Jobs to be Done provides a framework to help you leverage the force of your customers’ behaviour in order to drive your product improvement.
In a highly interactive session, Bob, architect of Jobs to be Done, and long time friend of BoS, (he loves the people he meets and is always one of the top three rated speakers), works through some of the challenges you have implementing the framework in your organisations. From running successful interviews, collecting the data, using it to drive insights that will help inform your product, sales and marketing strategies, you will hear live case studies from your peers in the audience that will help you build better products and companies.
We will assume you have familiarity with Jobs to be Done concepts. If they’re a new concept to you, we recommend that you watch some of Bob’s previous BoS Talks (here), particularly, ‘Understanding Your Customers’ JTBD’ including a live ‘switch interview’.
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Transcript
Bob Moesta
So here’s the thing, this is a test. We’re prototyping something different and and instead of giving a regular presentation, Mark, has literally challenged me to only have seven slides, be on stage for two hours and talk to people I’ve never talked to before. So this is totally improv, but we have basically three different or four different groups of people we’re going to bring up here to talk about Jobs to be Done.
My expertise is jobs. I think the easier way to ask is, who has never heard of Jobs to be Done before? (counting)
All right, so we’re going to spend a little time going through the basics of Jobs to be Done and what it what it’s what it’s about, and then what we’ll do is we’re going to bring up different people who have been trying to implement it and the challenges they’ve had.
- We have Chika is going to come up and talk about interviewing problems she’s had.
- Then we’re going to have Marcin and Steve come up and talk about how applying jobs are done to product, and the problem, the challenges they’ve had.
- Then Bo going to come up and talk about applying it to sales.
- And then last Jeff is going to come up, and we’re going to talk more about strategy in the organization around thinking about Jobs to be Done from that perspective.
Bob Moesta
My, my, let’s see. I’m going to go to my slide. This is the primer. I wasn’t prepared to really do this, but I’ll do this as quickly as can.
The first premise of jobs to be done is this, people don’t buy things. They hire them to make progress in their life. And the whole aspect here is that the reason why this is important is the fact this is that what you want to be able to understand is what is going on in their life. Nobody randomly does anything.
There’s nobody who randomly buys your product – it’s caused.
It’s just we’re not smart enough. But when we can understand the causation behind it, it’s actually it actually helps us understand how to sell. It actually understand how to build product and understand marketing, etc. And so the aspect here is there’s two really big components, the circumstance. If there’s no struggling moment, they can’t even see you, your customers, right? But the moment they struggle, they have a struggling moment. They’re in a circumstance and they can’t go any farther, is when they start to go like, Oh my gosh, I got to do something different. And that’s when they actually start to think about something new. But it doesn’t actually just a struggling moment itself. The pain itself doesn’t actually do it. It’s it’s the pain and the other side, the progress, the outcomes that they’re seeking. So it’s both the context and the outcome that make people change.
I’ve been studying it for over 30 years. I’ve worked on over 3500 different products and services, everything. You name it, I’ve pretty much worked on it. But the basic premise here is, what causes people to change and what causes people to buy your product, right? And so ultimately, that started with the whole notion of what we call Jobs to be Done.
Cause
In that when we actually talk to people, we actually try to find the causes, not the cause, the causes. There’s multiple causes. The top two are called the fuel of the change. What pushes them from the situation they’re in? Why now? What’s going on? What can’t they do that they want to do? Right? So part of is to understand the context. It doesn’t have to be as high as pain, because at some point it struggles. The struggling moment creates the space in the brain for people to say, today’s the day I got to do something else which actually creates the space for your solution to fall into.
Pull
The second part of it, then, is the pull – which is when they have your product, what can they do that they couldn’t do before? Right? And so we talk about those two things as the fuel.
Friction
But there’s also friction. Friction is the anxiety of the new. How long is it to get to how long does it take to get to train? how are we going to install it? What do I do with my old product? All these frictional components are things I could have a lot of push and a lot of pull, but if I’ve got a lot of anxiety, they’re not going to buy it. And so part of this understanding these four forces in the play at hand, right?
Process
The other thing is there’s a process by which they buy, which is very different than how we sell. And so part of this is flipping the lens from us pushing a product to people, to understanding, how do people pull products into their lives?
Jobs to be Done Interviews
That’s the foundation of jobs to be done. And we do this through a series of interviews, where we interview people on people who already switched. So we don’t go interview prospects, we interview customers. Because at some point, customers are the people who have to make the trade offs in order to fit their your product into their lives. And once we understand that, then we can actually look forward, because we understand the causal relationships, to understand how we actually find more prospects, how we converge prospects to customers. And we’re going to talk about that.
But it all starts with an interview around understanding the forces that our people are going on and and to the timeline that they follow along the way. The timeline is very simple.
There’s a first thought. First thought is about creating space in the brain for the solution to fall into. How do they get the first thought? What happens to them to do that?
Then what happens is they go into passive looking where now they have a space, but they have nothing in it, and so all of a sudden they get to notice things that they never noticed before, and they learn whether they should do something about it or not.
And then they get to active looking. Active looking is probably when you see them. That’s when they raise their hand and say, Hey, I got a problem. I think you might be a solution. But they’re looking for all the possibilities. It’s like a kid in a candy store.
And then the last part, or the fourth step four, is where they have to decide. And deciding is about trade offs and framing trade offs, because no product is perfect for them. And once we understand that, then we can actually start to understand the progress. What’s the first, how do we onboard them? What’s the first use? And how do we turn what they’re doing into a habit?
And so ultimately, trying to understand both the forces that cause them to buy as well as the timeline and the sequence of things that they do.
Chika Emebo, IDR Solutions: Jobs to be Done Interviewing Problems
With that, I’m going to invite Chika up. You ready? Yep, there we go.
Thank you, Chika, for coming up. I don’t know how Mark recruited you, but I’m very happy that you’re here. Are you nervous?
Chika Emebo
Not really.
Bob Moesta
That’s good. You shouldn’t be. Sit wherever you want, and I’ll sit on the other side. I started to think about this as like, almost like in the peanuts Peanuts cartoon, there’s Lucy plays the psychiatrist, right? But I feel like I’m the product doctor here, where people are going to come up with all these different problems with product. So all right, so I’m going to go, let me turn that black.
Chika Emebo
Hi, Bob.
Bob Moesta
How are you? So how can I help you?
Chika Emebo
So I work on the sales and marketing at IDR solutions, okay, we’re an IT software company, okay? And we help businesses display PDFs in different file formats on web browsers. I do the Jobs to be Done for all of our clients after they become clients.
Bob Moesta
Okay.
Chika Emebo
And amongst all the interviews, the main issue I keep coming across is the section about the purchasing process. When I ask them about the purchasing process and who’s involved in it, it’s always I don’t know, or I’m not the one that bought it, or I can’t really tell you much about that, and I don’t have much insight in that section. It’s a blank spot in the jobs to be done amongst most of our customers. So I was wondering how we could go about that.
Bob Moesta
Yeah, so let’s going to go back to this slide here. So just to restate the question is, at some point in time, the people you’re interviewing, when you get the time to interview them, by the time you’re actually in that session of talking to them, they’re like, Oh, I just signed the contractor. I, you know, somehow, you know, I might be in charge. My name might be assigned as the the owner of it or the champion, but I’m not the one who actually bought it.
Chika Emebo
Yeah.
Bob Moesta
Right.
So first thing is, what we have to do is we have to screen a little better, because at some point the people who who might have bought it the fina.., let’s say it’s the chief financial officer who bought it. They actually were told to buy it. And ultimately, those people aren’t committed to doing to making the change, right? They’re actually just helping to facilitate the change. So there’s there’s two sets of people. There are people. There’s actually three.
- There’s the person who’s actually feeling the struggling moment, who really has the problem and can’t get something done.
- There’s a group of people who are basically advocates of it.
- And then there’s actually people who are basically resisting it.
Most people don’t have the ability to say yes, most people have the ability to say no, right? And so the way I think about is the first, the first, when you screen somebody, you actually have to think about, how do I find out who’s the person who took the personal risk, almost the political risk to bring something new in, because if, if they’re not the person who brought it in, and everybody’s pointing the finger and saying it’s from somebody else, the fact is that ultimately, the reality is, we got to find that person who said, Look, we need this. And so if you’re not talking to that person, the fact is, what you get is a lot of gobbledygook. You just get, oh my God, it was so easy. Oh my I love this product, but they you don’t know. Ultimately, you don’t know this part of the process, which is the timeline. You don’t know who had the first thought. So ultimately, you have to understand who’s the person who navigated this process, because the sounds like the people you’re talking to and the people who were there to decide and to make the decision. But nobody knows what happened up here. And this is where all that, this is where all the energy is, right? And so part of this is is to see that.
The second part though, is to realize that everybody’s story is going to be different. Every customer you talk to is going to be different, right? What happens, though, is that there’s a pattern that you start to see across them. So when you do anywhere from, I’ll say, 7 to 10 to 12 of them, you start to realize that some are more similar to than others, and others are very different. And when you start to see those patterns, that’s what helps. But if you’re not talking to the right person, it’s actually really, really hard to figure out what the jobs are, because at some point it’s all it’s all fantasy, right? It just seems like it shows up, right?
Chika Emebo
Sometimes in the sorry, sometimes in the purchasing process. In the buying process, the person who had that initial thought actually doesn’t work out the company anymore. So what would you advise I do in that situation?
Bob Moesta
So it well, it depends. If they got fired for your product, it’s probably not a good person to interview, but it’s probably not that. But what I would tell you is the fact is, is that I would actually try to screen them out for now, and it’s almost like you lost the opportunity to talk to them, because now it’s almost like that story is gone. The one thing I would say I have done is I’ve actually went and tracked that person down who works at another company and interviewed them, because they have the story. They have the essence of that story and the causation that you need to have. And so in some cases, if you know who bought it and they’re now at another company, just say, Hey, can I, can I get your time for a half hour, 45 minutes to talk and pay them a gift Amazon gift card and let them tell your story, right? But the story, the actual, real story, the truth, is actually what’s really important here. And if we can’t get the truth, we end up getting a lot of themes, but we don’t get any details of what to really do. This is about going from the abstraction of, oh, we had this problem, to what was that real problem? What was the consequence of that problem? Why did you actually make the change? You have to be able to unpack all that. My belief is you’re really good at being able to get them to unpack but if they if it’s not there, they can’t make it up, right?
Chika Emebo
So would you say that there’s circumstances where you would advise to interview more than one person at the company?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, sometimes you might actually have to have two or three people. I don’t I like to make it clean and have interview one person, but sometimes you might actually have to do a like two or three people to get the full story out, but then you have to be really good at deciphering the politics and the bullshit that they tell you, because they’re going to tell you a bunch of stuff that’s kind of like, oh, this was going great. This was awesome. And somebody was going, like, you watch him make a face, and they’re going to like, that’s not what they think. And so you got to just be prepared for some of those kind of awkward moments. But the key is to get to the truth, to the to the underlying aspect of it. And what I what I always say is, like most people sit in a conference room and try to dream the jobs up, but ultimately there’s some moment where there’s some really irrational behavior, something that doesn’t make sense why they did it. And what that means is that we don’t understand the context. Because my experience would say nobody actually does something irrational. It’s the fact that we don’t understand their context, and when we can unpack the context, the context makes the irrational behavior rational, right? So it’s always digging for those kinds of things. Okay?
Chika Emebo
Another thing I wanted to speak about is, when I’m done with the interviews, we pull out quotes, and sometimes we put them as testimonies on our site.
Bob Moesta
Yes.
Chika Emebo
But what else should we be doing? What else should we be taken away from the jobs to be done interviews?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, I don’t have a slide for this, so I got to think about which slide I’m going to do for this.
All right, so you started to debrief. We chatted a little bit yesterday, right? So, and the question is, is most people don’t know what to look for or listen for when they’re in an interview, right? This is what I have people listen to, right? What are the pushes? What are the pulls? What are the anxieties, what are the habits that you heard that caused people to buy our product? Right? And so we start by doing one interview. That interview is bucketed for an hour. Usually takes 45 minutes. Sometimes it takes a little little longer, a little shorter, but then we take an hour afterwards, and the hour afterwards is really, really important, because now, from everybody who is listening, what did we hear? How do we get a common language of what they mean by when they say easy? What kind of easy are we talking about? There’s 22 dimensions of easy, what is important to them in terms of easy?
And so part of it is, what did you hear push them? What did you hear that pulled them? What did you hear that anxieties and what habits? And so we treat each story as they’re unique and different and they’re unrelated. But when we get done, we don’t look at themes across all of them. We actually start to separate them and say, of all these 10 stories, what two stories are most similar? And we put them together. And then I say, I want to find a story that’s most different from these two over here. And then I start reviewing them, and you usually end up finding 3-4-5, different buckets of stories. And stories basically start with context. Are people starting in different places and outcomes, people wanting different places to end. And if they have a similar starting point, a similar ending point, they go in the bucket. If they have different starting point, maybe in a similar ending point, different bucket. And so part of it is being able to see how many buckets do they have in terms of the paths to make it to your product, and that then becomes the thing.
So the thing is, what’s happening is, in some cases, you’ll be showing them quotes on your web page which resonate with somebody, but then when they look into it, it makes no sense, because there’s nothing more that supports their story. So part of this is turning each one of these buckets into stories about transformation from this problem to this outcome, or this problem, and this outcome, and the aspect here is saving money is very different than saving time. Saving money is we got to cost reduce. We got to basically make this more efficient. Saving time is about actually getting more capacity. And you start to realize that, though we see them both as trying to be more efficient. They’re very different fields for them, and so part of this is being able to segment them, or to separate them that way.
There’s a very simple method called the contrast method, which I just said, and there’s a very sophisticated method where we actually break each story into a bunch of variables, and we use math, and very complicated math, but it’s clustering analysis to basically find out how many unique stories we have that helps us kind of get there. But ultimately, there is. There’s never one way that people buy from you. There’s multiple ways, and you have to understand the buying process, not the selling process. Okay, does that make sense?
Chika Emebo
Yeah, thank you.
Bob Moesta
Anything else?
Chika Emebo
I don’t have.
Bob Moesta
Okay, let’s hold on, because I want to open it to the floor. How much is where we got, like, four more minutes questions about interviewing. Those who do interviews, any questions on jobs to be done? Oh, good. We got a couple. Yeah.
Audience Member
One thing, Bob, thanks for thanks for that. That was very interesting. You mentioned listening to the interview, and I got the I heard, we listen to the interview. So who do you bring into?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, great. That’s a great question. So this is, first of all, this is not an individual sport. This is a team sport, and to be honest, like last week, I did interviews, I had basically VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, Head of Product, Head of Engineering and the CEO all in the same room listening to the interviews. If it’s a lower level team, we’ll have basically, but make sure it’s cross functional, because the debriefs are where they build the language for each other. That’s the important part. Is we all agree it’s easy, but engineering thinks easy means this, and marketing thinks easy means that, and we all work on easy and then it doesn’t work. So this is where you go slow to go fast. Everybody feels like they got to go, go, go. We’ll get this person to do all the interviews. You do all the interviews. Put in a PowerPoint for us and play it back to us. It’s the worst thing you can do. These the information we’re talking about so subtle but so powerful that if you don’t understand it, it literally will get away from you. And if you do it at the wrong level, it just becomes pablum, and you can’t do anything with it.
We got another one. We got one get one here. Thank you.
Yeah, quick quote, be careful. Yeah, thank you. Bo’s up next, all right, in a few so if he has a tough question, he’s gonna get it back.
Audience Member
My question is, do you share this methodology with the customer itself or the person that you interview? Can you self identify your push and pull of the situation or?
Bob Moesta
So, most of the time, to be honest, I can’t even identify my own pushes. So like when I did this for my company, I actually hired somebody else to interview my customers, because I’m so close to it, right? But what I do do is I do tell them the timeline, because at this point in time, this is not my sales process. This is their buying process. And I ask them where they are in the buying process. And when they’re talking about something, half the time they’re talking about passive looking, and I think they’re down here, and it’s very different information. And so part of is to realize what they’re saying. You need to know where they are, because these are very different mentalities as they go this is problem aware, solution unaware. This is solution aware. This is literally solution implementation. And so you start to realize that they’re very different mindsets as they go through this.
We got a question up here, yep.
Audience Member
Question for me, I’ve never actually really thought about jobs to be done in the way you’ve just framed it. I’ve always thought about it as very much a product led activity.
Bob Moesta
It started that way because I’m an engineer and I love to do product, but Clay was nice enough to turn it into a theory, which I didn’t know what you meant at the time, and so it’s been applied to many places.
Audience Member
So I guess I’m really wondering where you see the loop back. So you’ve described a questioning or an interview process post sale yes to a customer and why they’ve decided to work with you. How often do you go back and review that? Because one of the most powerful ways I’ve found of using jobs to be done is looking at the emotion over time. As they move through using software for the job they’ve hired it for.
Bob Moesta
So there’s the emotion of getting to the buy, and then there’s the emotion of actually using it. I call this part the big hire. I call that the little hire. So when do they buy the software? When do they pull it out or reach for it to do something with it? So sometimes there’s two sets of interviews, right? But I think the reality is being able to see how, how they get there, and trying to do it. This is why it’s hard to be honest.
The first thing is, you can’t get the sales people to interview because the sales people end up distorting the entire story. And to be honest, they know their emotional they know their emotional roller coaster, but we need to know the customer’s emotional roller coaster, because they have the same thing.
The other part is, we’re not just interviewing for, like, the functional things, what they did, it’s how they felt, social, emotional and functional energy is what causes people to do go through this process, right? Something doesn’t work. It makes me frustrated, which is going to make me look bad to my boss, functional, emotional, social. And so it’s this causal change we have to look at, versus my boss is pushing pressure onto me, which is actually making me very, very uncomfortable, which makes me actually kind of screw up. Social, emotional, functional. And so part of this is to understand these chains of energy, of how they change states to actually cause us to change, because our, our, we are creatures of habit by nature. We, none of us want to really change. And so that’s why we study change this way. And if you think about it, most people think about stealing share. I think about how many people want this product, but actually don’t even know about it, right? There’s way more in non consumption people who want to do something and can’t than there are people doing because they can’t make the change. And they can’t make the change because the anxiety forces are too high.
What I’ll tell you is almost everybody understands the push and pull all day, but the real money lies in being able to reduce anxiety, because for me to make the change, push and pull have to be greater than anxiety and have it. Sales people, marketing people, coming more feature, more features, more features, create more pull. They’ll best sell more. We’ll sell more. My thing is is the more, the more features you create, the more anxiety you create that they don’t need it. It’s a paradox. So understanding the anxieties is actually the key and understanding, and it’s a very simple question so that right before you were buying it, what were the what was the hesitation that you had, what were the things that kind of stopping you from buying it right immediately? And it’s those little things that actually turn out to be the big things, right? And ultimately, for every one person who’s made it, my belief is there’s 10 100 1000 a million people behind them who haven’t made it because they haven’t been able to play with the forces that way.
Mark Littlewood
All right, one more question, and then we’ll switch out. OK, Steve.
Audience Member
Thank you. So you made it very clear at the beginning that you want to talk to buyers and not prospects. What do you do? Or can you use the system before you’ve even got a product, yes, ready to purchase it?
Bob Moesta
By the way, that’s like the number one question. I literally got to figure out how to record right now I’m going to record it. So this is how this works. So when you have a new product, it does not exist. The reality is, is there is in my world, there is no new consumption.
So what you’re going to do is people who are basically going to buy your stuff, right? They bought something else in the past. So for example, I worked on Facebook marketplace, and one of the things we did is was before it existed. What did we do? We went and interviewed people who set up Etsy accounts, people who set an eBay account, people who basically bought and sold things. So we would talk about what caused you to say to say, today is the day you set up an account on eBay. What causes you to say, today’s day I’m gonna go to eBay to buy and ultimately, by learning all those things from from the competition, if you will, we were able to set up Facebook marketplace, which is now $6 or $7 billion right? But we didn’t have to build it and then test it. We actually could learn from because other people who had struggling moments or struggling moments around it. And we’re like, Why in the world are they here? Like, we saw it as a very simple they were on, what was it, Facebook Messenger, selling a set of drums? And we’re like, What in the world is going on here? And from that, we basically that’s, that was the the anomalies are. A seed for the innovation, right? So that anomaly, we basically said, All right, well, if they can do that there, why are we setting up a platform to do that? And that’s how it all started. And so you look for what people are going to fire when your product exists, and you figure out, why do people hire that product? And then you can transfer it over and then iterate it.
Does that make sense? All right, thank you, Chika.
Chika Emebo
Thank you, thanks.
Bob Moesta
Great job. All right.
Mark Littlewood
Because you were the first volunteer, and you came back with some fabulous questions, and have been brilliant, you get three prizes, thank you. Thank you.
Steven Toy and Marcin Zaba, Memrise: Problems in Applying Jobs to be Done to Product
Bob Moesta
My presentation coach always says, don’t hydrate while you’re on stage, so I’m gonna keep doing that. All right, we’re gonna bring up Marcin and Steven, right.
Mark Littlewood
We are. Welcome! All right.
Bob Moesta
I’m just gonna roll off. I think. There we go. Got it? Hey guys. Hey, tell us a little bit about your business.
Steven Toy
Sure. Well, I tell you what, I think we could probably frame it up real quickly with your slides here. Okay, so give us the first one with the right there, yep. So we have two of your timelines necessary in each other. We know this because of the great work that Marcin has done in the year that he’s he’s been with us here, but our first timeline loop is our customer who we sell a product that helps people learn a new language, okay, like Duolingo, but better. So, and
Bob Moesta
What’s the name?
Steven Toy
The name is Memrise. So what we have found is customers don’t necessarily want to acquire a language just for acquiring a language. Of course not. They have reasons. They have goals for it. Either they want to travel more successfully. They married somebody who’s in laws. Their in laws are from a different country. They want to connect with their co workers, so they have a reason for acquiring a language. So that’s our first timeline is, why do people want?
Bob Moesta
Why do they reach out and say, I need to take some language training?
Steven Toy
Exactly and on all the reasons where it’s talking to another human being, that’s where we come into play. If it’s to take a test, right? Get accreditation. We’re not the right call. But if it’s talking to other human beings, we’re the right call, and that’s because of what our product does. So if you go to the next slide where this one, yeah, right, the old way is get a flash card, app, dual Babel, Boso Manley drops Rosetta Stone and us in the beginning, right? You just learn some words. But the struggling moment is the web is replete with memes all over the place about how I have 2000 words and 500 days streak, and I don’t know what the heck’s going on in Charles de Gaulle airport or Madrid, right?
Bob Moesta
I don’t know how to really navigate anything I can’t do. I’ve got a streak, but I have no idea why I’m doing
Steven Toy
Nothing, exactly nothing. And so that’s the struggling moment. And there’s a new way, which is really kind of the old way, right? The best way to learn a language, go in country and survive.
Bob Moesta
We all know this Germany. I totally understand.
Steven Toy
Exactly, because you’re just hearing it non stop, and if you want a beer, you’re going to have to say something to Jed, right? Exactly.
Bob Moesta
The other thing you learn is that Germans count with their thumb first. If you do this, you get three beers, but exactly,
Steven Toy
Are killed in the inglorious basket. So, so we have a way of replicating going in country, by bringing in tons and tons of content from the world and filtering it by the words that you’ve learned on your flash cards.
Bob Moesta
Got it.
Steven Toy
So that’s the timeline of going from the old way to the new way, nested in
Bob Moesta
So I just want to hit a timeout for a second, because what they’re talking about is very, very important, is most people say, I don’t want to go up against Duolingo, right? Oh, my God, they’re killing it. Their reviews are great, everybody. But the reality is, there’s it actually creates a new struggling moment that they can’t even see. And so all of a sudden, every innovation creates the opportunity of a new struggling moment. And so the fact is is at some point they’re building off a Duolingo and literally going like, well, Duolingo is going to get you so far, but we can get you to the next level. And so all those people are going to step up. So most people think I got to go into a market where there’s no competition. I would challenge you to say you need to go into markets where there are lots of competition and where there are lots of struggling moments. Sorry, I just want to take that. So how do you guys use this and how do you use it in your organization? I’ll let Marcin kind of take that.
Marcin Zaba
Most of it we do in sales and marketing. So we’ve done probably about 250 interviews, on that timeline leading up to adopting the solution, maybe the first day of using it. And we’re obviously trying to understand the push pulls and anxieties and inertia. But the fifth one we look at a lot of is the locksmith moment. So where were you exactly when you realized you needed to.
Bob Moesta
What was really going on? Because you start to realize that some things is like without the pressure, they would make one set of decisions, but in a different citizen, where they got more pressure, they’re actually going to make a really different decision. And so part of it is to realize capturing people in context is really, really important, and if you gloss over those important subtleties, you lose it all.
Marcin Zaba
And it lets us decide, for example, what marketing channels are we going to use in order to hit them that’s most likely to be in that struggling moment? That’s right, that’s right. And so we use that to improve our messaging, make sure that we’re addressing all of the anxieties and inertias that we’re messaging in their language, not our own language.
Bob Moesta
That’s, by the way, that’s a really big point. Just want to re emphasize it. He’s marketing in their language, not meaning the customer’s language, not the company’s language. That is a fundamental flip, because most people marketing tends to over exaggerate and use it in their in language that makes it seem more powerful, and it actually is less powerful. And so the half of these interviews are used to basically just get the right language so we can talk to them in their language, so it resonates in their head. Sorry. I hope you remember where you were.
Marcin Zaba
And so we use it pretty effectively at the top part of the final up to acquisition, usually including paid. And then we sort of collaborate with our product, colleagues and product around. How do we then help the users build a habit? And this is my first question to you, is our colleagues and product don’t use the framework. How can I influence them to start it?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, so I think the first thing is it’s, it’s a little bit different set of interviews. So, like, I’m doing these interviews for Ryan Singer right now, around Shape Up, and we know why people take the class. We know why they sign up. But right as the moment they start using first use their struggling, new, struggling moments that they didn’t anticipate. And so now it’s a set of interviews that are really geared towards what’s going on here, and where did they get lost, and tell us about how you went from a to b from because this is almost like in their head of what they want to do. This is about what they really do. And so using the same approach to kind of go like, let’s go find the struggling moments in the in the in the onboarding, right? And in the basically, where there what, what do they want to do, but they can’t. And what you’ll find is there’s lots of emotional energy that’s tied up in this, and that you’ll be able to find it. And so part of it is being able to the hard part is engineers, me being included is we’re not really good at listening, right? We’re just not. And so part of this is we have to train them a little bit to get good at listening for what the customer means by things, because we want to run so fast that we hear three things and it’s like, oh, I got the feature. We can go run that feature. You need to be patient to kind of gather it all, because there’s usually two or three unlocks, not 100 and so you need to see the pattern. But if you do 10 interviews on the like, under, under one job to be done, just do 10 interviews about, let’s see one of the bigger jobs, and say, like, All right, what’s the struggling moments of onboarding to basically building habit, then you can find it.
And so, so they’re very different kind of interviews, as opposed to knowing how they got to you, it’s like, I know you got here. How did it go? And so it’s, and it’s not, not judgment of the because the thing is, is they’re going to talk about their struggling moments, and they’re going to go like, well, if you just did this and this and this and this, you could make it happen. But the fact is, they never found it. And we need to know more that they never found it, as opposed to directing them to do it, right?
Marcin Zaba
Yeah, so I’m more thinking about it from the perspective. So I’m head of marketing, yes, I’ve got a colleague who’s head of product, not using this, yes, isn’t particularly interested, potentially. How do I?
Bob Moesta
I would tell you the only way he they’re going to get it is when they have a struggling moment. So the question is, can you create a struggling moment for them?
Marcin Zaba
I can.
Bob Moesta
See, wait a second, just think about this for a second. If you really want to make people change, and the struggling moment is the seed, how do you actually make that happen? Claire, speak loudly.
Claire Suellentrop
I’ll just use my state voice. So we talked about this before. It’s the idea of coming up with marketing that creates the space for someone to realize that they have the problem, not telling them that they have because they don’t want, nobody wants to be told they have the problem. They just need to see all of the evidence and so private it themselves.
Bob Moesta
Right? So one of the ways I do that as a post mortem, I literally talk about the last feature set, the last project, the last cycle, and say, let’s do a post mortem on it. What was missing, what’s not going on, what don’t you have? Where did you get stuck? Where are the rabbit holes? And focus on their process. And say, All right, well, this information would help you. So how do we get you to quit? Create that information. So to Claire’s point is, how do we help them see the problem so that they want to solve it, as opposed to so that’s what I mean. That’s what I meant by creating the struggling moment. But it’s not being so direct of telling them, but orchestrating them discovering. So you can tell them, but then they’re going to feel pushed. But if you actually get them to actually see the struggling moments and understand what it is and what they struggle with, then they’ll actually pull it in. But I would tell you, anybody who’s pushing this onto any part of the organization, the six the likelihood of success is zero. This has to be pulled because it’s hard and it’s slow and it’s against all gen, genuine, kind of instinctual things in startups and but the reality is, like, it’s really, really powerful when you get it.
Marcin Zaba
Right, especially if there’s a someone with a vision, an idea of that product that’s right, introduce
Bob Moesta
That’s right. And so one of the places that we did this, for example, at Basecamp, is we actually just went to customer success and looked at all the problems that they were solving. So every time you have a problem where people can’t get it and they’re calling in, there’s actually two problems. You got to get them to get it, but then we have to redesign the product so they don’t have to call in to get it. And so customer success, we actually started with customer successes as the place to gather all the struggling moments and then take it back to product and say, What are we going to do about this? So that’s the other way that you can do that as well. But you need some data and you need some interviews around it. But if the head of product doesn’t really want to do it. I would, I would tell you, there’s organizations that do this in sales and marketing and don’t do this in product. There’s people who do it in product and don’t do it in sales and marketing. It’s a tool that you can use in both places, but they have to have the space in the brain for this to fall into. That’s the first thing I’d say.
Steven Toy
We have another similar one with engineering. So your engineering background in order to do the thing that we’re doing, because we’re coming from flash card standpoint, we need to be able to command our data in motion. We can’t write to a database and wait for batch process and so on. And so we have to migrate, while the plane is in flight to an entirely new architecture. And this may stretch into the last talk where there’s a lot of fear about
Bob Moesta
But we gotta move into the learning zone, right?
Steven Toy
Exactly. We gotta move into the learning zone. But they have to understand that it’s existentially important to hear the customer as the way they’re speaking as Marcin brings it back and say, Okay, what we have now is not fit for purpose. We need to move no matter how scary it might be.
Bob Moesta
So one of the ways that Intercom did this is they actually invited the entire organization. They actually turned the interviews into podcasts. And so as they had the interviews, they would actually hear the interviews, and then at the end, there would be a dialog of kind of what you learned and what was about it. But ultimately, what I would tell you is that I think the best way to actually get it started is to invite them into your interviews and teach them how to listen for the things they need to listen to, because at some point, once they hear it, then they actually know what to do. But most of the time, nobody takes the time to explain to engineers and product people how to decipher what customers are saying. And so part of this is actually teaching them how to listen, and that those debrief sessions actually help them a lot, and to realize, like, oh, because again, they might actually think they have the ideal solution, but the reality is, is, when they hear what the customer says, that solution gets obliterated because of this. And this, in this context, they’re almost developing in the absence of context.
And the moment you can give them context, they actually get it, and the moment that they get to outcomes, which are requirements, but they’re unpacked, the clarity begins. And so to me, one thing might be is to say, I’m doing some interviews. Will you guys come in and help? And we’d love to get your take on kind of how we do this, and then teach them how to listen, and then they’ll naturally pull it into their world. That’s the other way that we’ve done that Chris Spiek actually started with it in product, and then basically brought his sales and marketing guys into listen, and then they basically pulled it into sales and marketing. And so ultimately, it’s more a collaborative tool than it is about kind of, again, pushing and telling people what to do.
I just find like if we tell people what to do that. It’s kind of like your kids once. It’s the great example Joe brought up, right? It’s like, if I do it for my kid, I lose, they lose the opportunity to innovate, right? So that’s that answer the question, yep. Okay, you want to open the floor. You got more?
Steven Toy
We can do either one, whichever works.
Bob Moesta
Well, no, you get you get precedents. What’s the next question?
Steven Toy
So what is your mental model for the general nesting that we just talked about? So there’s the nesting of a customer, who wants to accomplish an objective travel? Better talk their in laws. But, and in order to do that, they need to acquire language. Now they say, Okay, I’m gonna acquire language. There’s many ways I could go about doing So how do you think about the tune, the nesting of those?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, so I think there’s actually parallel aspects, right, which is this aspect of, again, this is how I was taught. There’s a system that we have as an engineer, and I have inputs to the system, and I have actions to the system, right? And ultimately those systems create an output, and that output goes to a customer. And so most of the time, engineering wise, we’re stuck in the supply side, where we just have to get to these outputs, which are our requirements. We don’t understand the outcomes that the customer is really trying to make. And so if we can actually get to understand the outcomes and then translate. So I think of it as teaching people to think, how to do this, this way, right to left, right? Which is, what are the outcomes the customer really wants? What are those outputs that really need we need to generate to get to those outcomes? All right with those outputs, what functions do we need to actually have to create these outputs? What inputs do we need to be able to do that? And so we think we actually create product from left to right. But when we design product, we actually have to do it right to left, and so it’s helping them.
So this is the framework I use, and what I really think of is, if you will, there’s a technical system, and then there’s a customer system, because the customer, I treat the customer just like a system. What are the pushes? What are the pulls? It’s all a system that caused them to say, Today’s the day I want to get to this outcome. Most of the time we stop, because we think about the outputs we need to meet. And if we get to these, these attributes, we won. And 9 times out of 10, it’s not the attributes, it’s the outcomes, it’s it’s the it’s not the outputs, it’s the outcomes that are most important.
And so helping them understand and move backwards in the system, especially if you’re starting over. Because here’s the interesting part, if you do this, I got to think about left to right. That system is a process because it’s known, but when you do it right to left, it’s a system because there’s too many unknowns in it to call it a process yet. And so that’s where you actually have to do so if you’re redesigning it, you have to start on the right and go to the left.
Steven Toy
So our outcome is successfully talking to my mother in law, in Italy, right?
Bob Moesta
And so she’s so she’s impressed. And so, like, what do I have to do that? By the way, it doesn’t have to be this big. It literally can be this small of a if that’s the goal, it might only have to be this big. And we’re designing it to be this big when it only has to be really this big, right? And that’s really, the thing is, is, how do we make sure we’re clear on those outcomes, because those outcomes should then describe the process I have to do,
Marcin Zaba
I think, follow up question to that one, which might be the one you’re asking, is so we have a couple of use cases going somewhere, traveling, and you want to sound like a local and be an insider of the culture. Second use cases I’ve just become, got into a relationship with someone from another country, and I want to impress my mother. Would you separate those out?
Bob Moesta
Absolutely, because they’re different starting points. If they’re starting at a different point, they’re like, think of, think of value as basically this difference between where I am and where I want to be. And they’re going to value it this much. And if I start down here, I value it differently. And so I have to think of the starting point, the context and the outcome as the two things that define the progress I’m trying to make. And if they start in different places, or they end in different places, they’re probably different jobs. And so part of is that actually, when is that? When is it, when is it a similar situation, and when is it very different? And that becomes, that’s the math problem. A math problem I use. Would I use clustering? Because at some point in time, knowing that talking to my mother in law is different than me getting to know somebody like the notion of if I’m in a relationship, you can say I’m in a relationship with my mother in law, but it’s very different kind of depth of language. I want to know if I’m trying to date somebody versus I’m trying to impress my mother in law, right?
Steven Toy
We hope. We hope.
Bob Moesta
Again, I don’t have a set. I’m sometimes too little. I came out of my mouth that was not a good, not a good analogy. But again, it’s improv. Does that am I? So this is where. But what you find is that, what I The other thing I try to do is, is, if you, if you’ve got 250 interviews, you’re gonna say there’s like 250 different markets. My belief is, is, if you cluster that and find the, you know, the 20% that represents 80% and work on that, that’s usually how I start,
Marcin Zaba
yeah, we have five use cases basically, that represent 80% Yeah, and two of those represent around 80% of paying users.
Bob Moesta
So the reason why I just so you know, why I don’t call them use cases and I call them jobs, is I think of jobs as sets of use cases. A use case is a very specific thing, and it’s kind of like, but they’re starting in the same they’re almost like different scenarios that you would be in that job. So jobs are sets of use cases, and so you can genericize it, but a job is about who, when, where and why. If I have those four things, I can figure out what, how and how much. But if I don’t have those four embedded in my use case, I’m screwed, because that’s actually where I get the trade off. So I got to have those four elements in what you would call your use cases.
Marcin Zaba
Is there a point at which you would take those five jobs and abstract up to a
Bob Moesta
No, I haven’t done that. The thing is, is you can from a vision perspective, but I’m a product person at heart. And so my thing is, I just want to know what to go build. And so I leave that for people like Claire and April, who basically know how to do positioning for the company versus position for the product. I’m not really good at the organizational level. I’m really good at the product level. So I’ve never done that, and more than happy to try it. But I, I don’t, I don’t know how to do that. Cool, right? Good question
Mark Littlewood
Before we go to the floor, are you happy that your questions have been answered without the old switcheroo?
Steven Toy
He’s the boss. In more case than one. Absolutely. Thank you.
Marcin Zaba
Good. Thank you.
Bob Moesta
All right, let’s open it up on product. Got a question over here.
Audience Member
Thank you, Bob. I’m going to make an apology
Bob Moesta
First time. I love it. I love the first time making a question. Thank you.
Audience Member
I’m going to ask a real 101, question, which is listening to you and talking about the engagement you have with customers. How do you create this framework, this mechanism, this this access to customers that you talk about? Because and how do you incentivize, if that’s the right term, customers to speak to you.
Bob Moesta
So the first thing is existing customers actually want to talk to you. They do. They actually don’t that most of the time they’re you’re checking in on them. They’re checking but nobody actually has a chance to have a higher level conversation.
The other part is that we, typically the frame we would wrap around is like, I’ll if I’m doing the interviews, like I know nothing about the business help me understand what happened for you to say, today’s the day you’re gonna buy this product. So you start almost as a novice, right? And then the aspect goes like, I have no idea how you got here. Can we just hear, you know, set the story. I have no set, set of questions. It starts very exactly the same way every time, which is, you know, we’re just doing very early research to get the language around why people decide today’s the day to buy this product. I don’t really know much about the product. I’m really here to hear your story. There are no right or wrong answers, and I’m going to apologize up front because I’m going to interrupt you because I’m curious and not rude. That is literally my opening statement that then lets everything go. And so from there, the other part is, I’ve more or less memorized Chris Bos book. Never split the difference, which is an interrogation method book, right? But ultimately, it’s interrogation that feels like therapy, because most people don’t understand and have not connect the dots between like, all of a sudden they bought something like, well, so tell me when this started. And next thing you know, it’s like, well, two years ago. And you’re like, Whoa, what happened here? And then it’s like, why the two year gap, right? And so part of this is to do that.
The other, the other secret I have is, I would say I use a place called Respondent.io which is a place that’s a panel of just millions of people who are literally willing to talk about anything. I literally did. I did diapers last week, like and it seems like it should be an obvious thing. It’s not obvious, and I have more than enough people willing to talk about it, right? The other thing is, I do incentivize them. I do pay them because I want them to realize that, you know, I I’m gonna say this, wow. How do I say this? I’m on stage. I’ll say I want. I want. This is my time, not theirs. And so when I cut them off, I’m cutting them off because I only have this much time with them, and I want to make sure I get everything I need out of it, as opposed to being rude to the customer, right? And so part of it is being able to manage that time and to get what you need out of it, right?
The other thing is, what I’ll tell you is, at the very end, if you summarize the story, they’ll literally just go like, Oh my God, you know more about me than my team, right? Because you’ve listened so much, and you’ve got to make sure you’re listening for the social, emotional and functional parts.
Marcin Zaba
I just add to that. One of the anxieties a user will have when they’re going into the interview, especially in the B2B context, is that they think that you’re going to transcribe everything they’re saying and use it for quotes on your website, as testimonials. And just caveatting that this is going to be anonymized. It’s just you for research purposes, right? We’re not trying to sell you anything. We’ll help them, put them at ease and, like, open up with more sort of emotional journey that that got them there, basically.
Mark Littlewood
Bob, shall we move on?
Bob Moesta
One more question.
Audience Member
I was wondering so we’re talking a lot about, basically, what’s the point that got someone to like do the job or to make this transition? Now, when doing it the other way around, say, I want to figure out why customers churn. I suppose the same method is applicable. I’m wondering if there’s any like recommendations that you have, because in our particular case, you’re running a B2B2C business, and I would try to figure out why the customers of my partners are churning and they are typically not in the best place when they do so.
Bob Moesta
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. You buy usually you have to pay them more, mostly double. It’s just a fact. But here’s the thing is, the crazy part of this is them leaving you is progress for them, because there’s something that your stuff is not doing for them, and so they’re making progress. So it’s the exact same interview. And so the bonus, though, is that churn interview, I get two stories. I get the story of why they came, and then I get the story why they left, right? And ultimately, by understanding it, growth comes when I get more people in and less people leave. And you gotta be able to do both. And to be honest, why people come to you is not necessarily why they stay. And so you have to realize the job for So, for example, people, people might come to you because of I gotta think of a they’ll come to you for one reason, right? Like you save them time. But ultimately they save because you actually make it easier. And so they move from one job to the other. And if you don’t do this other job, they move on. And so part is understand the portfolio of jobs that you have to do, your product has to do through their life cycle. So a lot of times the best place to start is with churn, because there’s a lot of pressure. People don’t know why they do it. They can’t see it, and by the time you’re done, you will be able to see all the variables in their behavior to say they’re going to churn in four days, and you can predict churn.
But part of is because we don’t have the right variable set. We don’t know how to do that. So it’s the exact same interview, by the way.
Audience Member
Appreciate it.
Bob Moesta
I think that’s the last question. Oh, wait, if you’ve got one, you do it. Go ahead. He’s kind of the kind time keeper. He’s trying to jester.
Audience Member
Trying to keep it quick. You said earlier on that, you know, if you’re trying to roll out Jobs to be Done somewhere else in the organization, and there’s no desire to do it, you’ll have zero success.
Bob Moesta
Zero.
Audience Member
I think you’re right. But then I kind of wonder, well, how do you get success otherwise? Because if you’ve got a head of marketing saying, hey, I really want the head of product to come on board, and I’m a product guy, if that wasn’t there already, like, how have you, How are you coping through that dissonance in the organization? Because if you’re asking customers up front, through your process, what it is they’re buying, buying your software for what role they’re doing.
Bob Moesta
There’s the answer. You have to create the struggling moment by highlighting a problem that they can’t solve right now. You actually have to create the space in the brain for your solution to fall into. If you give them the solution, it’s going to literally bounce off their head and go right on the floor. But if they have a problem that they have to solve, and they’ve literally tried to solve it two or three other ways, and they can’t now, when it hits them, it goes in that solution space. It takes a lot. It takes a while. But like this is we all think we should be efficient about it, but what I would say is, like being able to set up the context to make them pull it in, versus you pushing it into them is all the difference in the world.
Audience Member
I guess what worries me in that scenario is you’ve got a product team, by the sound of it, moving in a different direction to the marketing and sales side of the business, and that that would, that would worry me. So whilst the 0, chance thing, I get it, but it kind of feels like.
Bob Moesta
But this is where what I so I I’ve actually had this to be honest, in the last week or two, and what you find is that what you do is you get everybody in the room, and you start talking about direction, and you highlight the fact that you two are in different directions, and you need to negotiate it. So as the CEO, you can actually kind of create this struggling moment to say, I need alignment here. This misalignment is going to hurt us, and ultimately let them both learn each ways to do it, and then figure out how they do it. But don’t solve it for them. Just create the problem for them to go solve. Right? It’s very similar to Joe’s topics. What Joe said, All right, let’s thank these guys. Thank you so much.
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Boyan Ivanov, StorPool Storage: Jobs to be Done Sales Application
Bob Moesta
How are you Bo? So tell us a little bit about the business.
Bo Ivanov
So it’s a software company, as you would guess. We do, infrastructure, data, storage piece of software for mission critical users. If we lose their data, their business is gone in a day, in an hour. We haven’t implemented the framework, so we’re kind of using some bits and pieces, like the Duolingo example. How do we implement it? How do we start using it?
Bob Moesta
So that’s your that’s your first question. How do we implement it?
Bo Ivanov
Yes, in a practical term, if we have to, people don’t want to talk to us. You said, start with your customers. Okay? They said, We’re busy. Like we’ve implemented your product. It works. We moved on to other things, like
Bob Moesta
They won’t even talk to you.
Bo Ivanov
Usually no, unless they say something’s broken and they want to churn.
Bob Moesta
Okay so, so, all right. So maybe the first, the first place I would start was churn, right? Because churn, though churn is, is one of those things where as people are turning, the fact is, now you can get basically how they came to you and why they left. You’re going to have to pay them a lot, $200-$300 maybe for an hour’s worth of time.
Bo Ivanov
Whom? If we have to be five people, how do
Bob Moesta
I actually try to find the person who got you to churn? Because, that might not be the person who bought but the churn because, like, this is a case where, especially if you’re starting the organization thinks they’ve got the front end figured out, but they know they don’t have nobody thinks they have the back end figured out. So if you talk through churn first and learn enough and churn, then you can bring it back to the front end, if that makes any sense, right? And so part of it is then starting to interview what causes people to churn today?
So the whole thing is how do we actually make sure that we understand what caused them to leave and what they did? And that will actually that. But the other part is, when you’re in that interview, you couldn’t ask them how they got it. And if it’s the same person, that’s one thing. If it’s not, then you just ignore that data set. But ultimately, fixing churn will help you then understand that’ll be enough for the organization to go, like, we don’t know what that you know what we’re doing on the front end of the things. And it’s so it’s a problem where everybody can rally around. But also then it has kind of tentacles to the front end of the process.
Bo Ivanov
What if you’re turning very, very few customers, and usually they’re not a good fit, like we’ve acquired them in the early days, it’s like, so,
Bob Moesta
So the other thing is then to go to win loss. So you basically have a win loss thing. You go to people you lost, and again, you pay them $300 of why they lost, and have them tell the story of why you lost. It’s very similar. It’s just churn at a different point. It’s churn before the sale versus after the sale, right? So that would be a place where I would kind of look that. I think the bigger problem is, if they’re not even willing to talk to you, the thing is, is you’ve got to figure out how to make it worth their time to talk to you. And I typically will do interviews before hours after hours, like I might do them at night, so they can do them from home, right? And so they can do them after the kids go to bed. And I mean, I’ve gotten very creative in how to basically make sure that it’s worth their time and that we can get them so they can speak openly and honestly.
So that’s probably the couple places I’d start. The sales part, though, I think is really the important aspect of this is that we’ve talked about it’s for product. But the fact is, is this process, using for sales is just as important. Here’s here’s.
The thing is, I actually think the sales funnel is run by finance, secretly run by finance, not by sales. Why do I say that? When can I give a 20% discount. Goal? End of quarter, end of year. If my predictions are off, and I’m 20 and my rev share is going to be compromised, my prediction, I’ll be able to sell anything at any price just to get it done. And the reality is, like, if I just waited two more weeks, I could have gotten full price, but that, but finance, is literally pushing me to actually make the close. And so you start to realize that this is, this is the idealized way of how we want to sell people.
Claire’s got a great book called Forget the Funnel. Forget the funnel, because the reality is, if we just focus on how people buy and set up our sales process to focus on how they buy. It’s not how we sell. It’s not the same process. We think they’re synonymously. It’s kind of like, how do I teach versus how do I learn completely different processes. How do I sell? How do I buy? Completely different processes. And so part of this is to realize, so to me, another place to go with this is to say, how do I help my sales people? Because at some point they’re the ones who are literally trying to force people to buy. Convince people to buy. That’s what this is about convincing. This is about finding people who are ready to buy, right? And it’s a very this makes it so much easier that, to be honest, my experience right now, to date is, I say, when you focus on this is the process you need half the sales people. Sales people don’t like to hear that, but, but the reality is, is I don’t need so many because I don’t have to have so many people in the pipeline, because I know. Here’s the funny part. When we talk about a prospect, I need to know what’s pushing them. I need to know what’s pulling them. I need to know what anxiety, because at some point, as a salesperson, I got to understand all that to help them basically buy. That’s what goes into Salesforce. And so when you start to review accounts from that basis, you start to realize somebody who says, Oh, they’re going to close in October. I don’t have pushes, I don’t have any anxieties. I only know that they have this one problem, like, there’s not enough stuff there to help people do it. So there’s a book I wrote called Demand side Sales that literally helps convert it into the sales process. And to be honest, it’ll help you the most. And so another place to start, instead of churn, would be sales, and just do this for sales, and then sales will actually lead to marketing, and then marketing will lead to product, right? So to be honest, there’s many, there’s different starting points you can take, but I think I would try to find the place where the executive team as a whole can agree that this is broken and we need a different approach to it, and that, because jobs is one of those things that has so many tentacles other places, is to start where the biggest pain is or the biggest problem is.
Bo Ivanov
That’s good one, but it’s such a chicken and egg problem, because we say, Okay, our top of funnel is fairly dry, which means that our messaging is not very good, and people don’t resonate with it, because we’re doing company centric messaging.
Bob Moesta
But if you can agree to all that, then, then the reality is, if the messaging isn’t right, and again, Claire’s the person, you’re gonna take it is, right?
Bo Ivanov
It doesn’t resonate the teams or the product. People say,
Bob Moesta
I have the product, but you don’t have the marketing. It might be okay. Let’s start with this, with marketing, and get the positioning right. And it’s still gonna start with the same set of interviews, right? The key is to actually get product involved in it, and get sales involved in it so they can actually hear those interviews, because that common language amongst the cross functional group is what’s critical.
Bo Ivanov
What What about if we have a segment, and we think this is a our product market fit segment? But maybe we’re delusional, and there is a better segment that we have on the uncovered, with a better jobs to be done and a better messaging that goes with it. How do we uncover a stronger product market fit.
Bob Moesta
So that will actually come in the process of doing the interviews. So for example, at Intuit, one of the things they found is the really big market was basically small businesses that hated accounting versus their small businesses who love accounting, right? And most people build the build the their software for the accountants. And the reality is is most small business people dread accounting. And so the whole thing is, they built it to make it as easy as possible so you could do it yourself. Because if you’re going to hire somebody, you’re going to hire another painter, another baker, another whatever, not another accountant. And so ultimately, the fact is, is when you get to see the the portfolio of jobs you do, you can then start to look at strategically. So Jeff’s going to come up when we’re done, and talk about how we look at the strategically, but, but that’s, that’s the other part. Is, once you get the job, you get to choose who you want to serve.
And ultimately they’re like, I will say, in almost every case, there’s always a job that people hire your product for that you should just ignore, because at some point, you know it shouldn’t be there. It’s not designed for it. They complain a lot. They do all these other things is to be honest, like, like, and they’re gonna keep buying it, but it’s really nothing that has any growth potential and just like, but it literally is, like, the bane of your existence, but just ignore it, right? And what you realize is that so, for example, Intercom actually had four jobs, and eventually they just they focused on three of them to get to over a billion. And the reality is, like the one that that job they gave up was the one that they were near and dear to, was this, help me learn which was about the product people, but the product people were just a pain in the ass, right? And it turns out that it was easier to focus on these three other jobs, and so part of this is you don’t feel like you have choices, because you have you have an aspiration, but this actually helps you see the reality of what’s available to you so you can pick.
Do you have any others?
Bo Ivanov
I guess. Can you walk us through quickly? Like, yep, we haven’t implemented it. What should be kind of the first things.
We haven’t implemented the process. So how do we go? Like, can you briefly walk us through the steps so I can start running with it today? Like, send some emails and start organizing meetings. Crash course, I guess.
Bob Moesta
I think the first thing, the first thing I would do is I would start a book club and just basically, either grab one of my books or, I mean, there’s, there’s several different books, there’s competing against luck, there’s but to get everybody to read the book and then have explicit time to talk about it, and what’s the implications to the business. Because that’s the thing that’s going to kind of get everybody around the table to talk about it, right? And I think once they do that, you need to be able to frame kind of what’s the struggling moment you’re trying to solve, and what does progress look like? And then basically, there’s classes you can take to learn how to do the interviewing. But I would you. To be honest, it’s one of those things that once you start it, it’s going to move to other places. And so my thing is, is pick a team.
So, for example, I did this with a large company called Procter and Gamble, and one of the things they did is, the way they did is they gave each division a chance to basically work with me. And I’m not saying you have to work with me, but like, that’s how they did it. And then within six weeks of finishing that project, they had to replicate it with our coaching. And then basically after that, and they had three so they did four divisions, and then they basically had eight projects, or no, 12 projects after that, and then, basically after that, then they just have phone support. And so they have over 400 people who can do these interviews across the whole globe. And so part of it is basically starting with a case study and being able to tell a case study.
So one of my mentors was Dr Deming, and he would always say, the only way you’re going to get your organization to learn things is through Case Study Review. And so every engineer, every marketer, everybody had a responsibility in their profile to write a case study, one good one, one year, one bad, one the next year. So you could talk about learnings, but then they would have a glow, like a corporate learning or just a learning day, where everybody would share their case studies so they could learn from each other, because that’s how these methods will kind of get permeated. But I think starting would be getting people to get the language, start talking about struggling moments, start talking about the forces, and then frame a project, whether it’s in sales, whether it’s in marketing, whether it’s somewhere else, and then assess it. Do it, assess it, and then kind of repeat, that’s how I would think about it.
Questions on sales. We got one up there, one there, one down here.
Audience Member
Hi, I think this is relevant for sales, but forgive me, if not. When you’re selling software or the software product itself replaces people in the organization. So it’s a new tool. That means, actually the main narrative is you don’t need to hire as many people, or actually you’re doing cost reduction. So when it’s that sort of dynamic, how does the framework, how do you adjust, what sort of principles do to bring in to cater for that?
Bob Moesta
So this is the thing. This is the key. Is that 67 or 68% of all proposals go unanswered. So as a salesperson, I turn in a proposal, I have a one in three chance of people even responding to it, and that’s because we don’t actually give them the ability to make the trade offs, and you have to frame the trade offs explicitly. And so part of this is to realize that most salespeople just try to make the product the ideal situation, and they end up kind of screwing it up. But ultimately you got to, if you go with this path, then this is what’s going to happen. If you go with that path, then this is going to happen. And ultimately it might be the fact that we’re growing really fast. I don’t want to hire more people. This is about getting rid of people. This is about adding capacity, versus my staff is actually turning over, and I’m losing people. And I want to be able to, basically be able to make sure that, like, if I lose people, I’m not actually losing all this knowledge. And so at some point I can do it with less people and not have to worry. And so part of it is, is to think about the scenarios of where, like, it’s you’re thinking of a direct scenario of, like, I’m gonna have to fire this person if I buy this thing. And my belief is that I’m almost pretty sure I’ve never heard of that in real life. I’ve heard that in everybody’s mind, but typically they’re going to buy because they’re growing and they can’t find enough people, or there’s got a lot of turnover, and they need, they need a way to create stability. That’s how I would kind of answer that.
And so part of it is being able to the interesting part of that one is that you always need to give three proposals. Do you know why you don’t give anybody one proposal for God’s sakes? Because all it is is do do nothing or do me. And so all of a sudden it becomes a list, a back and forth, a plus minus list, and they still can’t make the decision, this or that, and it doesn’t work. The reason why you need three is this, if you give them three, what’s the very first thing you do? When somebody gives you three options, what’s the first thing you do? You throw out one. The moment you throw out one, you have confidence, I’m not going to do this. And then there’s two left. And guess what? They do? Do? They compare them to each other. They don’t they compare it to the one that’s out. And they realize, like, Oh, this one’s close. You know what? I’ll do? A, wait, wait. Why? A? Well, because I don’t want to do B and C and so hard part is, we don’t actually give people the ability. Contrast creates meaning. And if we don’t give them contrast, or the contrast is too big, they can’t make a decision. And so in sales, I’ve teach all the sales people to say, like you need to come back with, I can do this really fast. We can do this very, very measured, or we can do it with with a focus of transferring skill. Which one do you want? And they can eliminate, and they can choose, and they’ll always say, I want to do it the fast as possible. But if you do it fast as possible, then you don’t get this, this and this, okay, well, let me think about that one, right? Because trade offs is what it’s all about. Nobody has the ideal product. Nobody has the ideal situation. Your ideal customer profile, to me, is crap, because variation is everybody. We have to understand the context and outcome more than the just the people.
Okay, where’s the other one? Oh, yeah, you, you, you’re all right.
Audience Member
So it’s, it’s actually not a question. It’s building on your response to Bo’s question, which is, if I want to start this afternoon, yeah, where did we start? And you said book club recommendation. Absolutely agree with that. I would say there was a step zero, which is, send the team a video of one of your interviews. Because when I’ve seen this, like the spark land in an organization, yeah, it’s the response has been like, f me to watching you doing an interview. Just the amount of insight that is generated in 45 minutes. So you know, there’s videos of your interviews on the business software website. They’re all they’re all over. Just go watch. Just go watch. And that’s where the light bulb that really starts.
Bob Moesta
This is the this is the table that Ryan and I interviewed Nopadon and Nopadon had no idea he was buying time with his wife. He bought a car, and he hated ended up selling the car and bought a second car. And in the whole interview, he’s literally like, I don’t know why I bought the second car. And finally, it’s like, him and his wife are in the car a lot. And finally, it’s the point where now they can actually have great conversation in the car. And he didn’t realize he was buying a car for them. He thought he was buying a car for him. And ultimately he was able to. And it was like in the middle of the interview, he just went, Holy shit, right? It’s really good.
Mark Littlewood
One last one. Here is it, Sarah?
Bob Moesta
Doesn’t matter. Here we go.
Audience Member
I guess, on the theme of implementing this from scratch, can you kind of do it gorilla, as in, I get, like, the robustness of interviewer interviews and consistency. If you’re not sure, you’re going to get a lot of buy in in your organization. Can you do it quick and dirty? Can you do short interviews? Can you just get little bit of
Bob Moesta
What I would tell you is, I don’t try to shortcut the process, but I would shortcut the number of people, so I might actually go do a couple interviews by myself, just to understand and realize and get the language. Because, to be honest, it’s scary. Your first interview is scary because you think you can ask it, but like I tell you, have no questions, they’ll have 20 questions, and they’re looking at the questions and fumbling around the question. My thing is, you got to immerse yourself in the conversation and listen, it’s the So, the other so one is you can do it by yourself. I would tell you, it’s not ideal, but it’s a way that you can get comfortable doing it, right? But the thing to listen for is not just what they say, it’s what they don’t say and how they say so, for example, boy that was really good, versus Boy, that was really good. Yeah, same, same words on the transcript. Very different. Next question, like, when they pause and they go down, it’s kind of like, okay, what was wrong with it when they pause, when they don’t pause and they go up, that’s where they’re excited about it. Let’s talk about that. And so you start to realize, like, what I would tell you is to read Chris’s book, like mirroring and getting to, like, I ask questions that they’ll say no to, because when they say no, I can ask more. If I ask questions, they say yes to it’s done, right? So there’s a whole bunch of little things. So if anything, the real way to learn a gorilla style is literally talk to your family about shit they bought. Ask your mom why she bought a new pair of shoes. And you’re like, Okay, you got 47 pairs of shoes. Why do you need a 50th pair? Like, and you start to realize, like, oh, I want to be and you start to realize that’s an emotional release. And you start to realize it has nothing to do with the shoes, right? And so just interview people around everyday things to get to build the skill.
Mark Littlewood
And of course, in that scenario, no one ever goes, Oh, I don’t need that many peasants. Yeah.
Bob Moesta
The other, the other thing I will tell you is, do not do this on your partner, because they get very nervous, like, why are you asking me so many questions?
Audience Member
I already did that with management training.
Bob Moesta
So I would say, brother, sister, mom, dad, niece, nephew, friends, that’s fine, but partners, it’s it’s very dangerous.
Mark Littlewood
This is the final question. Welcome back, Stephen. It’s been a couple of years. So great to see you.
Audience Member
Hi. It’s not a question, actually, Bob, what was the name of the book? Again?
Bob Moesta
Never split the difference.
Audience Member
No, the other one. Chris. Somebody. Hey, Chris Voss. Chris Voss. V-O-S-S, he’s the name of the book is never split the difference. Oh, you said mirroring or something. Oh, mirror, it’s in it. Mirror that’s in the book. And it getting, getting to know, for example, is in the book, if you like. It’s their chapters in the book, right? It’s very good. It’s a good if you do, is it? Matt? What’s the name of the Masterclass with Chris Voss, so it’s worth 150 bucks just of drawing master class to take his class. It’s phenomenal.
Mark Littlewood
Okay, that’s great. That was a very good question, wasn’t it, to finish the session. Thank you. Bo. So just before we get Tall Jeff up, I have now seen 10% of the top 100 films of all time, having done another one this year I saw Godfather. I have a very low attention span and cannot still for very long. So I don’t see why anyone should sit down for two hours if he wanted the luck to stand up and stretch.
Bob Moesta
Just stand up stretch. He’s not wrong. This is where it’s uncomfortable. Reach to the sky, reach to the ground. That’s good. You’re tall. How tall are you? All right, 38 minutes, and then lunch.
Jeff Szczepanski, Reframe Technologies: Jobs to be Done in Organization Strategy
Bob Moesta
So our last sit down, Jeff, he is sitting he’s that tall. This is Tall Jeff from the previous conversation, just so everybody knows previous talk. So Jeff, Mark put us together. Yes, like I felt I was shotgun marriage. They kept trying to connect with each other about, like, what we would talk about, yes. And we came back to kind of three topics. One of the things is, is you run a very customer centric organization, and it turns out that we have very parallel lives in some cases. And so how did you become so customer centric?
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, it’s interesting story. So first of all, big fan of everything Bob does, and all the stuff you’ve done for the world, and like the readings with Clayton Christensen and stuff. It goes back. I’m getting pretty old now. It’s loose back to the early 90s, there was a really interesting paper by these two folks called Lanny and Phillips that talked about market focused organizations. And maybe get into some of the vocabulary stuff that was coming up before, I think we talked about customer centric. You know, the best way to understand it is really in contrast to something and so like, what does it mean, customer centric? And the thing that I really liked about their paper, and this is really early in my career, working with some really good marketing people that were kind of ahead of their time, and to some extent, this is, like the cutting edge back when I was talking to Demi and things like that. And they talked about the difference between customer compelled, which we know, at some level, is not necessarily good. We want to listen to our customers, but if we just do what customers say, this sort of takes some creativity element. There’s paradigms around how people try to solve problems versus a market focused organization, and so I feel like I’ve spent my entire career trying to understand the difference between market focused, customer compelled, right? And how do you justify doing something the same as or different than things that customers are telling you that’s actually in their benefit? And as you were just talking about, customers don’t actually know what they want most.
Bob Moesta
Yeah, they really don’t, especially going in right? But in hindsight, they can, they can, they can, they can talk about it, and we can actually see it. But like, for me, this is, like, I grew up on this model, like, like, as an engineer, like, system, system, system, everything’s a system or a subsystem or super system and but, and to be honest, all I saw was inputs and outputs. I never knew about the customer, because it was just like, here’s your requirements. As engineers, here’s the other part. As engineers, they usually give us, at least you’re he’s an electrical engineer. I’m an electrical engineer. I’m an electrical engineer. They just gave us problems to solve. So you would go to school and they’d give you all these really complicated electromagnetic field theory go solve this magnetic field theory problem and tell me how much force would be created by these fields, right?
Very, very like, to be honest, I was excited by all that stuff, right? But the reality is, when you get in the real world, there’s nobody there to give you problems. You actually have to learn how to frame the problems. And so you start to realize that we can start to optimize the system. But I end up over optimizing the system because I don’t take the customer account. And this was where I got into Deming. I met Dr Deming when I was 18 years old. He basically took me to Japan as an intern and taught me his method and thinking around, basically how to think about a system and a set of systems and customers, and what customers mean. And so ultimately, I understood, now, outputs have to go to customers, but what I didn’t actually understand is the word outcome. And for me, I had to go, I had to go deep on the word outcome, because it’s like, what’s the customer going to do with my product that they value? And ultimately, this was a quest for value for me. And so ultimately I could, I could optimize the system and not create value to the customer.
And so it turns out that I learned that value is a two, two legged system.
One is I have to one is, what are people willing to pay me? What they’re willing to pay me is independent of how I can execute. If we talk about the progress I want to make, I’m in this situation, I want to make this outcome. It’s worth that much to me.
Now the question is how do I engineer the system on the other side to actually do that job and make a profit? So there’s customer value and there’s there’s organizational value or enterprise value. And we have to actually realize they’re two completely independent things, right?
Jeff Szczepanski
And one thing, yeah, I’d like to add to that too, is we talk about value. But one of the thing again, this is this contrast in comparison is actually what we’re actually seeking in the end too, is, is differentiated value? In other words, obviously they get value from certain solutions they have. Everybody’s always doing a job through some way. And part of what we’re trying to understand is the differentiated value. And one of my favorite sayings around this is just problems are really solved in the best way, in the context that they’re presented. And I like to think of these frameworks as trying to figure out how to break outside of the leakiness of the abstraction and understand what it is that you’re really hearing based on the the information being presented. And yeah.
Bob Moesta
So one of the things that you and I had talked about was this aspect of chairness, right? Which is, which is the thing that kills an organization is abstraction to being too abstract. And so is it when everybody says, oh, imagine a chair, I can guarantee there’s nobody here thinking of the same chair. And if we all we all can agree what a chair is, and we can all agree on what the elements of a chair are, but we don’t have any real concrete meaning of that chair. And so how do we actually understand that? So how do you guys, you’ve talked about chairs, tell me how you use that in your organization, because it relates back to concreteness that we have to get to.
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah. So, yeah, it’s a really good one. Yeah, that the this chair, this idea, is a really important one. And the part of the, you know, understanding things in the context of just vocabulary. So we’re really trying to break down the words. And it was a thing in Joe’s talk about the scarcity versus the abundance. Thank you, the abundance of things. And the debate was actually about the definition of the word scarcity, if you think about it, right? And I think what Joe really had in mind was a different definition, which was more like false scarcity. It’s our brain being fearful, thinking time compression, must make choices, fast, survival mode, kinds of things. And we just have to realize this is going on all the time. I think constraint was the things that people in the argument, in the argument were actually arguing for.
Constraints are good, but a scarcity in mindset is not good but we were using the same English words. And so in an organization, you got to realize this is literally happening every day, and the more innovative or inventing you’re trying to get, the more this becomes fundamental to the solving the problem. It’s not about solving the problem. We can solve problems like engineers. If you present the exact present the exact right problem, we need to actually understand vocabulary first. That’s right. And so maybe to your question, like we literally and the first wave of things don’t use any words with any meaning at all to start the discussion. So like we have, you’re going to design a new type of interface or a new type of approach. Oh, that’s a type one solution versus a type two versus a type three, and not even in the Jeff Bezos sense of type one versus type two. And the idea there is we have no baggage now at this moment, and at the point we can start agreeing on what to call the thing we’ve been talking about for three days, three weeks, or maybe even three months. Now we’re starting to get convergence, and we’re all starting to have a common understanding of the word we were actually using, or the term we were using, and that’s your biggest battle, even in these customer interviews and stuff, is to understand the vocabulary.
Bob Moesta
And so you start to realize across whether you’re talking about the customer, you’re talking about internal technology is, is, clarity is, is kind of our friend. And it’s that trade off between taking the time to get clear and and moving. And what I will tell you is the number one. If you start to look at all the all the points where you have recycling and you basically, you know, have to re develop something, or basically, you end up down a rabbit hole you can’t finish it’s because you talked by each other.
The way I talk about this is what I call, there’s a dictionary problem and there’s a thesaurus problem. Now, as a dyslexic, I’m afraid of both of those books. I’ve never opened them ever, is more conceptual in nature. But the reality is, is, like a lot of times, we use the dictionary problems when we use the same word, but we have two people on the team talking me have different meanings for the same word, and so all of a sudden they agree, but when they go off to do something, they’re doing completely different things because they don’t understand no common definition.
The other one is this is actually more prevalent, is where we argue about the words when we’re actually using different words and they actually mean the same thing. That’s the Thesaurus problem, right? And so you end up spending like, you feel like, oh my god, we’re going round and round and round, and it’s round round because you’re actually arguing about the same thing, but you haven’t taken the time to slow down. And so part of the thinking around jobs to be done is, though, we do this with customers, we need to do this with the entire organization to understand the progress our employees want to make, the progress our customer wants to make, the progress the system is going to make. Like all of these things have to come together, and they all start with having a very, very concrete understanding of what’s going on. And so it’s taking the time to go from some abstraction down to some concreteness. And so this whole notion of design requirements, right? I learned it and you learned it the same way, which was, design requirements are solution agnostic requirements of what the customer wants to have done without any notion of how to do it.
Virtually nobody builds criteria that way anymore. It’s almost like, I’ll tell you what the product is, here’s what it does, here’s here’s the output performance of it, and then the assumption that those output criteria meets what the customer wants is virtually zero. And so we have to take the time to basically understand and we have to start from the right. Is that the right and move that way, because the clarity comes this way. The execution goes the other way,
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, the term we use it in Reframe is quality attributes. And as Bob was saying, just to put my own vocab there, to maybe help other people see the perspective is just these quality attributes. Again, are this idea of, we have this job? What does it mean to do it? Well, independent of the technology. And my favorite example of this, you know, because in software, it gets actually quite abstract. We have all these different features and dialog boxes and drop downs and different ways of doing things. In software, this gets very abstract very quickly. But if you think like automobiles, we can maybe more relate to. Quality attributes are things like handling, you know, smoothness of the ride. You know, how good is the ride? And we can see in different types of solutions, because of technical constraints, in a sports car, we were trading off the ride handling for one set of performance characteristics versus a cushy sedan that goes nice over the bumps. But you can even see in cars that the technology starts to creep into these ideas very quickly, where we talk about fuel economy, it’s a quality entry, right? Fuel economy more. Fuel economy better. This is good. But what do we say about electric cars all of a sudden? Right? And so as the technology is moving, what becomes possible to do these things are interdependent. We’re always seeking for the truth and these ideas of, what does it just mean to do the job well, for these different applications, these different segments.
Bob Moesta
So one of the things so I worked in the automotive for a long time, and we always got like, I want better fuel economy. One of the things we did is we just made a larger tank. Because what happened is people were really measuring fuel economy by the number of times they had to fill up the range. There’s a range. And so basically we just made more range. And people go like, Oh my god, this is amazing. I wanted to fill up once a week. And you’re like, Okay, that’s just cheating, but that’s their definition, right? And so that’s how things work. And so you start to realize, like, part of this is, as you start to step back from the technology, you find out new ways in which to satisfy.
There was one other topic, I can’t remember what it was.
Jeff Szczepanski
We did the probably talking about some of the horizontal last.
Bob Moesta
There you go. So one of the last things is, I think Bo you asked, like, how do you start, right? And one of the things that, again, we found just having talked is that most people we work with have very deep, vertical skills, marketing, engineering, product, right? But there are very few people who have horizontal skills. And this method is really one of those few things that helps you with the horizontal skills of integrating and aligning everybody. And so how do you think about kind of those horizontal skills and developing it from inside the org?
Yeah, I mean this, yeah, so many different places to dig into this one, but some of the questions and comments before you know, like, what practically happens in a lot of organizations where people talk about, you know, the product team not necessarily going along with the same thinking as the marketing team. And I mean, there’s so many different ways I put my coo hat on, and there’s one way to talk about this, which is thinking about what, you know, within the company, what people’s accountabilities are, but keeping that separate from their responsibilities. And I think one of the things that’s getting lost, and a lot of companies want to try to do this is we have to realize we’re all one team trying to solve the same problem, and we have to be working from common vocabulary. So like, my, like, the hair in my back of my neck goes off when you talk about product team, not participate in this process, because it immediately goes to, you know, thinking as a CEO now is, like, a leadership question, right? Like this is like, but there’s, how can they, yeah, people.
Bob Moesta
There’s a practical part of like that. They can’t start it all at once, right?
Jeff Szczepanski
Right. Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. So I think, yeah, my answer to that earlier question around you know, how do you get started? The first one is like, be talking to customers. And this seems really obvious and crazy to say, but if you’re really honest about it, looking at most teams, how many, what percentage of the people? On the team have ever really talked to a customer, and this is actually one of the things I hate about product management, or the discipline of the idea of the definition in organization of product management, or even marketing, for that matter, is that these are the people ordained to talk to the users or the customers, and that’s a massive loss of information, as exactly Bob was talking about in terms of the synthesis of the best solutions that thing are going to come from the technical people that actually people that actually understand the trade offs. But we don’t have, usually, in an organization vocabulary to talk about the trade offs in a way that’s independent of the solution space. And so Joel Spolska, I worked with a number of years at Stack Overflow, you know, he has a great blog post about this. Of you know, all abstractions are leaky. And the thing that we want to see that in our organization, that we’re starting trying to figure out from is what’s the abstraction that we’re going to operate the company in that we actually assume is essentially not leaky? Because we have to have some sort of foundation to start building everything up on, from first principles, our definitions at a very base. And what’s usually going on in organizations that have trouble communicating is that we haven’t built things up from that common foundation.
Or another way to talk about this in a kind of practical way, is if you’re thinking about your strategy and how you’re executing something, at the moment, there’s a disagreement about how to prioritize something. I’m going to argue that the strategy is not complete. So when we have two teams wanting to make different decisions, we actually don’t have a framework to talk about that problem in a rational way. The abstraction rate is leaky, and this is really the place to start. And it seems so counterintuitive to so many people, I just want the answer, like, what’s the requirements? How do we what’s the right feature to build? The competition is coming. You just have to stop. And actually, anybody gets hired at reframe. People come in, they’re very ambitious. They want to contribute, and they want to come up with some new messaging or improve something in the product, or figure out them. They figure out the next feature, and they’re all looking for things to ship, and I’m just like, stop. Like, don’t just start asking questions. I want fresh eyes on everything. You go and ask questions and be curious about everything you see. I’m not expecting you to do anything immediately, just to start learning, to start building up the context, to start drinking the water of our vocabulary, because the efficiency of us as an organization in arriving at and even seeing the limitations, what are we actually assuming within our leaky abstractions, within the broader abstraction? It’s the people asking the good questions that actually start to uncover this.
Bob Moesta
So that’s one of the reasons why I talk about jobs is it’s got the same rules as Fight Club, which is the first rule of jobs, is don’t talk about jobs. Talk about your customers.
And ultimately, you should make it your own language for your organization. There’s no best way to do jobs. It’s the best way is for your organization. So this is where the you know, most people want to be obsessed around jobs. What I would tell you is, just be obsessed around your customers, and think of jobs as one of many methods to get to know your customer and to know what they’re where they want to go, and how you can help them. But it’s not, it’s not the it’s not the panacea, the be all, the end all, it’s one of those things that ultimately, if you’re customer centric, you’re going to create all new methods. My belief is this method will be defunct in, you know, 20 years, because they’re going to find a better way to do it, and so like, which is all fine, but it’s ultimately, we’ve got to start over here, where, to be honest, as an engineer, I was tired to start over here, come up with the technology.
The greatest lie I was ever told was in engineering school, build it and they will. It’s a lie.
It’s not true, and I learned it the hard way. And ultimately, the way I figure out how to get people to come is to understand what they want, why, and it’s not even what they say. It’s the outcomes they want, because again, they lie to you and to themselves, not on purpose. That’s why this interrogation thing is so important, to really understand where they’re coming from.
Jeff Szczepanski
That’s another good vocabulary. And build it. If we knew what it was, it actually worked. That’s right.
Bob Moesta
So there’s times when we need abstract things to rally around, but then there’s times where we need very concrete things. And what I would say is, like, I exist to basically make the abstract concrete. That’s what I do for if I’m not doing that, I’m not, I should not be involved, because that’s my unique skill, and that’s really what I think we should really strive for, is being able to be more and more concrete, but not to the point where we’re so concrete we can’t, we don’t have any flexibility, right? Let’s open it up.
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, I got a question down here right, grab that Mark.
Mark Littlewood
So I have a very quick question, which is. No, tell me what you’re doing. I mean, what’s what’s really to just.
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, quick bio. So Jeff Szczepanski is my full name. Tall Jeff is my handle on Stack Overflow. And a number of places I really would like to find the guy in Twitter that has Tall Jeff handle. I’ve been trying to get it for 10 years.
But in terms of background, yeah, I actually I. Serial founder, I guess you could say we’re joining very early teams at various places. So I’ve been spent really the first half of my career as a engineer, I guess in today’s terms, would be like Head of Product, VP of engineering, CTO, kind of roles. And then really I spent the second half of my career more operationally. Coo, so my biggest claim to fame is building the business with Joel, the business behind Stack Overflow, the site, very big exit there, but across my various activities, at three successful exits on my fourth company. Now it’s called Reframe. If you really want to take a step back at the highest level of non leaky abstraction. Our mission is to drive human capacity. And we might put a few qualifiers on that the human capacity for knowledge work. And this is really about what do we use computers for, and how are they supposed to work? Just like the Xerox PARC days of people are familiar how the desktop, Gui, mouse, everything we use today and the current paradigms are invented. We’re really looking at everything that’s been learned over the last 50 years, since that was invented, basically in thinking about exactly what is next. What do we do to the desktop environment? What we call it reframing organized work environment is really solving the next generation. How does AI incorporate into the platform? And all the other stuff that we’re familiar with doing is what Reframe is all about.
Mark Littlewood
So just, it’s always good to find a really tiny niche to think.
Bob Moesta
So the notion is so many people are talking about AI, right? They’ve got the system, they’ve got the features, but they don’t understand the outcomes they’re going for. So he’s starting from, what are the outcomes we actually need to help people with? And then, how do I incorporate AI to help it, whether it has a or AR or not, most people don’t care, right? It’s like, just help me do my job better, faster, easier, right? And then so ultimately, it’s starting with those outcomes, and being able to see it from that perspective, that’s why it’s so interesting.
All right, we’re now open for questions. Bo, you get to go first.
Mark Littlewood
Who’s got the mic?
Bob Moesta
Bo, right? Bo is, well, going to grab for it, and he literally Mark five.
Bo Ivanov
Can you talk a bit about working backwards from outcomes to wrapping a business case. How do you go about measuring what is the value that the customer gets? Can we actually deliver it at a certain price point? Would it make business sense to have that business running?
Bob Moesta
Yeah, I’d love to hear your answer first, if it’s all right.
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, well, I think Yeah. It’s so hard to dig into this. And the best way, what’s the short answer here?
Well, the first, I mean, the first thing is, and this is what I was trying to say about taking a step back and getting sort of beyond the leaky objection. So I literally talk about, how do we increase human capacity for knowledge work using computers? Okay, now the next thing is obviously very vague and high level. So the question is, is, what’s the next level of success look like here? If you’re starting this output, I always try to imagine people okay, it’s five years into the future, and we’ve already accomplished what we wanted to accomplish in those five years. Look around and describe to me what you see, okay? And the more specific you can get, the more constraints to the previous point that we can apply, the better. Because this is just saying what success looks like. And now the question is only, how do we start working that back and breaking it into pieces? So we’re reframing, actually, this terminology it comes right from, like television shows we talk about the great driving human capacity over the long haul, in the same way that Moore’s law, which was really a strategy at Intel, for breaking the problem down and saying, every year and a half we’re going to double the number of transistors we got available. There was nothing magical about physics that said that was going to be happening. It was just an assumption to put into place of the design team knew how many transistors they would have in three years, six years, nine years, to start working backwards to make it predictable, exactly to make it predictable. And so we did the same thing. We that we talk about television series. There are seasons of reframe. We’ve defined four seasons out, but we’re actually in season one right now, doing episode one of the first season. What does that look like?
And so we’ve worked backwards from the brig thing. We’ve have a good idea of what these seasons look like. What we’re trying to do from a human capacity, not in terms of the actual technical approach. But what does this do for people from a human capacity level all the way down to this first episode, and then we go all the way back to what most people would call an MVP prototypes. Let’s just start to paint the path, and we can talk about users at every one of the steps in the journey. What are people really trying to do? And that’s that’s just basically doing the homework all the way back to what’s actually going on in their mind right today. What are their frustrations with a computer when they use it? And there’s a whole bunch of them that probably immediately jump to your mind. This, these two things at each end are the constraints that we want to connect in the middle.
Bob Moesta
So to me, to build on that. To me, the opportunity exists by having a demand side, basically a struggling moment that a customer wants to have something done with, and having a technology that can do it. And so ultimately, the business case has to include both the struggling moment, the progress and then the underlying technology that we think we can do. I can’t define an opportunity short of that, because at some point there’s there’s the opera, I’ll say the opportunity of the market, but the fact that the opportunity for us has. Include the supply side. And ultimately, how do we design for product market fit? And ultimately, it’s hard to do when I actually start with the product and then try to push it out to people, because then I’m just literally trying to find of the 8 billion people in the world who needs it, which is just a completely different game than, hey, I’ve got this group of people who are struggling with these things. What do we build for them, right? And so it’s very, very very different. And so part of is to make sure you’ve got both sides. Both sides have to be included in whatever you’re thinking is the business case. And so when you’re doing strategic framing jobs, is one of those things that we use as kind of to set in and say, Where do we want to go first? What do we want to do next? And it’s all comes back from the series of struggling moments that customers have. Because again, I’m going to say it one more time, is every time you solve one problem for a customer, you create a new, different problem that literally causes you to have to innovate again. So innovation is a perpetual machine, because at some point we’re always struggling with something new. There’s a list which comes off the list, the list just shifts up, and now there’s something else.
Jeff Szczepanski
Actually, I love that comment, because if you look at our seasons, season one, season two is about solving the problems that season one creates.
Bob Moesta
Exactly. But that’s how we think about the roadmap. Now, the roadmap shouldn’t be about what technologies we’re bringing. It’s what struggling moments are we solving, and can we see, based on this season’s stuff, what new problems we’re creating that we got to go solve.
Mark Littlewood
We’re gonna switch to the other mic, Mark at the back there.
Bob Moesta
Hold on, that mic’s not no, don’t do anything. They’re just gonna turn it on.
Audience Member
Is that better? There we go. I wanted to fiddle with it and fix it.
Bob Moesta
To our engineers, we all want to push buttons.
Audience Member
So question on jobs to be done? Yeah, so I will set up jobs to be done called and quite often, I’ve already started with the point that I might have given the guy discount to do the call, or it’s good will, and then I put Chika on the call, and she’s a very intelligent, articulate, articulate young lady. And my big worry on the call is that I put you on a call, and I don’t want you to be rude, but I want you to be absolutely candid and honest. And my worry is one, you don’t want to offend or you don’t want to offend Chika. And secondly, your actual reasons might not be quite as honorable and as sort of deep as you want. They might actually quite sort of shallow. So how do we get in the nicest possible way people to be totally candid and honest with us, rather than just telling us either what we think, either what they think we might want to hear or what they think they should be saying. How do we get to that sort of radical truth?
Bob Moesta
So the first thing is there’s a TV show that’s very, very old. Again, dating, you’ll understand, it’s a TV show called Columbo detective, right? And if you notice, he would ask a series of questions, and everybody would give him the answers that they expected to get, and then he’d literally walk for the door, close the book, and then he’d turn around and open the door and say, I got one more question, right? So the thing is, is most the time when you’re going into an interview, they’re literally their head is full of all the things they want to tell you. So the first thing you do is you let them vomit all over you, all the stuff. Oh my god, I love this. Oh my god, I love this. Oh god, you got to fix this. This is horrible, like, and finally, go when they’re when they’re done with and by the way, you ignore it all. You just don’t even listen. To be honest, all you’re listening for is their language. How do they talk about it? What do they say? And then from there, what you do is you basically say, All right, let me ask one more question. How did you get this product? And then there’s another 40 minutes after that, right? And so part of it is, if you don’t do that, they’re holding all this stuff in their head, trying to tell you why you’re doing these other things, and they seem distracted, so just let them vomit all over you, like, like, so what? And ask them just the basic product things, and they can’t help themselves, but once they get it all out, they have nothing else to say. They’re empty. Now you’ll get the real stuff.
Jeff Szczepanski
That’s kind of a uniquely British problem, by the way. I’m just joking. You guys are so polite about everything. We like to talk.
Mark Littlewood
Other mic at the front, I was talking to the magic sounds people so that you can speak.
Audience Member
So just wanted to come back to the previous point that we’re making, because it’s really interesting, the idea of having a vision and take it back to where we wanted. Yeah, but I’ve been trying to mentor startups and UX person, and so I’m trying to think about, think about what you want to complete, and then we figure out how we get there, but having an idea of what, of what you want, and that can come from, but this trend now of just being MVP, MVP and VP, we don’t want to even figure out what we want to do in five years, because what we’re going to be in five years is completely it’s not going to happen until we know what we want to do. And you said, Yes, that’s true, but still, you want to get a sense of where you want to be in order for you to build a thing, but it there’s, there’s a there’s a tension here that you see in the business. And I think, I’m pretty sure that people around here must have that attention.
Bob Moesta
I think, very bad answer to this one, but that’s okay. Okay. You go first, you give the better answer. I’ll give the bad answer. Maybe
Jeff Szczepanski
it gets back to the Colombo point. The first thing is, I think. We gotta realize we’re looking for truth. So like, in other words, if we’re just looking at the problem of, like, what feature to go next, and do we put this feature in or not? You know, that’s coming from the I guess, call it overly constrained case, right? So I think if we think of the interviews as just understanding what customers value, then it actually becomes a very real engineering sort of product process problem to figure out what’s the right order to build in, and then at some point, we just run into the realities that, you know, what’s the most efficient way to deploy the resources to take us on that trajectory? In other words, at some level, it doesn’t really matter so much exactly which one goes next. And the other part of this gets into the definition of MVP, where people think it’s like, build something quick, throw it against the wall to see what sticks, and then we’ll iterate from there. Yes, that’s you know, but what I would call that, another way to think about this is a reliance on physical experiments, which is, build something ship and see what happens, versus a reliance on thought experiments. In other words, develop a hypothesis and test it without building anything, by talking to people. And in the end, what we’re just trying to do is this is this is why we use the human capacity thing like Moore’s Law at reframe. We just want release after release to be actually increasing the capacity of people using computers. The exact technical approaches to get there is much more fungible. There’s a very plentiful way we can think about all the different choices there. And so yeah, that’s where the my thinking comes from.
Bob Moesta
My answer and I’m not a very big fan of vision, because most people do a very bad job at it. It’s about their internal vision and wanting to communicate it to others. And they’ll say, My vision is we have 10% growth. And my answer, because how do you how did you come up with 10% and they’ll say, I guessed. Okay, that’s not a reasonable do it like I gotta understand what’s available in the market. There’s a whole bunch of there’s a whole bunch of back story to actually create a vision. And most people take a back they almost think it’s a creativity exercise, as opposed to, to be honest, I take a very analytical approach to kind of go like, if this is happening and that’s happening and that’s happening, what will happen next? And so it’s about causation, to see the vision, as opposed to, most people take a vision and then try to work backwards to it when they don’t even know if the vision is possible or not. And if you actually have the causation behind it, then it actually becomes really tangible, and you can actually you’re you’re out of the pablum words, and you’re into the causal words. And so to me, it’s, it’s it’s it’s one of those things where people want to create a vision to make everybody feel good. But the reality is, like, again, I don’t know if I should be going 10% or 12% or 200% and most people are making that up. And that’s back to his point is, if we’re not dealing with the truth, then it’s just a bunch of like, you’re trying to put 10 pounds of shit into a five pound bag, and it doesn’t work, right? Sorry, that wasn’t too visual, but yeah.
Mark Littlewood
Thank you. We’re going to go back here.
I feel like we’ve got a slightly different problem to a lot of people in the room. We do lots of these customer interviews. I feel like I need to shake the product people a bit, because we now have a kind of situation where we have confirmation bias on these calls. So I’ll go on looking at a sales marketing angle, and they’ll go on looking at a product angle, and it’s almost like they’re using these calls as a way of just confirming something they want to build. And I want to just get them to start listening again to what’s really going on. So how would I go about doing that?
Bob Moesta
So I’m going to give you the single best question you can ask, especially when it comes to the product and feature, they’re going to go like, Oh, my God, I wish it had a calendar. Oh, we need to build a calendar, because they ask for a calendar, right? And the reality is if you ask, why do you need a calendar? Because it’s almost stupid to ask, like, Well, why do you need a calendar? But when you ask that question, it turns out like, I need a place and where to assign something and find a date and time. Well, I can do that without a calendar. And so you start to realize that what you have to do is, don’t think about the feature or the product, but when they say what they want, you got to ask, what could you do with it that you can’t do today? And that will actually get you past it. So you actually can find out five different ways in which to get them a calendar without ever building a calendar. You you’ve got, you’ve got a response to that one, or that’s a good answer.
Audience Member
So this is a really like, low level practical one. We are because our product is self serve, where by the time we actually have a customer’s, you know, name or a purchase, especially big purchases, it’s long time since they personally have a product. Honestly, even if we nab them quite shortly after the thing, we encounter the product. They encounter the product. We asked them, you know, about some of these earliest experiences, and they go, Oh, I have no clue. I probably Googled something, or maybe I saw it somewhere else, yeah, I have no idea, yeah. But you talked about asking a question, someone opening with, well, two years ago, I would kill for that problem. Any tips?
Bob Moesta
Yep. So do you want to go?
Jeff Szczepanski
Yeah, this is definitely your area.
Bob Moesta
I figured how to ask before I go, yeah. So think of like chewing gum. Most people can’t tell you when they bought a pack of chewing gum. It’s just like it happens in the moment happens. But if I ask people about when they chewed gum and how they distributed gum, then I can actually see their inventory strategy of how they buy packs of gum. So I started with basically understanding, when do you chew it? It turns out there’s, there’s a there’s a job around what we would call a gum giver, somebody who literally offers everybody a piece of gum because it’s a social cue. And you start to realize, like they buy packs of gum, and they have five or six packs in their bag that they’re literally always they’re a gum dealer. And you start to realize, but then eventually we could get to, oh, here’s the thing, and ultimately, here’s the package we need to change, here’s the flavors we need to put together. Here’s but we had to start with they couldn’t remember one iota of anything that they did. So started with the little hires of, when do they reach for the tool? When did they go for it? And then, ultimately, that’ll help you see the bigger hire.
Audience Member
That’s yeah. So that was the thing. It was all of that is about the little higher, yeah, by the time you talk to that and they, they like you, you’re correct. I totally get why you break up the stages, yep. Like, isn’t there a danger that they’re only telling you about that part of the process, the thing you desperately want to know about is the stuff they profess they can never remember. It’s a different process.
Bob Moesta
So think of it as like the I think of the memory as almost like something that that it’s actually all there. You just need to give them enough time to access it. And so by recalling them about the when they chewed gum, they’ll actually start to remember when they bought gum. And so it starts to leak into other things, but they can’t, for the life of them, remember when they bought a pack, until they were in a moment where they wanted to chew and they didn’t have any, right? And they’re like, Oh, I gotta have and so then you start to learn about their inventory strategy and how they inventory, right?
You don’t need to, you don’t need to get into the headiness of how they learned it. It’s like, what do they do? And then ultimately, how did they feel, like they fear.
The other part is to learn about competitors, because sometimes it’s easier to study a competitor, because they can’t talk about you that. Well, right? I was gonna say there’s one other thing, one other strategy I have, which is, so, like, I’ve had people do diaries, like, so if it’s a product that’s that they’re migrating to, is like, ask them about writing a diary and then just come back and have them talk. So they almost have a way of which recording kind of moments where they’ve used it, and then come back and ask them about it, right? But, but they’re not, you don’t want to do a survey to them, because at some point I don’t even know the questions to ask. I just want them to actually almost have a like, I remember, a memory of, you know, basically, somebody saying, I’m standing in line at Target. I didn’t eat lunch. I smelled the popcorn, and then I realized, oh, you know what, if I take a piece of gum, I won’t eat the popcorn, right? And so that’s, it’s all of a sudden, let’s talk about that moment, and we can learn about things, right? So I think that there’s different ways. There’s also a so there’s, there’s a recency bias, so like, if it’s too too close. So a lot of times, like, for example, I can talk about a house purchase, I can talk about going to college, because it’s so emotional and so big, but like, packs of gum you up, I’d have to actually, or, you know, things that are smaller, that they don’t that kind of almost fit in day to day life. You have to do it much closer to the actual purchase. That’s, that’s my experience on that one minute and 30 seconds. Look at this I’m on. This is the, by the way, first time I’ve ever been, I wouldn’t consider we’re not done yet. Never mind.
Mark Littlewood
This is the Colombo close.
Jeff Szczepanski
I was gonna throw one thing quick, that maybe is an interesting theme going at least in the back of my head. And if it makes sense, everybody around the last two questions, which, you know, it’s like the confirmation bias, things getting people’s heads. I talked about the difference between thought experiments and, like, the physical experiment. Obviously, when you’re going out talking to people, that is the experiment experiment, but you’re coming to it with a certain hypothesis. And, you know, so in other words, when people look at this, they think of doing these interviews and trying to actually get to statistical significance, and actually think of that as being the wrong question, because if you come to it with this idea that there is a job out there that we believe people are hiring us for, at least that’s why we’re talking to them, there are these quality attributes, different axes of goodness around doing that job. Well, okay, it only takes one interview to disrupt the model, right?
Like, in other words, all of your users around that job should have different trade offs of like ride quality versus fuel economy versus these different things that they value. And when people are going with a confirmation bias, they’re just looking to hear something about a feature or a particular idea in there, I suggest that flip it around the other way. I only need one data point to break a hypothesis about what we believe is good about those trade offs of those. Things given the constraint. And so if you go at it curious from that point of view, now you’re starting to get to the universal wisdom around the shape of the market, around the job of those people.
Bob Moesta
Yep. Awesome. Thank you. The one thing I would tell you is the way a different take on that is, I believe jobs we’ve done is hypothesis building research, which is I go into it with all I know is they had a behavior change. I have no idea why. And out of that, I can build a lot better hypotheses than me sitting in a conference room trying to guess why people bought my product, because I can guarantee you, I will be wrong every single time. Yeah, no.
All right, the last question, here we go.
Audience Member
It’s actually not a question. Again, you’ve actually talked about this in terms of retrospecting on why a customer buys a product. Great, but this can also be used to future. SPECT, yes, you’re actually what you’re actually trying to identify in most of these cases to get the best value is the underserved needs of the market and what jobs your product could do. That’s right in future. And I think a lot of the questions and the topics of conversation they’ve just gone gone through have been very much on what, how do you know what question to ask? How do you how? How close do you have to be to the purchasing purchasing decision? Well, there doesn’t actually have to be a purchasing decision, because you can be future expecting on this.
Bob Moesta
Well, here’s the thing, is that what I would say is, at least, the way I look at it, is that the future is an extension of the past. And so I do interviews of the recent past to understand the variables that are causing people to buy so when I look forward, I can see where they’re going to go, but I can’t, I can’t possibly look at the future without understanding the connection to the past. So 10, I don’t do 50 or 100 interviews. I do 10 interviews to get that language, and then, to be honest, I can turn into a sales system to say, like, when this and this and this happen, they’re going to buy. So if that’s the case, how do I help them get to this and this and this? And so you start to realize the ladder that you have to build. But I can’t do these interviews with prospects because they haven’t gone through the whole process and they haven’t made the trade offs. Typically, most prospects are raising their hand, and they actually are active looking, and they’re kind of like, I kind of think I want this, but they don’t know. And the fact this is, this is where, like, when I build houses, people would say they want, you know, energy efficient home. They want to ask, but they call ENERGY STAR home. Everybody said they wanted it before they bought a house. But nobody bought nobody ever bought it. They all bought the finished basement, which is the same price. And so you start to realize that people say one thing, but do another. And so that’s what you have to be careful of when you do that.
Audience Member
I think that’s fair. I just I guess you can, in any scenario, a job is being done, and you’d like them to hire your product to solve that job, but they’re probably solving it some way already now. So providing you’re open enough with questioning, you can still get your high quality data points out of it through prospective, prospective customers, or general market.
Bob Moesta
I find it very tough, because they just don’t have the language to articulate what they really want. And by the people who’ve done it have actually have that, but I hear you, and to be honest, I know people who have tried to do it that way. It’s just, it’s it’s not as deep as it needs to be, that’s all, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a place to start for sure. That’s it. Time’s up.
Mark Littlewood
This is a place to end for sure. Fabulous. Thank you.
Bob Moesta
co-Founder, The ReWired Group
Entrepreneur, innovator and ‘the milkshake guy’ from Clayton Christensen’s famous example of Jobs-To-Be-Done, Bob was one of the principal architects of the JTBD theory in the mid 1990s.
Bob is the President & CEO of The ReWired Group and serves as a Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. A visual thinker, teacher, and creator, Moesta has worked on & helped launch more than 3,500 new products, services and businesses across nearly every industry, including defence, automotive, software, financial services and education, among many others. The Jobs to be Done theory is just one of 25 different methods and tools he uses to speed up and cut costs of successful development projects. He is a guest lecturer at The Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Check out Bob’s other talks here.
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