Listen now (70 mins) | Brought to you by Sidebar—Catalyze your career with a Personal Board of Directors | Merge—A single API to add hundreds of integrations into your app | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments — Bob Moesta is the co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework, a close collaborator of Clay Christensen, and CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group. He has helped launch more than 3,500 new products, services, and businesses and built and sold several startups himself. He is also a fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute and a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. In this episode, we discuss:

I think 1 of the biggest misconceptions around jobs to be done is this notion that it's pain and gain

When you hear somebody's story and it seems irrational, like, well, I feel, oh my God, that's an anomaly.

But what you realize is that the context makes the irrational rational.

So the moment you hear a story and you go, I can't believe that, 9 times out of 10, it's because you don't have the rest of the story.

And so part of it is being able to understand the rest of that context that would drive somebody to say, like, why would somebody cut their arm off?

Well, if they're in this situation and this and this and this, like, there's nobody who would say they want to cut their arm off, but in certain situations, you'll do it.

And so that's what we're trying to do is find where will people change behavior?

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences, building and growing today's most successful products.

Bob is the co-creator of the Jobs to be Done framework alongside Clay Christensen.

And as you'll hear at the top of our conversation, is maybe the most anticipated guest I've had on based on the LinkedIn response.

Bob has started 8 companies and is currently the co-founder and CEO of the Rewired Group and currently spends his time helping companies of all sizes unlock hidden insights and create successful products and services.

In our conversation, we get deep into all aspects of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.

How to apply it to your product when it's not a good fit.

How to interview customers to get accurate insights into their struggles.

Plus examples of how Jobs-to-be-Done works for 0-to-1 products and a ton more.

Thank you to everyone who suggested questions and topics for our conversation.

Enjoy my chat with Bob Mesta after a short word from our sponsors.

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I wasn't even super familiar with you before we started organizing this podcast chat.

And then as you saw, I posted on LinkedIn what questions people had for you and around jobs to be done in general.

And I've never seen so many comments and questions and so much passion for guests I had on.

I think there was over, absolutely, there was, I don't know, 130 questions and comments.

And like folks like Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, and Des from Intercom came out and just like, I am excited for this episode.

They're great people and fun to work with.

I just had no idea there's so much passion for Jobs to be Done.

I have a million questions for you, a lot of them coming from the audience, some from me.

So I'm excited to dig into a lot of this stuff.

Okay, so I thought it'd be useful just to start with the very basics briefly, just what is the simplest way to understand the jobs to be done framework?

I think the easiest way to think about it is that I'm an engineer, I've basically, electrical basically, I've been building product for almost 30 years, And 1 of the lies I was told growing up was, build it and they will come.

And so we always think about it from a technological point, how do I build this thing?

And what I realized very early in my career is that it didn't work, I couldn't make it work.

And so Jobs to be Done is this whole premise is that people hire products, right?

They don't buy them, they hire them to make progress in their life.

And if we can take a step back and look at it, we see it in a very different light to realize like at some point they're in some context and there's some outcome they want.

And if we can understand that, we start to realize that different things compete.

Simple example is, think of Snickers and Milky Way.

They're both candy bars, they're both bought in the checkout aisle.

They're both made almost with the same ingredients.

But and if you start to compare the products and like do a competitive benchmark, you know, you start to get to one's a little softer, one's a little harder, one's got a few more calories, one's got a less calories.

But when you talk to people about when's the last time they ate a Snickers, right?

And when's the last time they ate a Snickers, right?

And when's the last time they ate a Milky Way?

You start to realize that Snickers typically is a case where they've missed the last meal, they've got a lot of work to do, they're running out of energy, and they want to basically get back to the task as fast as possible.

And so you start to realize that Snickers is about almost like a meal replacement, right?

And it's about the stomach is growling and things like that.

And you start to realize that if they didn't have a Snickers it competes with a protein drink, It competes with a Red Bull, a coffee, right?

But a Milky Way typically is eaten after an emotional experience.

And it's taking time to regroup after this emotional thing.

And you start to realize that it competes with things like, you know, a glass of wine, a brownie, and to be honest, a run.

And so you start to realize that Jobs helps you see the true competitive set from what we call the demand side of the world, as opposed to the competitive set from the supply side of the world, which is the technology or the underlying business model by how which we're making it.

And so it allows you to actually see what customers really want, as opposed to trying to figure out how do we sell things to people.

To maybe follow up on this example a bit, how often do you find these jobs emerge after they've developed a product, like in this case, I guess, if Snickers or Milky Way, how often is it just like they see this problem and actually apply this approach even accidentally?

What's interesting is that, at least for me, the thing is what I learned was that supply and demand are not as connected as everybody thinks.

Most people think they create a product and that creates demand.

But the real thing that if you start to study causality is that a struggling moment causes demand.

And you start to realize that in some cases that struggling moment exists and can exist for a long time and nobody solved it.

So 1 of the companies I helped was Southern New Hampshire University and Paul LeBlanc.

And 1 of the things in 2010, we found basically these anomalies, these people who were going to school but not actually coming to class and watching everything online.

And the anomalies basically, and they're paying full price, they didn't want to come.

It was very, for Paul it was kind of like, why are they doing this?

And when we went to study them, we realized that they actually had a very different job than a typical 18 to 24 year old because when they're a little bit older typically they had either already had a degree or they basically had tried to go to college and it didn't work and it was about basically time now that they had responsibility to do something new and so you know then they didn't actually build the product at all.

And as they started to look and say, how many people want to go back to school but can't?

They started to realize it's not a thousand people.

They're 1 of the largest universities in the world.

And so it starts, all of this starts with a struggling moment, not with a product.

And so that's what we mean when we're customer centric is that we're studying the struggling moments they have and that people like Intercom and Basecamp, they look at struggling moments and that, that becomes their roadmap.

So they don't actually, because again, think about a roadmap.

I'm literally trying to tell you what I'm gonna build in the next 24 months, for example.

But like, none of us saw chat GPT coming.

And so all of a sudden, I have to go undo the roadmap.

But If I talk about the struggling moments that I'm trying to go after, all of a sudden I realize that the roadmap is now, when I get to that struggling moment, there's multiple ways I can solve it.

So instead of just talking about features, it's typically talking about features for the first 90 to 120 days, but after that we just talk about struggling moments, because that's the seed for real innovation and basically where new products come from.

To unpack the framework a little bit more, if you were to come to a founder and tell them, hey, you should be paying attention to struggling moments, I feel like all of them will say, yeah, we know that.

So what I'm curious there maybe is just what is maybe the right way to do it.

Most of what we're taught in business school was pain and gain.

It's the fact that I didn't eat lunch before.

The fact that I still have a lot of work to do, the fact that I have this podcast going on.

It's not that I'm in pain, but it's the context that makes me value this in the moment that much more than something else.

And so part of this is it's not just about pain and gain, it's about context and outcomes.

And so when you frame it that way, it becomes a vector, a vector of progress or a factor of intention of what they're trying to do.

And once we frame that, then we can actually wrap technology around it.

And the crazy part is that I was always told or taught, if I build the best product, it will sell better.

And what I've learned is that actually a kick-ass half is better than a half-ass whole.

But the reality is like, if you look at QuickBooks, QuickBook is half the features and double the price.

And you start to realize that at some point in time, it's about meeting customers where they are, not trying to wow them and not trying to convince them.

They convince themselves to make the progress.

I'd like to understand this vector piece more because that feels really important.

So you're saying that it's not just there's a pain point, solve that.

What you're saying is what's even more important is this context around that pain point and things that precede it.

So, so, so if, if this is, So the first thing is we don't ask, we don't talk to people who just want to.

For people listening on the podcast, Bob pulled up a drawing, so you should try to check out the YouTube video of this to see what he's doing.

So there's some product A is the old product, and there's some product B, which is the new product.

And ultimately, people don't randomly do anything.

And so the real heart of the method of jobs because I understand the causation of what pushes people to say today's the day I gotta do something different.

And the push or the context they're in has nothing to do with the new product.

It's the only reason why they would leave the old product.

And if there's no push, they can't even see your product because we're creatures of habit.

And so as soon as I have a push, I call that F1, force 1.

Then I create something called F2, which is basically the pull to a new outcome, a new state, a new thing, right?

And so at some point in time, it's like, I have to be in this situation and I have to want this outcome, right?

But here's the other part, is that there's this waterline that there's these other forces and there's 2 other forces.

Every time I show somebody something new, it actually creates anxiety, right?

And then the other thing is I have to get them to leave old thing.

And what you start to realize, and I call that f4 and as if f1 and f2 are not greater than f3 and f4 they're not gonna move they're not gonna do anything.

It's a ultimately what's what we're doing is we're framing the market as a system of behavior.

And most people say if I just add more features create more people will buy.

It's not true More features create actually anxiety.

And what you start to realize is if I reduce friction, which is the bottom part, I actually don't have to do anything with the product, I just have to make it easier.

So for example, 1 of the things I did is I built houses.

And 1 of the frictional points that people had in building and moving was the fact of moving to the house was basically packing all their stuff up and going somewhere.

And so I would literally sell them a condo.

They'd go from a 3, 000 square foot home to a 1, 500 square foot condo, and they'd cancel 6 weeks later because they didn't know how to get rid of all their stuff, which is a frictional point.

I actually raised the price of the condo, included moving and 2 years of storage as part of the deal with the condo because it's the frictional coefficient and I increase sales over

So what this is is it's really about focusing on the customer, it's about understanding the causation behind it and then using design thinking to actually start to realize how do we actually enable people to make progress.

And so I wrote a book called Demand Side Sales that basically took the premise of like stop trying to sell people and just help them make progress, help them buy.

And so the whole book is, instead of trying to base the sales process on how we want to sell, we need to actually design the sales process on how they want to buy.

And it seems like it's the same thing, but they're actually really, really different things.

Is there an example that can make this even more real of a company or product?

So 1 of the companies I work with a lot lately is a company called AutoBooks.

They're based here in Detroit and they basically do, they help banks basically do invoicing through let's say Apple Pay.

And so instead of having to use Square or PayPal you literally can use your bank now to do these things.

And so there's 2 things they have to sell small business on it but they also have to sell banks on it.

And when we started talking about it they talked about why do banks want it?

And the first thing we did is we found out there's 3 really different reasons why banks want them.

But the thing is, is that the, where the process looked at as they would talk about the struggling moment, they talk about what was going on and then everything was about getting them to a demo.

And once we got them to a demo, we had to close them.

Well, it turns out that the buying process is literally has different phases in it.

There's a first thought, there's something called passive looking where they're problem aware and solution unaware and they have to learn a bunch of things.

And then there's active looking where they're both problem and solution aware, and they're trying to figure it out and frame a solution.

And then there's deciding, which is about making trade-offs.

And so what we end up doing is, when I started to talk to the team about it, what they started to realize is I said, where is the customer in their timeline of buying?

I said, no, no, you have a timeline of how you wanna sell to them, and after the demo, you try to close.

But what if they're actually impassive looking and want a demo to learn more?

It's very different than if I'm trying to close.

And so what we end up doing is breaking the demo apart, asking people where they were in their buying process.

And by doing that we actually then found out a way in which to give them 3 different demos.

1 about telling stories and giving them the background about the problem.

Another 1 about showing them all the alternatives, and then the last 1 is about basically giving them choices between ways to move forward, right?

And you'd think that it would make the sales process longer.

It actually made the sales process almost half, and it 4X basically conversion.

Because now we meet them where they are as opposed to where we want them to be.

And is that something you find generally in the sales process?

There's these 3 phases that everyone goes through and you got to think about them individually?

Yeah, There's actually, I call them 6 phases.

First thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, first use, and then ongoing use.

And so if we don't actually study that part of how do people transform themselves through a struggling moment, We don't know what they want.

Like if I talk to people who want to buy a house, they tell me they want granite and hardwood and they'll make everything these things they want.

But when you actually talk to people who bought a house, they actually made a lot of trade-offs.

And although, for example, Everybody I would survey before buying a house, I had 93% say they wanted an Energy Star compliant house.

It cost 30 grand to make it Energy Star compliant at the time.

And the reality is, is like nobody bought it.

And so there's the difference between what they say they want and what they want.

And so the method itself is not based on traditional research or market research, asking people what it is.

It's actually based on criminal and intelligence interrogation about telling me the story about how you decided today's the day I bought a house, or today's the day I bought a you know I went back to school.

It's not random and if it's not random then we need to actually find it and that to me is 1 of the bigger differences.

Most people build their sales process on probability and Like if I get so many leads in, I'll convert so many to here, to so many.

But the ultimate thing is, how many people are really ready for your product?

And that's what Jobs to be Done is really about, is understanding where they are, what's causing it, and how do they make the trade-offs.

So let's follow that thread of interviewing and talking to your potential customers and customers to understand the jobs to be done.

What is the actual process you recommend?

The first thing we do is we frame a question.

And the way I think about it is most people, So the 1 thing to know about me is I've been building things for over 30 years.

I've worked on 3, 500 different products and services across many, many industries, but I have had 3 close head brain injuries before I was 7 years old and I can't read and I can't write.

And So 1 of the things for me is that I could not understand the research that I would get from marketing around basically they'd say, hey, I need something that's easy, fast and fun and cheap.

And I'd be like, okay, what does any of that mean?

And so the first thing we do is we start to frame, like, let's just talk about what causes people to say, today's the day they want to go on vacation, or today's the day they want a new set of windows.

And you start to frame around that, and then you go find people who recently purchased and say what in the world happened that says today's the day I need new windows and you start to realize that there's pushes and there's pulls and there's anxieties and there's habits and so the first thing we do is we try to extract the story from the customer right And it doesn't have to be my product.

If I haven't built it yet, right, it's literally like, what are people gonna fire when they hire me?

And so when we get the stories, though, then we start, and the stories are gonna get us the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties, and the habits, the trade-offs, and what we call the hire and fire criteria.

And then what we do is, instead of trying to look for themes across all of them, we actually do something.

Instead of segmenting them, we cluster them.

We find the pathways, because what you start to realize is it's not 1 reason why people do it, it's sets of reasons and those sets actually work together so the pushes work with the pulls so when they have these pushes they want these pulls and when they don't have these pushes they don't want those pulls and so when you start to see the patterns and you start to pull it out, you start to realize that most companies or most products are hired to do 345 different jobs, and they're in conflict with each other.

1 person wants to go faster and 1 person wants to go be more thorough.

And so all of a sudden, being more thorough means it's slower.

So if I say we're thorough, the people who want to fast, they're like, I don't want this because it's too slow.

So how do you frame those things out and understand where the conflicts are behind it and think about different products from it?

Intercom realized that people hired it for 4 very, very different reasons and then instead of building 4 different products, they literally took their product and turned off the features that were not relevant to the pathway that people wanted to take.

So for Acquire, They didn't need a whole bunch of these other features.

And so they actually framed it around basically, how do we help people convert?

And that job actually competed with HubSpot.

There's another 1 where it was about helping me with support.

And so they actually changed the pricing model to basically match who the competition was and to match the progress that people were trying to make because Zendesk was too much and too hard and HubSpot felt like it was an overkill for where people were.

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The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)