37. A Jobs To Be Done Masterclass with Andrew Glaser and Bob Moesta

Hi, this is Clay Christiansen, and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call the Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at hbs, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them, and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful.

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Hi, I'm Derek Van Beaver, and you're listening to the Disruptive Voice. We're here today in the studio with Bob Mesta and Andrew Glaser, two expert practitioners of the theory of jobs. To be done Jobs is a central framework that we teach here at HBS in Clay's course, which is called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise, or BSSE for short. The JOBS approach seeks to understand the causal drivers behind why consumers choose to purchase or hire in our language, as well as to fire products and services. And it's very useful to entrepreneurs and managers of all kinds of businesses. Bob Mesto will be familiar to listeners of the podcast. We sometimes refer to Bob as the Milkshake man because he worked with Clay in the infamous milkshake research project that sort of put jobs on the map. Andrew Glazier is the Chief Strategy Officer for American Signature and Value City Furniture companies. And he's one of the handful of practitioners that come to Bob's mind when Bob is thinking of people who have generated deep insight into this approach. Now, full disclosure, I thought Bob was the most committed evangelist for the jobs framework that I had ever met, until I met Andrew earlier today, who uses the JOBS approach every single day. And our hope for today's conversation is that our listeners will learn how much honest work goes into mastering jobs and how rewarding it can be. Fair warning, if Andrew's experience is any judge, once you see jobs, you can't unsee it. So if you're listening, get ready for the ride. Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you.

Thanks, Eric.

Let's get into it. Andrew, like a lot of evangelists, I guess you came to Jobs the hard way. You came to appreciate its usefulness after you had racked up some failures. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. I love that we're starting straight with the, hey, nice to meet you. Let's talk about all of your failures.

Exactly.

We are rolling.

Perfect. Let's get right into it. Hello, everybody. Let me talk to you about my failures. So I think two areas in my career come to mind in a big way. I was a hedge fund investor for about a decade. Equities retail consumer. And I ran a startup. I had certainly success in the hedge fund industry. But at the same time, there were some struggles in areas that I felt that I could not invest in or missed, but couldn't explain why I missed them. Certainly if there was a product to be launched in the future, say an iPhone. And I didn't invest because I couldn't predict what people would do in that situation, whether or not this would be a breakthrough product. And anyone that did not buy Apple stock in 2007 is probably in the same boat or a product that was already launched. Amazon, same thing. So many people did not buy that stock and being able to predict that. So there was definitely struggles there. And I did have a startup called Club Crown. It was a golf startup that allowed people to customize the top of a driver or three wood. And it was an incredibly cool product. And I brought it. We'll get into that laugh in a minute, I'm sure. And it was an incredibly cool product. I brought it to the PGA show, I put it in front of customers. I won best in Show. It was all over the Golf Channel. People were telling me how this was the coolest thing and this was going to be everywhere. Retailers were telling me the same and it didn't work.

So let me understand. So Club Crown, the idea here was that you could put like a transparency like your Harvard shield or your club or whatever you wanted on the top of your driver. That's right. What's not to like? Why was that not just a runaway success?

And we're getting pretty much straight into jobs and the notion of, well, it was cool. We thought we did all the right work. But I think that. I think we're getting straight into what we call like an innovation paradox. And the paradox is that people are terrible at predicting their future behavior and people are terrible at providing accurate causal mechanisms for past behavior. In this particular case, I would show it to people and they would. And they predicted their behavior, that they would buy it. And they told me that again and again. And then awards told me that again and again and caused me to then invest more of my own money behind it. What in the world happened? What in the world happened? And that was like. And it bothered me. And I came up with theories, but it's about coming up with what really happened here that bothered me for a long time.

And what was it ultimately? Why did people not buy.

Comes down to the crux of jobs. If there's no struggling moment, there's no progress to be made, there's no innovation.

Could you stay on that for a second? So that's a lot of language you just laid out. If there's no struggling moment and no progress to be made. Bob, you're smiling like the Cheshire cat. What? Translate that for us.

Humans are. We're people of habit. We'll do the same thing over and over again, and we might see something cool. But the reality is, are we really going to actually fit that into our lives? And when you start to realize, I got to give my driver to somebody else to actually, for a period of time for them to put that thing on it. And, oh, by the way, it has to be actually perfect. And if it's not, somebody else has to. You have to take it off and put it on. And there's a whole bunch of other things they have to do. And it's like, I don't want to lose my driver for a day to basically have that put on. And so you start to realize that there's a lot of inconvenient things along the way. And so all of a sudden, there's no real get for what they have to give up. And so to me, there's no real struggle. Which means as much as they say it's cool and they love it, they're actually never going to find time in their life to fit it in there.

And there was a second aspect to it to compound. The issue was that this had to be installed, so people at a shop had to learn a new process to install it. So the struggles, there was actually a huge anxiety on that side of, am I going to mess this up? Do I have. That was a. Do I. How fast do I have to do it? What's the speed at which the customer is going to expect this? What do I get out of it? And then it was a huge behavior change, because club makers often have very dirty hands. And just creating the behavior change and getting them to wash their hands because this was an adhesive, an advanced adhesive, but still an adhesive was just that little behavior change that sounds so simple was extraordinarily difficult for all of the.

BSSE alumni in the world who are listening to Andrew and remembering Chet huber's experience at OnStar and what a mess it was to try to put OnStar installation into the dealer channel. I think you're hearing again, that same importance of understanding that the channel is aligned on the same job that the manufacturer is trying to promote. Bob, anything else that we should pick up from?

No, I think the aspect here is that again, as Andrew rightly named it, the paradox of consumers actually can't tell you about the future, and they can't tell you about the causal mechanisms. And so when you count on them to give you feedback for your product, you end up over investing in the wrong things. And to be honest, you end up not being able to make the business work. And so part of it is being able to actually really understand what progress people are trying to make and where those struggling moments are is critical.

So this is a really tough paradox. In the absence of this theory of jobs. I've got data on the past, on what people have done, I've got surveys where people tell me what they will do. And you're saying that neither of these things is helpful in my trying to figure out what is the path for my product or service?

The data is usually at the wrong level. So it's kind of like when you walk into the doctor's office, they take your temperature, they measure your heartbeat, they might measure your breath, but that doesn't talk about how healthy I am. It doesn't actually talk about kind of the underlying causality of why I might be sick. And so all of a sudden, we might be collecting data. And Clay and I talk about this all the time is we actually usually end up measuring the things that are easy but not necessarily meaningful. And so part of this is we have a lot of data that's out there, but it's not necessarily meaningful to this endeavor. The other part is, for some reason, we think that because we can't predict the future, if we just ask consumers to predict the future, they can do it better than us. And the reality is, this is where some work we've done with Todd Rose and some others, you start to realize the fact is a larger sample size doesn't actually give you a better answer to a questioned, right? And so if I survey everybody who's going to have dinner on next Tuesday night, and it's like, eventually chicken will come up. And it's like, if I have enough, people say, chicken, boy, chicken's going to be there on Tuesday night. But that's not what causes people to have chicken on Tuesday night. And so part of it is that we confuse correlation and causation. And causation requires great Attention to detail and basically patience to basically find it.

So I think for our alums who are listening to this podcast, we've got you exactly where we want you. You're back in the classroom remembering how we talk about the challenges to implementing jobs and the fact that the data that is so abundant is not very useful to you. And adding more data doesn't make it any more insightful. So, Andrew, back to you. So you had been through your hedge fund experience. You'd been through what I take was probably a fairly disappointing experience with Club Crown, and you talked about a light bulb. That's accurate. You talked about a light bulb moment where you came across jobs theory. Could you tell us about that?

Sure. A number of years back, there was an HBR article, know your customers, jobs to be done, written by Clay and a number of other your colleagues. And in it, it talks about. They mention Bob and some work he did on people that are downsizing to a condo from a home. And he came up with some insights that just blew me away. I just. It literally, my head exploded when I saw this. I was like, how did. And the notion that his job was not just to build condos, but to actually move people's lives and how the dining room table played a role in that, and then how he. And to me, it was like, oh, my God, someone solved this paradox. I need to talk to this person. Because everything that I did in my prior two careers, the hedge fund career and the startup career, all the struggles, some of the most principled struggles, were in that paradox. And I didn't know how to deal with it. And then as soon as I saw it, I said, okay, someone has figured this out. I need to go get as close as possible to this person because they know how to do it. And that's when it really happened that I went down this rabbit hole that I thought was, you know, a foot deep. And it's been miles.

Bob, when we were talking earlier this morning, when we all convened in my office, Andrew was reflecting on how. How challenging it was, how creative it was for you in the course of doing all these interviews with people around this topic of downsizing, how the dining room table didn't jump out of the conversations, you had to pull it out of the conversations. And that's both, I suppose, encouraging and disheartening. Talk to us about. About that experience and help us understand what was the significance of the dining room table here.

So the hard part to me is the fact is, for me is, like, I don't pretend to understand Anybody's story. So when I go to do interviews, it's literally like an empty vessel, a blank slate, an empty page. And it's like, I have no idea what caused you to sell your home for 30 years and move into a condo or try to move into a condo, right? And ultimately, to hear that story. The thing is, I might have heard some of the past, but I don't know theirs. And I don't know. I always think of it as dominoes. I think Ryan Singer says it best is, like, if we understand those little dominoes and understand the domino effects, the small things. So a domino half the size can knock over a domino, double the next one. So if you think about it, I can actually line up a bunch of small dominoes. And by the end, it's like, yeah, I'm going to move. And it's like, what are those little things that kind of build the snowball? And so, to me, it's finding that energy and what things help them make progress and what things hinder their progress. And as you start to hear their stories, this notion of the dining room table came up as things like, well, you know, we had a lot of stuff, and we had to get rid of a lot of stuff because we couldn't fit all the furniture in. And then you'd hear things like, well, so what furniture, you know, did you need to, you know, what were you going to keep, and why were you going to keep it? And what furniture did you get rid of, and how did you get rid of it? And. And part of it was, you know, some people weren't ready for it, and I wanted to put it in storage, but this dining room table thing came up because it was the way we actually designed the condo, which is it didn't have a formal dining room. And what they would rather have was a bigger second bedroom, almost a suite, to accommodate the fact that when the kids came back, they'd have a place for them to stay. And so sacrificing the dining room actually created a place for that to kind of come out even more, because they didn't actually know where to put it. And so but you heard it, like, once or twice, and you didn't think much about it. And then as you started to kind of layer the stories on top of each other, all of a sudden you start to realize, like, there's a really big anxiety here of what to do with the dining room table. And people who got rid of the dining room table were, you know, they were actually had. They were more free to actually move than the people who didn't. And then you started to understand the emotional bank account of it. And so you started to probe on the next. And it wasn't about kind of accumulating, but it's more like, I might have missed it on the first couple. But as you hear it, it's like, oh, there's a source of energy here that I kind of maybe have missed. And let me listen for it.

But what is the significance of the table is.

The table is. If they don't know where the table's going to go, they're not going to move. Because at some point, the dining table to your parents represent the emotional bank account of every holiday, every birthday. And in some cases, it's been passed down two or three generations. And they're not going to put it in the basement. It's not going to go to Goodwill, it's not going to go out to somebody else, literally, like, who's going to take it? Because if I don't know where the dining table is going to go, I don't think I can move. And the crazy part is, it's not an explicit thing. It's just more about a behavioral thing of the saying, oh, my niece Sarah finally took the dining table and then we could move. And it was a liberating thing. Like, wait, what? And you just didn't understand it, but from a domino's perspective, it was like, oh, that domino fell. So then they could actually feel more confident about moving, but it was like there was nothing really else that was as emotional as that dining room table.

So if you're a builder, you're focused on the what? You know, we want granite countertops, we want the second home office, we want all these features in the house. And then you're coming in with this approach and asking, why. Why are you stuck? Or why have you been able to move? And that's where you hit on this insight.

Well, and it's a difference between what they explicitly asked for, which was a bigger second bedroom and bathroom. And we actually cut it down and built a dining room, a small dining room where it could go. And then we got an increase in sales. And so the whole notion was we went against their premises. Right. It's no different than, like, Ikea, where they talk about the fact this is like, if you ask anybody, do they want to put their furniture together, the answer is no.

Right.

But the fact is people are willing to do it when they need it in a certain amount of time or they need to have something in stock or the fact is they only have a certain budget. And so part of it is the trade offs people are willing to make. And so ideally they don't want a dining room. Ideally they don't want to put the furniture together. But that's not life. Life is full of these trade offs.

Fantastic.

And that's a big deal in that, like, from an innovation perspective, no data was going to tell you what question were you going to put in a survey to know that the dining room table was a thing. There's no chance, there's no data that's going to get you there and then have the confidence based on these conversations to do something that seems completely irrational, which is cut a bedroom in half, make it barely big enough to fit a dining room table, and probably barely. You could barely put people in there and have an increase in sales.

Right.

Well, what are the chances?

So there's two things I want to make sure we clarify. One is we prototype it. We're not changing every plan everywhere. We're literally taking one of the units and basically saying, all right, we're going to cut this down, we're going to do this and we're going to build it out and see what people think. And the aspect is this is where prototyping comes in because it's so important. But the reality is that again, the only way I'm really going to learn these things is through prototyping and saying, I don't know, let's go collect some data around it. And that's the thing, is without the freedom to actually try new things, you're never going to solve these problems.

So, Andrew, you read about Bob's experience and the proverbial light bulb went off. And you said that you wanted to do this right away, you wanted to learn how to do this approach. So you actually reached out to Bob.

I guess, on LinkedIn.

Yep, that's right.

And said, I am, I work. I'm the chief strategy officer at this furniture company called Value City. We do a billion in sales. I think you could help us. Would you have a conversation with me? And within a week we were talking on the phone.

So my favorite though is, and this is one of the little things I want to say is that. So Andrew is chief strategy officer and as you know, most retail is very, very tight. He has no budget for any of this. And the thing is, we're going back and forth and trying to figure it out. He's thinking about it and what he did is he actually was very creative. And the reason why I'M bringing this up because I think it's very useful, is that he went to one of his suppliers and said, look, we're doing a review of this category. How do we actually get. We'll do this information and get you to pay for some of it. We'll pay for some of it and we'll split it. But a way in which to kind of create budget for it by going.

To the spot supply base so you can. So you both can benefit from the insert. That's right.

That's right.

There's a way to pay for it without.

Yeah. And I think it was very good for kind of the supplier that chimed in. But at the same time, the fact is, it was. I think it was equally as useful for you guys.

Before we get to the application of this to furniture, however, Andrew, you said your first project was kind of a pet peeve related to the cafe Value City. Talk about that.

I can't get away from this cafe. So I knew that once we did our first project together, for me to retain the framework, the methodologies, the creative ways that Bob came up with solving the innovation paradox, I needed to do it as soon as possible. Soon before I had done this project with Bob, the cafe began. The internal corporate cafe began to report to me the next week. I literally went. And that's an area where I was going to have no pushback from anywhere in the business. No resistance. I could just go do it. And went and performed full jobs, interviews, workup. Internal employees created innovation ideas off of it that we would go implement within a couple weeks of actually executing a mattress project.

So the funniest part is, like, you're leaving on Friday. And you're like, okay, I got this. I understand how it's going to help this, but I want to do this. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, I want to go do the interviews. I'm like, okay, go find something that nobody can reject you for. It's like that cafeteria. I'm like, nope, nobody's gonna stop you there. And he's like, he could literally sit in the cafeteria as people walking in. What caused you to come in right now? What were you hoping for? And then the people, then people who never showed up at the cafeteria were like, why don't you go to the cafeteria? I went here. Well, what were you hoping for when you go somewhere else? And so just back and forth. And within a week, he had all the interviews, and it was like, now I know what to do.

I really want our listeners who have come to us with a question that we get perhaps more often than any other, which is where do I start? How do I start? I've got to get everybody in the organization bought into this new way of looking at things. And what you're hearing here, right, is no, you don't. You need to find something that is struggling, bonafide struggling, but that no one is going to somehow pull rank or tell you you need to get 10 sign offs, something you can do on your own end to end and demonstrate the value of jobs. And I understand that worked in the cafe. What were some insights that came out of that work?

So we were, I mean, we found that we were over serving a certain portion of the population. There were kind of two main jobs. One was when I'm having a long day, really helped me get a really good break from my day and make me feel better about it. And that was really more about having something that was comfort food, something my mother would make for me, that's mashed potatoes and spaghetti and meatballs and things like that. The other person, it was more of when I, when I want to, when I'm working really hard and I want to get home and I don't want to take time during the day, I want to get home to see my kids, help me refuel in a healthy way. And the design requirements about we were massively over serving the first category and massively under serving the second category. And the second category made up two thirds of the building. And it wasn't a surprise that, you know, only one third of the building was actually coming down to eat.

Right. And so part of it was being able to play and prototype and make up some smoothies and do some other things just to test. And again, it was a place that there wasn't really much resistance. You know, you could build your blue, you know, I'm going to build 100 blueberry smoothies this morning and put them out there and see what happens. And it was just like, oh boy, that worked okay. Why did that work? And then just iterating and iterating and, and iterating.

That's right.

That's the cool part is places like the cafeteria, I've had people do it in the IT support desk, right. Who doesn't need help in it, right? So it's like, well, what's the struggling moments? How do we actually understand what they are? What progress are they trying to get? A lot of times they'll solve the problem, but they won't prevent the problem. And so if you can actually Use this in it. I've seen people use this in hr. It's all internal, where they all want help and so you don't have to get, like you said, a big sign off to talk to customers and all that other stuff.

That's super cool. And you said that there's been a big lift in revenue as well as, I take it, profitability and happy employees as well.

That's right. So people got to see it firsthand. They see, number one, they're happier, the food's better, their experience is better. So even in places the food might not be as good, but it's. But it's maybe faster. And they're willing to make that trade off, but they also see more people down there, so there's actually more community within the company. We started implementing the changes about a year ago. Sales are up about 100% and gross margin went from about 15% to 50%.

Wow.

But the design requirements like this cannot take more than 90 seconds for somebody to grab something. And so it's like, all right, how do we actually make this? And design, from the moment you're between a meeting and you need fuel to keep you going, that you can run down and in 90 seconds fulfill that job and get it done. And it's like. And again, it's a whole trade off. It doesn't have to be delicious, it just has to be sustaining enough so I'm not hungry during my next meeting or for the afternoon. And so part of this is Andrew was being able to kind of extract that data and be able to kind of then work with the chef and work with kind of the people in the cafeteria who were just ecstatic for the help, I think.

So, Andrew, you kinda, kinda, kinda anytime, anytime, any change, anytime you're changing, there's a lot of apprehension. Yeah. But in this particular case, I had full reporting responsibility on the area, so I was able to do the change management myself.

That's a great, great lesson. Please take note, listeners. So, Andrew, you went from the cafeteria to mattresses. Went to the mattresses, as they say. And you told us a lot about what's wrong with typical mattress sales. Could you talk a little bit about how jobs is not part of the typical mattress showroom?

Yeah. Anytime you see a product being sold off of features and benefits. When you walk into a mattress store and you see 40 white rectangles and everybody's talking about springs and hybrids and foams and coolant something or other, and you're going like, I have no idea what any of this stuff Means anytime you see that, you know that they're not thinking in a Jobs manner. A great comparison for the mattress industry. And what we did is what Steve Jobs did at Apple in 1997 when he came back, when he looked at their product lineup, when he came back and there were, I don't know, 40 something computers, different types of computers in it. And anyone that's bought a computer, that bought a computer in the 90s remembers how they sold computers. It was like this many gigabytes and this much RAM and this much. And you're going, I don't know what any of that stuff means. I have no idea. I'm so confused. And you try and find someone, some, one friend that's an expert that can come with you to help you buy something that's good, but you don't even know what good means. And when he got back, he like, he said, look, there's two things that people are trying to do with these computers and two things only. They're either trying to surf the web and Word Process, or they're trying to do that plus render photos and videos. MacBook, MacBook Pro. And for cost differences, here's one that's mobile, here's one that's not. So there's a four box for, for you, and we're done. And it was very simple and people actually understood it. And it was one of his most, to me, one of his most brilliant strokes as a geniuses that is not talked about nearly enough because it's a big deal. Same thing for mattresses. It was, it's a mattress for someone else. You know, I want to hit the easy button or it's like I haven't been able to sleep in two years. I've tried everything in the whole world get me back to sleep. So in the same way Bob was in the business of moving people's lives and the dining room table, we were in the business of getting people giving people their lives back. Because these people were a mess. They were struggling at work, they were struggling with family. Think about what your life is like when you don't sleep. And they've been struggling with this for years. And then they walk in the door and what do people say? We have a great sale going on today. Like what I am. Like, think about what I've been through the last two years of my life. And that's your first, like that's your first statement?

Yeah. The craziest part to me is all the other things they had done before, they actually finally like, you know, I Think it might be the mattress. Like, it's just this crazy. Like it's like, oh, that would make a lot of sense. But it's like, no, we gotta get a fan. No, I gotta get a dehumidifier. No, I gotta get a humidifier. No, I need space. Special wicking sheets. No, I need a noise machine. Like the portfolio of things is so large. And it's like. And then when they get there, it's almost like going to the doctor. Like, no language, which I know nothing about. I'm only going to buy a mattress once or twice in my life. And it's like. And when it's for them and they can't connect the design of the product to the symptoms and the problems and what's going to help me sleep better, it literally is I'm either going to spend as much as I can because it's like, look, money has got to be better. So more money is always better. And so you end up having people do that. But the reality is that they just don't know how to choose. And so lots of times you'll get how many people. It's the non consumption piece. How many people want a new mattress but actually don't know how to buy a mattress. And that's kind of the thing we went after.

So Andrew, when you figure out that it is about sleep, not about coils, how do you use those insights then to align the rest of the organization?

So great question. So I mean the neat part about Jobs is the implementation affects all aspects of the organization. So what products should be on the floor? How do you simplify the number of SKUs? We actually took 30% of the SKUs off the floor. Because when these two mattresses do the same thing, whatever it is, if it's your back, if it's your shoulder, whatever it is, you could just. We only need one for that, for that person type. So you can take 30% of the mattresses off the floor, which is what we did. So that's merchandising. Then you go to in store experience. You make sure that when the person comes in, you're talking to them about what they've been through, what they've tried, tried and what they're seeking and assure them that they're in the right place. And by doing that you win their trust. And then you could actually put them through a process that's going to fit them to a mattress that's going to help them sleep versus give them this many coils. And it's kind of like Fitting a shoe, someone that's a size 12, you wouldn't give them a size 9. How do you come up with the right system that fits a size 12 to a size 12 to make sure that they sleep well? And then you go to marketing, you start to talk about why we're set up to do that. It's kind of almost like it might be your mattress when you can't sleep. Did you think about that? And the easiest way to tell for most people is go sleep at a hotel. Anyone that sleeps better at a hotel is going to go, that's the last domino. It's the mattress.

What I love is what you came up with was like, how many Zequil do you need to take before you realize it's the mattress?

Yeah.

Is that like an ad?

That's what we've talked about.

Yeah, we've talked about it.

Interesting.

But there's these clear signs when it's like, okay, your mattress isn't working. And it's like, but again, they don't know. And so part of this is building awareness just to the fact that it might be time for a mattress. And then how do you afford a mattress? And then there's a whole bunch of other stuff around it. But it's that combination of marketing differently, it's merchandising differently. It's actually making it easy for them to choose, understanding, connecting to value. There's a whole bunch of pieces that they actually end up kind of moving around.

I want to, in the balance of our time, I want to now go down to periscope depth. And Andrew, you were talking earlier today about, you know, jobs is a concept that you understand through experience, you understand through practice. And there are some do's and don'ts about interviewing that strike you as the difference between success and failure. Could you talk about some of the things that you've learned in doing jobs interviews that you now would teach if you were teaching somebody else?

Yeah. So I think there's definitely a few parts to that answer. Number one is, I'm just going to go through how I would think about an interview. Number one is learning how to get someone to trust you. These interviews become very detailed on your emotional past, on your social goals. It's very psychological. A lot of people feel like it's therapeutic, like they're with this psychologist. And you get to these breakthroughs on these simple things. You need to create a lot of trust in that moment, especially at the beginning, to get people to open up to you. And learning how to do that is really Important. Then when you get into the interview going with a kind of beginner's learner's mindset of saying, I don't know any. Anything about what's. I don't have any predetermined notions about what this person's trying to get out of whatever product it is we're talking about. And sometimes that will come off, for example, in questions that seem almost silly, like almost just like you're in kindergarten. What my nephew might ask, why is whatever? So if someone says, oh, that's comfortable, you don't move on. That's a huge trigger for me. Whereas it would be just like it would get lost to someone else, where I'm sitting there going, whoa, whoa, whoa, we gotta stop. What does comfortable mean? And just that word, depending on the person can take 10 minutes. And understanding that language can take 10 minutes.

And.

Having that understanding as you're going through all of that, of that innovation paradox, that people are terrible at predicting their future behavior, and they're terrible at providing accurate causal mechanisms to past behavior. Knowing that you just can't ask anything leading. You can't let them kind of give simple answers. And that doesn't mean that you have to. That you're pushing really hard. It more means that you're just truly being inquisitive and making them help them understand themselves. So those are some of the pieces that are really hard to learn how to do and take a while. And really it's about understanding that framework and then just getting reps. Could we go back to.

You said it's really important to build trust. So how do you build trust? How do you get somebody to trust you enough that they'll share kind of emotional, social dimensions of their behavior?

It's almost a way of talking about the conversation as if it doesn't matter that much meaning. Like, hey, this is. You describe it as we're just trying to learn the language. This is early research. We're trying to learn the language that people use than when they're trying to purchase this project.

So let me just give the example that what I always say is something like, we got a really, really big research project coming up. But before we do that, I just want to get a handful of people on the phone and hear their stories of how. What caused them to say, today's the day to buy a new mattress. And so to be honest, today is just about hearing your story. There's no right or wrong answers. I don't have a list of questions. And it's really about digging. Digging into your. You know, into your story and getting language. So I'm apologizing up front. I'm gonna interrupt a lot. And, you know, as we interrupt, I'm literally gonna say, you're gonna say comfortable, And I'm gonna say, what do you mean by that? And it's all we're really trying to make sure we understand is. And if you don't know, you don't know. But it's literally, give me the permission to just interrupt.

Even as you're sitting across this table from me, Bob, I'm feeling my fear, if you're interviewing me about mattresses, is that you know a lot more about mattresses than I do. So I'm gonna say something stupid. You know, I'm gonna call something a coil. That's really a, you know, a blow dryer or whatever. And. But you're just saying it's, you know, we're brand new to this.

And I always say, like, look, I'm new to the industry as well. I'm doing this on behalf of somebody else, or this is my first day. And to be honest, I don't know that much about it. So you might ask us questions, and I won't know, but I'll make sure that we follow up. So the aspect here is being able to make sure that they understand, and it's really about learning their language and help us. And to be honest, the industry has its own set of language, of coils and hybrid and all this other stuff. But that's not how real people talk about mattresses. So help me see from your side. And that's where then you basically put the guard down and start saying, like, wait, I'm confused. You said it was a hybrid. What's a hybrid to you? When you saw that, like, oh, it had this and this. It's like, could be a completely wrong definition, but it's like, that's what their perception is. Perception is reality. And so it's. And it's not about trying to challenge whether they're right or wrong. You have to reflect the. If you will, the stupidity onto you. Like, wait, I'm confused. I don't know. And so it's all that aspect of you're inquisitive, and the more you're attentive to their details, it's like the first time people appreciate that you're really listening to them, and then all of a sudden they're like, well, I didn't really mean it that way. I meant it this way. And so you go back and forth and so part of it is, though, is to put that vulnerability on yourself, to take it away from them.

Yeah. Like an indicator that you're doing well is when people might say, oh, I can't believe I'm even talking about this with you. And that's when you start getting pretty good at it. And they almost feel like they're in control. Because think about, like, when you're in. If you're in a therapy session, the patient is really more in the control than the therapist. And how do we. And so much in research, it feels like the researcher is in control.

You told us a trick, Andrew, for getting that rhythm going from the very beginning of your interviews. Could you repeat that?

Sure. So I try to give right from the beginning, I say, look, I just want to spend the first 10 minutes. And I know no one's ever going to spend 10 minutes. It's never happened. It's usually. Sometimes it's 30 seconds. Spend the first 10 minutes just telling me your story. Go as long as you want, as much detail as you can from your first thought about this product, through research, through going to stores, all the way through buying. And be as detailed as you can. And sometimes it's like, well, I thought about it, then I went to the store and I left. And sometimes it's five minutes, and then that's when you. And now they're talking, they're opening up. They feel like they're in control. And I say, then I ask for permission to ask questions when they're done. I say, is that everything, or do you want to keep going? And then I can ask some questions. It's up to you.

So we're almost at time, and I will observe something about the friendship between these two gentlemen. When they came to my office this morning, they started talking about Jobs. And then we went to lunch and we were talking about Jobs, and then we came here, and we've been talking about Jobs. Craig will hit time soon, and we'll end the podcast and they'll keep talking about Jobs. Andrew, so Jobs has influenced kind of the way you see everything. You talked about some interesting thought experiments that our listeners can do as they kind of look around the world and try to speculate what's going on here. Talk about a couple of those things that you said that you see, that you go, oh, I think Jobs is at work here.

Sure. I mean, I think you're talking about how you could have predicted, say, the iPhone disrupting the BlackBerry. Or another example would be Instagram and how you could have predicted Instagram and we can start there and then work back to the iPhone with Instagram. If I painted this picture for you of here's this company called Facebook. It has a billion users. You can post photos, you can like photos, you can comment on those photos. And I'm going to start another service that has pictures where you can post that you can like that you can comment on. What in the world? Why is this thing going to work? How could it possibly work? And in jobs you look for like, where's the non consumption in Facebook? Where was the non consumption in Facebook? Where were the struggling moments? And the struggling moment in Facebook was what did they not post? What did people not post on Facebook? It was pictures of food. Food is everywhere on Instagram. Why wouldn't someone post a picture of food? It's because it looks terrible without filters. Same thing with landscapes and taking pictures of the ocean. Every Instagram influencer has a picture of them near the ocean. That looked rude, that looked terrible in comparison on Facebook. And the entire service was because that job was not being done. Help me appear like a professional photographer and you can create an entirely new social network that arguably has much more momentum than Facebook now off of that very simple job need.

So the aspect to me is to really look at it and go, where did people want to post but they didn't? Non consumption, but then why didn't they? And you start to realize it's for all those other reasons. And so it was one of those things where it was on the phone, it was very quick, it was very easy, but it had the filters and it enabled. It literally was not only easier and faster, but it was better in the aspect of having everybody learned most of Facebook on the desktop or laptop version. And so the notion is that as it got easier it was like, yeah, then Instagram just took off because of those two things.

Gentlemen, this has been a master class in the need for jobs, in the importance of beginning with a clean slate as you're doing your research, the importance of building trust of practice at this technique and then kind of looking around in the world beyond whatever you do from 9 to 5 and look at the struggling moments that people are in and, and how they're trying to make progress and just really sensitizing yourself to that kind of outside in perspective. Any other final advice for our listeners, Andrew or Bob?

I just want to comment to your thing about that. We think about jobs all the time. I don't actually think we think about jobs all the time. I think we think about progress, innovation and how to build products. I mean, I'm more of a maker, and Andrew is the same way, where it's like, all right, what can we we go build to help people in these things? So I think Jobs is one of the tools that we have, and it's a way in which it helps us frame where there's opportunity and what to do. I think it's weaved through a lot of conversations, but it's not like if the word jobs went away. I'm not worried about that. It's more about making sure that we understand where do people struggle? Where are there opportunity to help? Where is there opportunity for progress? And Jobs is that language we happen to use for it. So it's not just Jobs. It's really about building stuff.

Yep, Yep.

My parting remark is pretty simple. There's some people out there that, you know, have a tremendous eq, and we know that EQ has been studied to be more predictive of success, EQ and persistence than iq. What Jobs has done for me is in a really big way. I was not one of those people that had a great EQ early that can spot products that can spot progress. There are people out there like a Steve Jobs, that just sees it naturally. That was not me. I had an engineering mindset very different than an innovation mindset. There's a big difference between an inventor and an innovator. And Jobs gave me that ability to be steady, systematic about that. And then once you see it that way, it is so liberating. And it's just like I was never able to do this thing that I saw everybody else be able to, or not a lot of people, but people be able to do. And I can now feel like I can actually do it better than they can.

That's a wonderful, wonderful place to end, gentlemen. Our students are always so hungry to have examples of practitioners who actually are able to do this technique, who can share insights with them, and who can help them to just gain in their understanding of the advantage of really asking why of customers and not just what of products. And we can't thank you enough for the time that you spent with us today, and we wish you all the best of luck. And when Craig Stephen stops rolling the tape, we'll go back to talking about Jobs. So for all of you, thank you for listening to us today.

Thanks, Derek.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on itunes. Until next time. Good luck, everybody.