Jobs To Be Done: Rookie Reaction
Customers are the most important people at your company.
And at a startup, first customers are equally as important to a young company as the founders, the funders, and any early team members.
Your first customers are taking a giant leap of faith. With their purchase, they are saying to you: “I believe your product will solve my problem and help me make progress.”
Customers are hiring your product to do a job they need completed.
For a couple of years now, I have heard my colleague, Nick, talk about how he believes that a framework called Jobs To Be Done can help product and company builders unlock future customers and understand how current customers are actually using your product. In essence, the framework helps you find out what job customers are hiring your product for.
Sounds simple enough — you talk to your customers, unpack their stories, their struggles, and how certain forces are pulling them towards, and pushing them away from, making the progress they seek.
Next, you put together actionable items based on the job your customers are trying to complete, and then steer your company towards helping your customers complete the job or jobs.
Earlier this year, a perfect opportunity came up for Nick and me to try and run a set of Jobs To Be Done interviews on a company we were helping out.
The company was kind enough to grant us permission to reach out, organize, and run JTBD style interviews with nine of their recent customers. This was my first opportunity to conduct a JTBD session in the wild.
Nick had much more experience and knowledge about the Jobs framework than I, and I definitely didn’t want to be the one who sank our ship during the interview sessions, so I tried to at least give myself a chance by putting together a crash course in JTBD before the interviews.
I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous — just enough to fool myself into thinking I understood what the JTBD process would be like. I was a JTBD kook.
PRECONCEIVED NOTIONS
Years ago, I read the The Innovators Dilemma and that led me to Clayton Christensen’s classic “milkshake hire” example. However, that was where my knowledge of “Jobs” started and ended for many years.
Over the past couple of years Nick and I have had many conversations about the power of Jobs, but aside from those conversations, and sometimes falling down the Signal V Noise web rabbit hole of knowledge, I knew very little about, and had zero real world experience with JTBD.
Even worse, in the back of my mind, I probably thought this whole JTBD thing was too academic to be practical. From the outside, it all appeared JTBD might be more theory than action. Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, right?
Despite my preconceived notations, there was one thing that was never in doubt: Companies need to be customer obsessed from the very beginning of their existence. Being customer-centric and spending lots of time talking with actual people that have purchased your product or service just makes an incredible amount of sense.
CRASH COURSE IN JTBD — GO!
In order to prepare for our interview project, I download Alan Klement’s When Coffee and Kale Compete. It’s an incredibly quick-reading book that focuses on real-world JTBD examples and, at least for me, was super easy to digest.
I remember Eoghan McCabe and Intercom being mentioned in the book. On a previous project, I was introduced to — and became a customer of — Eoghan’s Intercom software, and I felt it was a really brilliant product and service. Intercom is a business sitting in the middle of a highly competitive field (customer service), and live chat help products that have been around forever, and yet it has thrived. Furthermore, I really loved the Intercom product almost from the start, because as it turns out, it was doing the job I hired it to do.
Jobs to be Done focuses us on these nuanced problems that arise in people’s lives. If you understand the nuances, you can then understand the specific criteria that the product must have. And then you can focus on building a product that fits those criteria and solves those problems. Anytime we want to build a new product or a new core feature in a product, we’ll actually write out the job to make sure we understand it.
— Eoghan McCabe Founder of Intercom
The second thing I did, at the behest of Nick, was take the online course Mastering Jobs To Be Done Interviews with Bob Modesta, Chris Spiek and Ervin Fowlkes.
Those are the Re-Wired group folks, and together with their colleagues, they have developed more than 3,500 products in the past 30 years.
This is THE playbook for running JTBD interviews.
The course left me feeling more comfortable with the task at hand. At the very least, I now had a process, some language, example questions, stories, and executables for co-running a JTBD interview session.
THE JOBS SESSIONS : CUSTOMER INTERROGATIONS
In September, we spoke with 9 recent customers, for ~45 minutes each, over a period of three days.
In my mind, the first product bar we needed to pass was: “Do these people connect enough with this recently purchased product to not only schedule a phone interview, but to also actually get on the phone and talk about their product-buying experience for close to an hour?”.
The answer, at least for our product, was a resounding yes. Of course, we enticed them with Amazon gift cards, but from their communications, you could feel these customers wanted to talk about their purchases.
At this point, still in the pre interview phase, things didn’t seem all that different from user interviews and focus groups I had been a part of in the past. However, I knew from watching the JTBD masters at work during their video class that it would be, or should be, different if we executed the interview sessions correctly.
My personal experience with customer (or user) interviews was akin to the Pied Piper control group experience, as seen on HBO’s Silicon Valley.
In scenarios like this, you are talking to users about the product, and noting each specific answer. However, at least in my experience, your aha moments can end up much like Monica’s revelation about Pied Piper in the scene above.
Anytime you talk to customers, or potential customers and users, you are learning. No doubt. However, the JTBD interview framework goes far beyond these typical user interviews or control group subjects.
First, the setup is completely different. You are interrogating your customers one at a time, and establishing a timeline — not casually chatting with them about the product or service. Oh, and you’re definitely not hyper-focusing on features or how your product works. Yes, interrogating your customers sounds pejorative, but that is what you need to do to get the real purchase timeline and story.
Second, you are trying to drill down and unpack individual stories and emotions that led the customers to your product or service. Could it be the weather? Time of day? Leave no stone unturned! Finally, you are after the job, always — poking around, asking detailed questions, and listening not only to what the customer says, but also listening to the words the customer uses to describe actions taken.
The JTBD interview sessions are much more like this scene, from HBO’s True Detective. You are listening to your interviewee talk about things that might seem completely unrelated to your product or service, and trying to sift through what they say and figure out what actions they took and why. What progress were they attempting to make in their lives? What are they firing in order to hire your product or service? All the while listening for kernels of the four forces, and putting all this together in a story timeline.
The Pied Piper user focus groups are literal. The True Detective style jobs interviews are figurative. At least that was my interpretation, and that is how we ran our nine JTBD interviews.
THE JOBS SESSIONS : AFTERMATH
We learned an incredible amount from each customer interview. Every customer told a different story. These stories were full of surprises, patterns, and conflicting recollections.
Each and every customer is simply trying to make progress in the confines of their own circumstances.
These customers have goals they are trying to accomplish. They have jobs that need to get done. And they are always actively and passively looking to hire products and services to complete those jobs (and fire other products and, or services in order to make room for the new hire(s).
What we really tried to home in on is the progress that each customer was trying to make. Considering their given circumstances, what was each customer hoping to accomplish with this purchase? The answer to that question is the job to be done.
In the aftermath of this process, I started to make a list of things the Jobs framework can help you accomplish as a company. This list will no doubt grow over time as I learn more about JTBD:
Jobs forces you to have actual conversations with actual customers
Jobs will help you understand what your customers aspire to achieve
Jobs will help you understand what forces are pushing and pulling your customers
Jobs will challenge current assumptions you have about your product, your market, and your competitors
Jobs can help you launch a new product line for your business
Customer adoption is crucial to all products and services, and the JTBD framework helps you figure out the mysteries of why some customers might flock to your product and others might not.
With experience, we will continue to get better and better at zeroing in on the job to be done.
