything mechanical. So steps thinking is functional. So like, costs, anything that’s super rational falls into that functional bucket to me. And then emotional is more like, almost like chemistry, it’s about the fact of like, positive and negative emotions, they have a different they they behave in a very different, they almost behave like electromagnetic fields. And so you start to realize it’s a very different functional piece than that. So to me, the financial piece falls under functional in my, in my realm.

Mark Littlewood

That’s a great question. Two things. What’s your function? See? Could be any? Where do you come from? Where do you come from?

Audience Member

Australia.

Mark Littlewood

Australia.

Bob Moesta

Gets the longest distance of wars.

Mark Littlewood

So on that basis,

Bob Moesta

He gets both.

Mark Littlewood

Well, we’ve already got one of each book.

Bob Moesta

I got some more.

Mark Littlewood

Okay. We used to give booze away, but I stopped drinking four years ago. And it was always Australians that want it and they always came with their own booze anyway. So you get two books.

Bob Moesta

And we’ll get, we’ll get you another book.

Mark Littlewood

It’s six o’clock. I told you. It’d be finished. But Bob’s give me around for dinner. Yes?

Bob Moesta

I’m here the entire week.

Mark Littlewood

The rest of the week. So, Bob, thank you. Thank you, everybody.

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