Bob Moesta recently appeared on the”Brand Labs Series Podcast”, hosted by Brian Walker and Natalie Pyles. On the show Bob gave an overview and background of the Jobs to be Done Framework and used it to explain how people shop and why people buy.  You might remember Brian as the Mattress Interview Guy who was interviewed by Bob and I at a Switch Workshop at Basecamp’s Headquarters in Chicago.  The Mattress Interview was featured on JTBD Radio and was later immortalized in Clayton Christensen’s book Competing Against Luck.

Below you will find:

• A full overview of Bob’s appearance on the “Brand Labs Series Podcast”.
• Some quotables from Bob.
• Show Notes:  (with a link to the podcast on Brian’s blog)
• A full transcript of the interview.

Enjoy!

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Interviewing a consumer or decision-maker about a purchase that they’ve made is one step involved in uncovering Jobs-to-be-Done insights (if you’re new to the framework, check out this video on jobs-to-be-done basics).

We ask some strange questions when we interview.

To people overhearing the conversation the questions can sound way out-of-line or uncomfortable.

To the person being interviewed the questions are straight-forward but require thinking, focus, and memory recall to answer.

The questions have a specific purpose though: understand the causal factors that led up to the purchase, so we can use that information to make products that people want to buy.

When product people start learning Jobs-to-be-Done and first hear an interview conducted, their first question is, “why are you asking about those things,” and after hearing the explanation, “how can I learn how to ask similar questions?”
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This is the best introduction to Jobs to be Done on the internet.  After watching you will:

• Understand the basics of the JTBD framework: Why JTBD is important for your company and an explanation of the Forces of Progress and the Timeline.
• Have experienced a live JTBD interview: with an audience member who recently purchased a pre-owned Volkswagon Jetta.
• Seen a brief interview Debrief & Analysis: examining the interview through the lenses of the Timeline and the Forces of Progress.

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A simple explanation for those interested in the theory of Jobs to be done and how they can apply it to their products.

“Understanding a product’s actual job makes improving the product easier.
Clayton Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School talks about the job to be done. View more of the series at http://phoenix.edu/lectures.”

As Jobs-to-be-Done continues to gain popularity in the SaaS community, many founders and product teams are struggling with the same question:  

“How do we apply JTBD when there is no purchase?”

A conversation that I have on a weekly basis goes something like:

“My team at Slack is in charge of video and voice chat.  We launched the feature and it’s going well but some users have tried it and keep using it, and some users have tried it once then stopped.  We’re working to improve the feature and grow adoption, but we want to make sure we continue to please our loyal users, while also converting more trial users to adopters. How can we figure out why people are switching to the feature so we can understand how to improve it based on the jobs that it’s hired to do?”

We tend to use large consumer purchases like buying a car to teach jobs-to-be-done, so feeling uneasy about applying it to the adoption of a new feature is natural if you haven’t done it before.

The conversation with the Slack team is fictional, but the anxiety is real. I’ll use the new Slack feature as an example to lay out three steps that you can take to ease your anxiety and get ready to push forward with your project. >>Read More