Transcription
I think one of the biggest misconceptions around jobs to be done is this notion that it's pain and gain as opposed to context and outcome. When you hear somebody's story and it seems irrational, like we'll have people go, "Oh my God, that's an anomaly, that doesn't happen." 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," nine times out of ten it's because you don't have the rest of the story. Part of it is being able to understand the rest of that context. That would drive me to say, "Why would somebody cut their arm off?" Well, if they're in this situation and this and this and this, like, nobody 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: find where people will 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.
Today, my guest is Bob Meade. Bob is the co-creator of the jobs to be done framework alongside Clay Christensen. As you'll hear at the top of our conversation, he is maybe the most anticipated guest I've had on based on the LinkedIn response.
Bob has started eight companies and is currently the co-founder and CEO of the Rewire Group. He 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: what it is, 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 zero to one products, and a ton more.
Thank you to everyone who suggested questions and topics for our conversation. Enjoy my chat with Bob Meade after a short word from our sponsors.
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Bob, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast!
Thanks, Lenny! I'm excited to be here. Big fan!
Ah, I'm a big fan of yours! 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 around jobs to be done in general, and I've never seen so many comments and questions and so much passion for a guest I had on.
Absolutely! I don't know, 130 questions, comments, and folks like Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, and Dez from Intercom came out and just like, "I am excited for this episode!"
I've worked with all of them. They're great people and fun to work with. I just had no idea there was 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.
All right, let's dive in.
Okay, so I thought it'd be just to start with the very basics. Briefly, 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 been building products for almost 30 years, and one of the lies I was told growing up was "build it and they will come."
Right? And so we always thought, "Think about it from a technological perspective. How do I build this thing? And all right, who wants this product?"
What I realized very early in my career is that didn't work. I couldn't make it work.
So jobs to be done is this whole premise that people hire products, right? They don't buy them; they hire them to make progress in their life.
If we can take a step back and look at it, we see it in a very different light. At some point, they're in some context, and there's some outcome they want. If we can understand that, we start to realize that different things compete.
A simple example is to think of Snickers and Milky Way. They're both candy bars, they're both found in the checkout aisle, and they're both made almost with the same ingredients. One has peanuts, one doesn't.
If you start to compare the products and do a competitive benchmark, 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 less calories."
But when you talk to people about when's the last time they ate a Snickers 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 get back to the tasks as fast as possible.
So you start to realize that Snickers is almost like a meal replacement, right? It's about the stomach growling and things like 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. It could be positive or negative; it's usually eaten alone, and it's taking time to regroup after this emotional thing.
You start to realize that it competes with things like a glass of wine, a brownie, and to be honest, a run.
So you start to realize that jobs help 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 we're making it.
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 of 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, if you start to study causality, is that a struggling moment causes demand. You start to realize that in some cases, that struggling moment exists and can exist for a long time, and nobody solved it.
One of the companies I helped was Southern New Hampshire University and Paula Blank. One 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.
It was like 50 or 60 of them, and the anomalies basically were paying full price. They didn't want to come. For Paul, it was kind of like, "Why are they doing this?"
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 were 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.
It was about basically time now that they had responsibility to do something new. So, you know, they didn't actually build the product at all.
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; it's not 10,000 people. They have over 200,000 students. They're one of the largest universities in the world.
So all of this starts with a struggling moment, not with a product. That's what we mean when we're customer-centric: we're studying the struggling moments they have.
People like Intercom and Basecamp look at struggling moments, and 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 going to build in the next 24 months, for example. But like none of us saw ChatGPT coming.
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 are 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. We do that. We look for pain and we try to solve it."
So what I'm curious there is maybe what is the right way to do it?
It's not just the pain. Most see what we were taught in business school was pain and gain. But the reality is it's the context. 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.
Part of this is it's not just about pain and gain; it's about context and outcomes, right?
When you frame it that way, it becomes a vector—a vector of progress or a vector of intention of what they're trying to do. Once we frame that, then we can actually wrap technology around it.
The crazy part is that I was always told or taught if I build the best products, it will sell better. What I've learned is that actually a kickass half is better than a half-ass whole.
That's what Jason talks about. But the reality is, if you look at QuickBooks, QuickBooks has half the features and double the price.
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 to solve; what's even more important is this context around that pain and things that precede it?
Yeah, 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, which is the old product, and there's some product B, which is the new product. Ultimately, people don't randomly do anything.
The real heart of the method of jobs to be done is understanding the causation of what pushes people to say, "Today is the day I got to do something different."
The push or the context they are in has nothing to do with the new product. It's the only reason why they would leave the old product. If there's no push, they can't even see your product because we're creatures of habit, right?
As soon as I have a push, I call that F1—Force One. Right? And I have some idea of what's possible, then I create something called F2, which is basically the pull to a new outcome, a new state, a new thing.
At some point in time, it's like I have to be in this situation, and I have to want this outcome.
But here's the other part: there's this waterline. There are these other forces, and there are two other forces. Every time I show somebody something new, it actually creates anxiety—the anxiety of the new.
I call this F3. And then the other thing is I have to get them to leave the old thing, so I call this habit of the present.
What you start to realize—and I call that F4—is if F1 and F2 are not greater than F3 and F4, they're not going to move; they're not going to do anything.
Ultimately, what we're doing is framing the market as a system of behavior. Most people say, "If I just add more features, create more pull, people will buy." It's not true. More features actually create anxiety.
What you start to realize is if I reduce friction—which is the bottom part—I actually don't have to do anything with a product; I just have to make it easier.
For example, one of the things I did is I built houses. One 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.
I would literally sell them a condo. They'd go from a 3,000-foot home to a 1,500-foot condo, and they'd cancel six weeks later because they didn't know how to get rid of all their stuff, which is a frictional point.
So what did I do? I actually raised the price of the condo and included moving and two years of storage in the deal with the condo because it's the frictional coefficient. I increased sales over 30%.
I love that! 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.
We don't need to sell them; we need to enable them to buy. I wrote a book called Demand-Side Sales that basically took the premise of, like, stop selling people and just help them make progress—help them buy.
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.
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?
One of the companies I work with a lot lately is a company called Autobooks. They're based here in Detroit, and they basically help banks do invoicing through, let's say, Apple Pay.
Instead of having to use Square or PayPal, you literally can use your bank now to do these things. There are two things: they have to sell small businesses on it, but they also have to sell banks on it.
When we started talking about it, they talked about why banks want it. The first thing we did is we found out there are three really different reasons why banks want them.
But the thing is that where the process looked at is they would talk about the struggling moment; they talk about what was going on, and then everything was about getting them to a demo.
Once we got them to a demo, we had to close them. Well, it turns out that the buying process 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.
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.
What we ended 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?"
They looked at me like, "Huh?" I said, "No, no, you have a timeline of how you want to sell to them, and after the demo, you try to close. But what if they're actually passive looking and want a demo to learn more?"
It's very different than if I'm trying to close.
So what we ended up doing is breaking the demo apart, asking people where they were in their buying process. By doing that, we actually then found out a way in which to give them three different demos: one about telling stories and giving them the background about the problem, another one about showing them all the alternatives, and then the last one is about basically giving them choices between ways to move forward.
You'd think that it would take the sales process longer; it actually made the sales process almost half, and it 4X'd basically conversion because now we meet them where they are as opposed to where we want them to be.
Is that something you find generally in the sales process? There are these three phases that everyone goes through, and you've got to think about them individually?
Yeah, there's actually—I call them six phases: first thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, first use, and then ongoing use—how do we build the new habit?
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.
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.
For example, everybody I would survey before buying a house had 93% say they wanted an energy-star compliant house. It cost 30 grand to make an energy-star compliant at the time, and the reality is nobody bought it. They all bought the finished basement.
So there's the difference between what they say they want and what they want. 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 went back to school.
It's not random, and if it's not random, then we need to actually find it. To me, that's one of the bigger differences.
Most people build their sales process on probability. If I get so many leads in, I'll convert so many to here. But the ultimate thing is how many people are really ready for your product? They have to actually be ready for it, and that's what jobs to be done is really about: 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 frame a question. The way I think about it is most people—so, the one 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've had three closed-head brain injuries before I was seven years old, and I can't read right. One of the things for me is that I could not understand the research that I would get from marketing.
They'd say, "Hey, I need something that's easy, fast, fun, and cheap." And I'd be like, "Okay, what does any of that mean? What is fast? How fast is fast? And what's not fast?"
You start to undo all those things. 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."
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?"
You start to realize that there are pushes and there are pulls and there are anxieties and there are habits. The first thing we do is we try to extract the story from the customer.
It doesn't have to be my product; it could be somebody else's product. It doesn't—if I haven't built it yet, right? It's literally like, "What are people going to fire when they hire me?"
So when we get the stories, though, then we start to—the stories are going to get us the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties, and the habits, the trade-offs, and what we call the hire and fire criteria.
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.
What you start to realize is it's not one reason why people do it; it's sets of reasons, and those sets actually work together.
So the pushes work with the pulls. When they have these pushes, they want these pulls. When they don't have these pushes, they don't want those pulls.
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 three, four, five different jobs, and they're in conflict with each other.
One person wants to go faster, and one person wants to be more thorough. All of a sudden, being more thorough means it's slower.
So if I say we're thorough, the people who want to fast say, "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? Think about different products from it. I mean, that's what Intercom did, right?
Intercom realized that people hired it for four very, very different reasons. Instead of building for 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 acquiring, they didn't need a whole bunch of these other features. They actually framed it around basically how do we help people convert.
That job actually competed with HubSpot. There's another one where it was about helping with support, and that one competed with Zendesk.
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 overkill for where people were.
We basically figured out how to actually position ourselves as a good next step between HubSpot and nothing or between nothing and HubSpot, and that's how they've grown to be overvalued at over two billion.
I have a follow-up question, but did you say that you can't read and write?
Yeah, I can't read and write.
So the thing is, I cannot read the words that I write, and I cannot read. Like, if somebody reads it to me, I can actually play back.
The fact is, the way I was taught to read is to—so when I look at a paragraph, I see the spaces between the words first, and then I usually see the left-hand edge of the word, so the last three letters.
My mom taught me to look at the five largest words on the page by circling the longest words on the page, and then I would study those and translate those and then figure out kind of what those five words would have in common.
Because for me, the part that's broken in my brain is that I can't look up things fast enough. So by the time I try to look at a word, figure out what it is, get the definition, I've literally forgotten every word before it.
Damn! How are you writing books?
It's a gift! I'm telling you, it's a gift. This is what—it's a gift I'd never wish upon my children, but to be honest, it's given me abilities to see patterns in so many different ways.
Because I can remember the first five words in the first paragraph and the last five words in the last paragraph. So I turn through a book three or four times, and I have as good a comprehension as everybody else.
This is insane! How are you writing books?
It's really simple. I have a company called Scribe Media, and what we do is we frame—first thing we do is we look for what are the struggling moments the book is going to address.
What struggling moments do people have? We then look at what are the competitive books wrapped around it. I then basically outline what progress looks like.
We then take each chapter and define it as a system and what we have to do in each chapter to help them make the progress along the way.
Then we just talk. We have ten two-hour sessions; they get recorded, and then somebody basically takes—so if you listen to or read any of my books, it sounds like me talking because it is.
Wow!
So I can get a book out in three and a half, four months.
That's incredible!
So now I'm a teacher. I'm an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School at Northwestern, and then I guest lecture on the East Coast and kind of different business schools.
Then I help Techstars and Y Combinator. So I'm really moving myself into kind of being into—I feel it's time to pass on. I've had some amazing mentors who helped me, and again, I was told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker when I graduated high school, and my mom thought I could do more.
I met these people who poured their knowledge into me to enable me to do all this stuff, so now I'm trying to pay it forward as much as I can.
So that's one of the reasons why I do as many podcasts as I can. So again, I appreciate you having me.
Yeah, this is a great opportunity to pass it on, and I'm very happy we're doing that. I had no idea about any of this about you, so thank you for sharing that.
It's been fun! I pinch myself. The other part is I don't know how I got here.
One of the things that I've been doing is I've been studying people for the last ten years around why they switch from one company to another to literally understand the jobs of jobs.
Because employees actually hire companies more than companies hire employees. You start to realize the struggling moment is why don't we have enough people?
Otherwise, like, "I want to leave, but I don't know how to leave." So I've been—I'm in the midst of writing a book around that right now with Michael Horn and Ethan Bernstein.
Is there an insight from that work that you can share about why people leave jobs or join jobs?
The number one thing that I would say is almost everybody, when you ask them about how they got their job, the number one phrase you get is, "It was so lucky! I was so lucky; it just happened to fall in my lap."
Then when you actually unpack the story, that luck had nothing to do with it, right? They were prepped, they were ready, there were pushes, there were pulls, there were anxieties, they were able to do it.
You start to realize—and the funny part is that if I talked to somebody who's been through three or four kind of switches, they all say, "Yep, I've had that job, yep, I've had that job, yep, I've had that."
So there's frames around basically understanding what progress are you really trying to make now? Is it, "Do I need balance? Am I not challenged enough?"
You start to frame it, and when you frame it, you start to realize I'm willing to actually take less money to be around smarter people because I want to be a founder later.
You start to realize that all of these things where we think we have to pay more money—over 50% of the people who got new jobs didn't get more money. It's a lie!
Yeah, it's about progress. It's about what do they want to learn, what skills do they want to get. At some point, it's about money, but it's not always about money.
The other interesting part is when you talk about money, we talked about this notion of unpacking. We'll say, "Well, why do you need more money?"
It's like, "Well, I have larger obligations," or "I want more money because I want more respect."
What you realize is in the hiring and firing criteria, they talk about money, but money actually has a bigger effect than just money. It's about respect, or it's about responsibility, or it's about their metric of progress.
There's a whole bunch of things, but it's like it's not just money. That's the interesting part.
Yeah, I've definitely done that myself. There's a status component to your job.
Yep!
I want to come back to the discussion we were just having around interviewing people to understand the jobs to be done. A bunch of people on LinkedIn were trying to understand just like tactically what they need to get right in order to get accurate jobs.
So I guess there may be just a couple tactics you recommend for how to interview people?
Let me give you three tips.
One is the first tip I'd tell you is go read "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss. I started to write a book around basically techniques that I learned back in the '80s and '90s around this, and his book is amazing around it—like how to mirror.
The whole notion of getting to know—like I play things back incorrectly because they're going to say no, and I'm going to say, "All right, fix it," and then they'll talk more.
The moment somebody says yes, there's nothing more to say. There are a bunch of techniques you have to learn to basically get them talking.
The second is I only talk to people who have already tried to make the progress.
For example, people talk about, "Well, you can't apply this to something that's new; it doesn't exist."
So I worked with a company that was a fairly large social media company, and at some point in time, they found people kind of transacting on their platform, but they didn't know anything about it, and they hadn't built anything.
What they ended up doing is we ended up going and studying eBay and Etsy and what caused somebody to say, "Today's the day I'm going to set up an eBay store" or "sell something on Craigslist."
Out of that, we found all the jobs of what both sellers were doing and buyers were doing, and now it's, I think, almost a three billion dollar marketplace that didn't exist.
They learned about it all from the competitors.
Sounds like Facebook Marketplace, maybe?
No comment!
How many interviews do you recommend people do to get to a confident understanding?
That's a great controversial question. The interesting part is from a causal mechanism perspective and from a set theory perspective—meaning the sets of pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits—it starts to repeat around seven or eight.
I usually do ten, no more than twelve. I would rather do two rounds of twelve interviews than do twenty-four interviews.
I had some really interesting mentors. One of them was Dr. Deming, who's the father of lean and quality systems and like that. He would always push me to basically how to do things faster and smaller.
So that's where a lot of it came from. You just realize that people will say, "Oh, we have to do something statistically significant."
Well, you do if you're doing it randomly, but if you actually understand the range of your market and you know that 50% of it is above 30 years old and 50% is below 30 years old, I can actually sample in a way that makes me get a good representation without having to actually do 50 interviews.
That's why we use something called designed experiments to help with that.
I love the concrete numbers! And so along those lines, when you're actually asking questions of people, do you have any best practices and ways of phrasing a question to get a response you can trust?
In a lot of cases, you have to look at it from multiple perspectives. This is where—so the other tip I have is to not have a discussion guide. It drives people crazy because everybody wants to ask the same set of questions.
But the problem happens is when you ask the same set of questions, you actually don't follow the ones that actually have the most meaningful information in it, right?
What happens is I use the framework of pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits and say, "What caused them to do this?" Everything else is just a conversation of trying to understand their story.
Part of this is being able to ask the questions around why, but you can't ask why, why, why, why, why. It's like, "Tell me more about that. Give me an example."
In a lot of cases, when they run out of—I usually get them to what I call the edge of language, where they have no more language.
What I do is I literally then bracket it. So was it more about this or more about that? I know it's neither one of those, and it forces them to talk more, right?
It's always trying to get them to know because the moment I get to, "So you did this and this and this and this," it's like, "No, that wasn't it."
The people who are working with me, like, "You know that's not the right answer." I'm like, "I know, but they're going to elaborate on why it's not that."
Those things—it's literally being able to reveal kind of the causal mechanisms of why people do what they do.
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When I think about jobs to be done, I've never fully implemented any sort of structured framework, but I find that it's been really useful in my newsletter work and my podcast work, just thinking about what is the job my newsletter is doing for people.
For me, it's helping people get better at the craft of building and growing products. I just think of it—there are these buckets of jobs to be done, and then there's this formal, "Let's just do it for real."
I guess, do you find that to be true? There's like the very simple and there's the more official?
So what I would say is I find a lot of founders, especially really successful founders—like I'd say Jason Fried is one of those—where he intuitively understood this. He actually thinks this way but didn't have language wrapped around it, right?
So I think that it's a very useful framework. I think the danger you run into is that when you look at the customer through the product, if I look at the customer through the Snickers bar, then I think of Milky Way as a competitor.
But if I look at the customer and say, "Why did they pick that thing?" then I realize that a protein shake and an apple and a sandwich are the competitors, not Milky Way.
Got it! So say someone wanted to start going in this direction of jobs to be done. What is the simplest, I don't know, first version, lightweight approach to starting to think this way?
So there's two things. If I have a product, go find ten people who recently bought your product. But what I want you to do is go talk to them not about the product but about why they bought the product.
What was going on? What were they hoping for? What were they worried about? What did they have to give up? How did they convince somebody else? Just listen to the story.
Start with just getting the story because there are three levels of information we have to get or three sources of energy that I talk about.
So think about it: there's got to be energy in the system for us to do something. There's what I call functional energy, which is usually time, space, effort, knowledge.
There's emotional energy, which is how I feel. I want to feel better; I feel frustrated; I feel overlooked. There are emotional aspects to it.
Then there's social aspects—how I want others to perceive me or how others perceive me. "Oh, my boss is going to fire me because he doesn't think I'm doing this fast enough, and I feel inadequate."
So part of it is understanding kind of the emotional, social, and functional components that are part of that energy source.
Got it! The second part is if it's an established product that's been there a while, I'd actually go and talk to people who churned.
Because in churn, what's interesting is when somebody leaves your product, they're still making progress. We think it's bad for us, which it probably is, but in their mind, it's like, "Yeah, this was too hard and complicated," or "You know what? It didn't do enough for us."
It allows you to actually understand the struggling moment they had because, again, they were using your product, and something happened, and some context changed, and now they struggle with it.
Now they've got to go find something else. Nobody wants to change, so that makes this actually the easiest thing to look at: tell me why people changed.
We just seem to literally not want to go deep enough, and we use the lazy word of random and probability as pseudo for knowledge, and it's not knowledge.
It's literally just if context is the same, if outcomes are the same, then I can do it. But like if I listen to football stats, you know, third down, right? In preseason, it's very different than third down in playoffs, right?
Giving me a stat about how their third down conversion is across the whole season makes no sense to me because the context is different.
You brought up this point that people often say they really hate something, and it comes across that they're ready to switch, and we'll use something that you've built that's better, but they don't because of that friction you mentioned.
What do you look for that might tell you that they're really actually going to use it for real and it's that serious?
The very first thing I would say is I never trust anybody telling me things they're going to do.
Yeah!
Because they can't assure it, and it usually never happens. It's just—it's my experience that says that.
The is I need to talk to people who did something and tried, and though they might have failed, what made them try?
So the phrase I have is, "Bitching ain't switching." Just because people complain about something doesn't mean they're going to do anything about it, right?
This is where, like, Basecamp, we learned the fact that everybody said, "Oh, if you had Gantt charts, God, you know, I'm going to leave you if you don't put Gantt charts in or resource allocation."
As much as they all say they want it, they're not leaving because of it.
If you follow—this is the other part—if you follow your best users, they'll take you up to this world that then actually destroys the lower end of the world of why people are there.
If Basecamp would have added all those things, one of the reasons why people join Basecamp is because it's so dang simple.
If I start to add all these things that make it more complicated, it doesn't work.
In those conversations, is there something you find that this is a sign they're actually really serious, or do you just say, "I'm not going to listen to anything they're saying in this case until we actually build it and they are using it?"
For example, in the first five minutes of an interview, they're going to tell you, "I bought a new car because I got a deal on it, and it was a car I've been dreaming about forever."
They have all these things, and then when you start to get to it, it's like, "No, the old car had 280,000 miles on it. You had three large bills in the last four months. The fact is, it's making a sound, and you've got a long trip coming up."
That's why you're getting a car. You're not getting the car because of the deal.
You're getting the car because of the context.
You start to realize that it's the layers of language. The very first layer is called the "palm layer," where people just like, "How was your day?" "It was good."
But nobody knows what that means. If you ask one further question, "Well, what was good about it?" they're like, "Eh."
Then you get to the next layer. The next layer is usually the fantasy nightmare layer. "Oh, it was so good because of this," or "Oh my God, it was so bad because..." They exaggerate to one degree or the next.
What you want to do is actually then pull it back to, like, "What actually happened?" This is where you've got to be more of an investigator and an interrogator.
The way I would describe it is it's criminal and intelligence interrogation that feels like therapy.
Because most people don't actually know why they bought because they only think about the time they wrote the check or swiped the card.
But the reality is, like, I did an interview with somebody who bought a coat rack—a $137 coat rack. It took them 18 months to buy it.
In their mind, they bought it; they say they bought it in a week. But the reality is, like, the debate about getting it and why they couldn't get it was happening for over 18 months.
So this is where you can't believe what they say. You have to do your investigation to get there.
And what does that phrase you use again for that vector of progress?
The intention—it's the context that they're in and the outcome.
So here's the thing: most people talk about you want to get to this outcome, and people value this outcome.
But value is not just the outcome; value also has where you start. So if I start here and I end here, I'm going to value it this much.
But if I start down here, right? I've got to get there. If I start down here and I go up here, I value that much more.
Part of it is that value is actually part of where they're starting from and where they want to go.
Most people say, "If I just get them up here, they're really going to love it." But some people say, "I just want to get here."
So you're overshooting it, and they want to—they actually want a price discount because you're giving them more than they want.
So I'm going in a different direction. The most liked comment on LinkedIn asking people what questions to ask was by Shiram Krishna, who's actually on this podcast in the past.
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
I remember seeing it. I remember hearing it. This is one of the reasons why I reached out because I'm like, "Okay, we need to clarify this."
Okay, great! So you saw his rant. He's not what you'd say a fan of jobs to be done.
No.
And so here's the question he wanted to ask: Is there a case of a startup or modern technology company or any company that was using jobs to be done to launch a product from zero to one that has had broad adoption?
That's a challenge in inside the company or broad adoption that the product that we've developed had broad adoption.
The latter, yeah. The product has done really well. I already told you an example I can't say, but you can, right?
The thing is, for example, Autobooks is another one that did this, right? They started to realize that the fact is you need to study the struggling moments, and it helps you determine what not to build.
Too many times, we just keep adding more and more things to the product.
In large organizations, it's very difficult because at some point, the dominant market research is about hypothesis testing, right?
I'm going to go build a hypothesis and go basically then go build a research project to prove or disprove that hypothesis.
But the reality is jobs to be done research is hypothesis-building research. I don't know! That's part of the point.
The fact is, they—we really don't know. Dr. Taguchi would always tell me there's way more unknown than there is known, and never forget it.
Again, what causes people to buy windows is not what we think it is. You start to realize that I think Dr. Aker said it best. He goes, "What businesses think they're selling is not what customers are buying."
To be honest, he said that in 1953, and it's still true today.
I just did interviews today where they were like, "Oh, people are buying for this reason." We did, what, 11, 12 interviews, and you started to realize, like, "Nope, that's not why they're buying."
They're like shocked!
Awesome! Okay, so you didn't say it, but maybe Facebook Marketplace. So if you like Autobooks, would be one you're trying from zero to one, from nothing, right? Brand new product is kind of the question there?
Yep! So at Techstars, we basically make sure that everybody does, but they come in, they usually don't have a product to start with.
At least in the Chicago and San Francisco offices, we do—we basically have jobs in the very, very beginning of that.
We have companies like Neutrient and Havoc Shield, and there's a whole bunch of them that are out there that are growing and going down that pathway.
To me, it's very, very useful, especially in the zero to one space. But the notion is you have to realize—the way that I frame it is, "What will people stop using when your product comes out?"
That's who you want to go interview.
So for the marketplace thing, it was like, "Hey, I want them to stop using Craigslist. I want them to stop using eBay. I want them to stop using Etsy."
If that's the case, what are they doing, and how do I do it better than that?
So I can understand there are really no new jobs, right? It's just the fact is we get better at them.
The higher fire criteria get better, but the context and outcome—most jobs I could look back 10 years, and the job existed. I can look ahead 20 years, and the job's going to exist.
It's just the nature of how the technology delivers on it is what gets better.
Awesome! And it sounds like Intercom and Basecamp also are very early jobs to be done at very early.
Yep!
So I think with Shiram, something that I read between the lines is he worked at Twitter for many years, and I think Twitter attempted a jobs to be done framework, and I don't know if it went well.
I think it just caused a lot of people to think this is a terrible framework.
So this is where I think there's different flavors of it. What I would say is that one flavor is really what I call very supply-side driven, where it takes the underlying technology and then looks at it and says, "All right, what else can we do? Where can we be better? Where are things that are important but we're not satisfying on them?"
Being able to prioritize. So there's a very systematic approach that's hundreds of steps and very, very prescriptive in nature.
The method that I have and that I've been using, mostly because I've been in the startup world and doing new-to-the-world type stuff, is it's very, very qualitative, organic, and it's a combination of a process, practice, and skills.
Every company actually has its own innovation process based on who they have, who they're serving, and the underlying technology.
To have, in my opinion, to have a very predictive one process that fits across everybody, I think there are principles, but I don't think there's one process.
So that's where I think—that's what they used at Twitter. The other thing is that I think Jack was actually a big fan, and he worked with Clay on a couple of things, but I don't think they worked on the method part of it.
They worked on the thinking part of it.
It was more about—so one of the most dangerous things you can do is sit in a room and hypothesize what the jobs are because I will guarantee you you're 100% wrong.
This is what happens, by the way. This is the gift of dyslexia. I'm not an A student, and so most A students don't start until they know the answer.
Most D students start because they don't know the answer. You start to realize we're very, very different.
Why you're very differently to do that.
So I always say that the A students have a disadvantage against the D students in entrepreneurship because we just go start, and we learn right there.
We don't have to hypothesize everything first because we actually don't know how to do that.
So your advice there is essentially people often get jobs to be done wrong because they just sit around and think about the jobs to be done and aren't actually doing the work to interview and understand?
They think more about the outcomes than they think about what's the best outcomes we can get for people.
What you start to realize is that there are trade-offs people make, and ultimately there's some irrational piece, some irrational component that makes everything twist around.
The irrational component is like, "Why in the world do people eat Snickers when they're hungry? It's a candy bar!"
Well, it turns out when you bite it, it masticates into a ball, and it sits in your stomach and absorbs the acid that's causing you to say, "Hey, I got to eat something."
Part of it is the role of the peanuts and the role of the nougat is actually to masticate it together. The caramel should be sticking it together, versus in a Milky Way, the melting temperature of the caramel is so light that you take a bite, it's liquid.
You drink it down; you swallow like it's a drink. It has nothing to do with food.
You start to realize that it's connecting the experiences to the outcome, to the context and outcome. It's connecting the supply side with the demand side, but it starts with the demand side first—struggling moments and opportunities all exist before there's a product.
Making me hungry!
I bought a couple, but I didn't use them. But I bought a couple, and you start to—I mean, you go deep into it. You start to realize that this is the crazy part.
Everybody thinks they compete, but like if you literally go back to a moment when you picked up a Snickers bar, like you were not thinking about a Milky Way.
You weren't thinking of like half the candy aisle. You're thinking of like, "I want a sandwich," or "Do I want Snickers?"
Half the reason why they pick Snickers is it's 300 calories, I can eat it in three bites, it's done, it's not messy, and I can keep working.
It's mainlining food!
I don't know if I've ever had a Milky Way, to be honest.
So that's right! I don't need that comfort.
That's the funny part is you go to—you go to the tech hubs in San Francisco, and you know the Snickers are all empty, and the Milky Ways are all full.
Yeah, I get that!
You mentioned that there's two different approaches or many different approaches to the jobs to be done framework. This is a question someone actually asked that maybe a framework by someone named Tony Ulwick, and then there's your approach, and then maybe Clay Christensen maybe has an approach.
Can you just help clarify?
So Clay and I collaborated on it. I was lucky enough to have Clay as a mentor for 27 years. I met with him once a quarter for 27 years.
At some point, I shared with him kind of the hack of how I was thinking about this and what I was doing. At some point, he said, "We need to turn it into a theory."
To me, it was more like my workaround because I couldn't read and write. Let me go talk to some people; I'll figure it out.
Ultimately, we turned it into a method. If you look at "Competing Against Luck," it was written with Taty Hall and Karen Dillon and Dave Duncan, but I helped on that book for 16 months.
Some of the clients in there are my clients. I think Intercom is in that one.
So Clay and I are aligned in that. Clay was more about turning it into a theory, and I would say I'm more about having it be a method.
His is like a thinking framework and a philosophy and a strategic kind of frame, whereas my mind is very tactical about how do we get it and then what do we do with it.
Ulwick comes from a very different perspective, and again, I think it's very valuable, but it comes from the notion of functions.
It's more like what can our product do? What jobs can our product do? As opposed to the way I look at it is, you know, basically only people have jobs. Products don't have jobs; people have jobs.
Organizations don't have jobs; people in organizations have jobs because that's the irrational part.
So fundamentally, there are two different views of how do we look at it. But ultimately, I would say Clay's approach and my approach are derived from the same data set, whereas Ulwick's is derived from a different data set, a different set of experiences.
Super interesting! I had no idea about this.
And your sense is in the case of Twitter, for example, maybe it was closer to Clay's just like think about it approach?
I think that's right. I think that's right.
And again, I think Oulwick's is very valuable, especially in some companies where there's lots of risk, there's regulation, there's lots of moving parts, very complicated systems.
But at the same time, it's so many steps. You have to have a very disciplined organization to follow it.
If someone wanted to start actually following through on this, which book would you recommend they start with to help them understand how to apply your approach?
I would have them read "Demand-Side Sales," and it basically is starting from the theory of why do people buy and how do we actually understand how to flip the lens from trying to sell people things to help them buy.
Ultimately, it has the entire method around it kind of framed for product and for founders.
Awesome! Is jobs to be done ever not the right framework for people to figure out what to build?
So a couple places: one is when there's no choice or there's no real choice.
So what's interesting is think about why do you know more about your car insurance than your health insurance, right?
Most of it is because your health insurance is given to you by your employer, and you only utilize it when you're sick. But the car insurance you have to pay for, so you have to sit down and decide what are the different trade-offs you're going to make.
Where when you do it for the employer, it's good, better, best, and it literally is like, "Where am I in my life? Have I been sick?"
You know, there's some basic things, but there's no real choice there.
You start to realize where there's no real choice or where people want to make the choice obvious, it doesn't work.
You have to be able to accept how people see you as opposed to how you want to be seen.
So when companies will come to us and say, "All right, I want you to find these jobs for us," like, "Nope, I can't do it because it doesn't work."
I can tell you what the demand side is asking for, and then we can see how your product fits to it and what you have to modify to it.
But if I try to make the jobs help you build the case to make the jobs what you think they are, it doesn't work.
In those cases, is there a different framework you recommend, or is it just like you don't really have a lot of options?
In a lot of cases, I'd do some ethnography. I'd literally figure out kind of where there's frictional points in the system.
I might do some prototyping around kind of different alternatives, but typically it's more about what I would call the little "H" or how do they use, for example, the health insurance as opposed to why do they buy the health insurance.
The other example I could use is chewing gum. If I talk to people about buying a pack of chewing gum, most people can't remember at all when they bought a pack of chewing gum, even if it was in the last week.
Like, "Uh, I think so." But if I ask them when they chewed gum, they can tell me about when they chewed gum.
Ultimately, that will then imply when they buy gum. If you go to something that's just too—like it doesn't register, it's so deep of a habit that they don't really know what they're doing, you'll never get that information out of it.
Again, the habitual stuff is very hard to see the job. It's only when people change do you see the—it's like the ice. You can reveal the entire iceberg, but if I've been using Tide for 20 years and I ask you why you hire Tide, you just make it up.
You have no idea why you use Tide. But if you switch from Tide to Gain or Gain to Tide, you can tell me that story very detailed.
There's a reader who has a really interesting question. Maria Delano is her name. She's wondering, with a framework this well-known, you're bound to get people misinterpreting it and repeating inaccurate information about the framework.
She's curious what misconceptions most frustrate you that you just hear again and again about jobs to be done.
The first thing I want to say is I actually—in doing it, I've explicitly made it very accessible because the moment you make it too copywritten, too patented, too whatever, people just move by it.
Part of it was being able to make it in the public domain so people could have conversation and try it and do different things with it.
What I would say is there's enough people that have used it and have worked with it and have had great success with it that at some point in time, most of the people who are trying it and not using it well, it's obvious.
So it'd be like, "How do you double down into it?"
I think one of the biggest misconceptions around jobs to be done is this notion that it's pain and gain as opposed to context and outcome.
And I think one of the other ones is it's purely about the outcome and not just about the context and outcome together.
Again, I think the biggest mistakes I've seen made is because they do it in a conference room when they don't go talk to people.
They don't actually find the contradictions; they don't find the irrational parts.
What's really interesting is when you hear somebody's story and it seems irrational, like we have people go, "Oh my God, that's an anomaly; that doesn't happen."
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," nine times out of ten, it's because you don't have the rest of the story.
Part of it is being able to understand the rest of that context that would drive somebody to say, "Why would somebody cut their arm off?"
Well, if they're in this situation and this and this and this, like, nobody 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: find where will people change behavior.
Most people are studying the momentum of where people are and what the momentum of the direction is, but the reality is what we're trying to do is study what causes people to change their direction, and that's where innovation happens.
Innovation happens when people change.
What convinced you to spend your time in life working on jobs to be done and helping people implement this framework, and what keeps pulling you back?
That's a great question!
So I think I started out as I just love to build things. My mom would take me—basically, we have something around here called Big Trash Day, where they throw out the dishwasher and they throw out the old mini bike and all these different things.
My mom would basically say anything that we could fit in the trunk, we could bring home.
So I've been building things my whole life because I've been just always fascinated with how things work.
So that's the first thing. The second part is I love to help people. One of the things I realized is I can't build products for myself.
I've done seven startups, but I realized that I have to build for others. To me, building for others was where I started in product, and then I realized that I'm a method builder and that I really help people innovate.
So my—I exist to help make the abstract concrete. That phrase has helped lead me to becoming now a teacher and a professor.
Writing books is something I never wanted to do because I hated books. Clay convinced me that I had to learn how to speak and I had to write books.
So here's a really good one: this is in 1990. One of the things that happened was when my youngest kid moved out and went—basically moved out of the house, I had my notebooks from almost 30 years of every project on everything I worked on, any company.
This is from one of my mentors, Dr. Taguchi. He said this in 1990 when I was living in Cologne, Germany. He said, "Write a book."
So I opened this like 30 years later, and I'm like, "Oh dang it! I gotta write a book because he told me to."
So it's just one of those things where I realize I really like helping people. I like methods. I'm very curious—sometimes annoyingly curious—but that's kind of the triad of things that I'm really that I love to do.
Amazing! Bob, is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on or make sure we cover before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
There are three big things to take away. One is struggling moments is the key. If you can't see it's struggling moments that people take action on, what I would say is they're everywhere—they are freaking everywhere in our lives.
There are only certain contexts when all of a sudden we realize we have to do something about it.
So study struggling moments because at some point, that's where we need the innovation the most.
The second thing is think about the progress people are trying to make. What is their standard, not your standard? What is that context? What is that outcome?
The last thing is the way I phrase it is choose what to suck at. Figure out the trade-offs that you need to make and make sure that your trade-offs map the trade-offs of the customer.
Because nine times out of ten, most products that fail is because they made a trade-off that the customer didn't agree with.
Awesome! Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready! Always ready for these!
Perfect! What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
"Shape Up" by Ryan Singer—it's phenomenal. The other book I would say is "End of Average" by Todd Rose. I listen to it every single year. I get something out of it every single year.
I've been listening to it for probably eight or ten years. I literally called Todd. I've become friends with Todd. We interact on a regular basis. It's an amazing book.
What is a favorite recent movie or TV show?
I love "Big Bang." I watch it every—like people would say that I'm Sheldon. I think I'm more Leonard, but I can see there's days that I've come across as Sheldon.
I don't mean to be Sheldon, but I like "Oppenheimer." I think any of the science type—I'm not really a science fiction person, but it's more about kind of, I'll say, historic documentaries.
I love them all because they help me understand the science.
What is a favorite interview question you like to ask when you're interviewing people?
What are the top three things you struggle with in your business today that if you could solve would fundamentally change the business?
Love it! What is a favorite product recently discovered that you just really like?
I recently purchased a massage chair, and it's one of those things where I've been getting massages for a while. As I get older and I'm working out more, I've lost almost 100 pounds.
I'm to the point where I'm working out more, and I'm—God, nobody told me I'm going to be cold all the time, I'm sore all the time, and I'm hungry all the time.
So it's like, "Okay, I need a way in which this." So I would get a massage every two weeks or so, and now I can get a massage in 20 minutes on demand, and it's pretty free.
Amazing! My wife has wanted one of these, and this might be good.
Oh, I will tell you, it's like it's a life changer. It's one of those things where I could do—like we'll do interviews, and I can go do an interview in a debrief, pop it, and do it, and I'm fresh as I can be.
It's kind of—it's better than an app!
Is there a brand you want to throw out that you found to be?
Kyoto is the one that I have. I got it from Costco. It's fabulous.
Okay, we will be looking into that! What is something relatively minor you've changed in how a company has implemented jobs to be done that has had a big impact on their ability to do it?
There are two—one is Intercom. The way that Intercom really took off and why it did so well is it actually—it was Dez Traynor and Owen McCabe who were the two founders.
They actually studied—they came to one of my workshops in the beginning, but they studied it, and they tried to do it.
Then we talked about it, but then they brought Matt Hodges and Paul Adams and Sean Townsend and the executive team, and they did the interviews.
When they did the interviews, they understood what to do, and it literally all went downhill from there.
They knew how to ask the questions, how to do the interviews. It was kind of amazing. Paul Adams and Matt's first day at Intercom was in my office in Detroit.
So that, to me, is one of the keys. The other is to find a place in a large organization where a group is struggling. They can't deliver product; they can't move fast enough; they keep getting the wrong insights.
They say it's going to be this big; it's not. Literally focusing on a very small area and giving them a little space to demonstrate the use of it, and then it will spread.
With a case study or two, and so most companies, if they start small case studies and share it with people, both when it works and not works, or starting with the top two.
More questions! One is someone asked me to ask you the dining room table story. Does that ring any sort of bell?
Yeah! So one of the things I did is I built houses. Before I built houses, I was running a venture capital private equity firm.
We had about 100 million, and I was doing 25 transactions and just traveling too much. I had four children, and so my wife and I kind of had the conversation that I wound it down.
I said, "What am I going to do? I'm going to—I wanted to try to find a business I could work in and be part of and be part of."
So I joined a building company here in Detroit, and we ended up building a thousand homes here in Detroit. I had 14 sites.
One of the things we did is we built for downsizers, like your parents. One of the things they constantly told us was, "Look, we're downsizing. We're not having that. We're not having the holidays. We're done with that.
I don't want a dining room table, so we can't even have people over. If we're going to do it, we're going to go somewhere else. I don't want the dining room table."
So we made a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, first-floor laundry, G kitchen, kind of amazing condo.
But what we realized is people, if they didn't know where the dining room table was going to go, they weren't going to move.
It turns out that the dining table was the emotional bank account for their entire life.
If you weren't going to take it or your sister wasn't going to take it or your brother wasn't going to take it, the reality is they weren't going to give it to Goodwill.
It was not going to go in the basement, but it might go into the storage unit.
For the most part, people would literally stay where they are until they knew where the dining table was going to go.
So I did the opposite of what they told me to do, which is I built a place to put the dining room table. You could never eat at it; it was never big enough to actually pull the chairs out of it.
But it was still a symbolic of what it was, and they would use it for puzzles and that kind of stuff.
But I sacrificed the second bedroom suite to basically add that, and it increased sales 22%.
So this is a case where you learn again that that irrational contradiction that says they said this, but you did that—that doesn't make any sense.
That's what jobs helps you with—those kinds of really important small but subtle and important insights.
Last question! You showed me this very cool camera setup you have, and one of the views was your heroes on the wall.
Yeah!
Can you show that and share who those are?
So this is—so I don't like at the end of the night, I have this philosophy that I have the energy in your body and your brain.
Literally, you need to use every ounce of it every day because you wake up the next day with a full bank account, and you can't really save it.
So every night I paint, and these are paintings of my mentors, and they're above me.
Dr. Deming, Clay, Dr. Taguchi, and Dr. Willie Moore. I wrote about them in a book called "Learning to Build" and the five skills that they taught me to enable me to kind of work on so many different things in different areas.
Deming I met when I was 18. He took me to Japan. I worked for Ford, and Ford—I was responsible on the front lines to help reduce product development cycle time at Ford from 72 months to 36 months.
So that's where I learned a lot of tools and methods and things like that from Toyota.
Then I learned Dr. Taguchi's method, which is amazing around designed experiments. Dr. Willie Moore was my first boss at Ford, and she was a PhD in particle physics.
She taught me the empathetic perspective of how to see things and frame things and really—an amazing, amazing individual.
Then the last one was Clay Christensen, which is—I just walked in his office, and he had a sign outside his office basically saying, "Anomalies wanted."
I walked in, and I said, "Look, I'm an anomaly. I don't really know if you want anomalies, but I am."
We sat down and started talking, and ultimately I asked him, "What's your research, and how can I help?"
He had been there maybe about a year, and it was one of those things where he got kind of like somber, and it was almost like I had a tear.
I was like, "What's going on?" He goes, "I've been here a year, and everybody's asked me for things, but nobody's ever asked to help me. You're the first person."
So that was the beginning of the relationship, and I had four hours a quarter for 27 years with Clay with no agenda, which is kind of amazing.
That's incredible! What a beautiful way to wrap up our chat. Bob, my job to be done for this interview was to help people understand jobs to be done. I think we accomplished our goal as much as we can in one hour.
Two final questions: where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask you a question?
Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place, and I post most of the stuff there.
Then I have several different companies, but one is called the Rewired Group, and I've had that for about 14 years.
That's a design consultancy agency around helping people build and launch products. We do everything from Fortune 100 to not-for-profits to startups and different ways.
Then I have something called Laser Ventures, where we actually work for equity, and we also put money into investments as well.
That's called Laser Ventures with Andrew Glazer. We have a podcast called "The Circuit Breaker," which is more or less all these different concepts in 20-minute format of me and my partner just kind of riffing around, you know, what is empathetic perspective or what are the forces of progress.
Or just small little things that basically help people kind of learn along the way.
And it's just long enough for a commute or a walk or something like that.
Last question: how can listeners be useful to you?
To be honest, I was so excited for this podcast. I was excited, one, because I'm a fan, but two, to see your post and then get all those responses. I think I said, "Boy, I think we need more than an hour. This is amazing!"
So, to be honest, posting questions, asking questions, and letting the community kind of interact is key.
What was so interesting is that there were people who had questions, but then there were people like Dez and Jason who reached out and said, "Oh, this will be awesome! You'll love this!"
All those kinds of things.
So, to me, just keep being a community.
And what I would say is, as this is posted, just put more questions up there.
The hard part for me is actually answering questions in a written form.
So my request would be that if we can figure out a format, I can answer them more in a conversational way.
We could have almost like a list of things where there might be a follow-up of some sort.
But if your listeners could literally help me by being more articulate, that would be great.
Okay, let's figure out if we can do some way of doing that. That would be amazing.
That would be great.
Bob, again, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me!
Bye everyone!
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