423: Jobs-to-be-Done: Customer Interviews That Drive Growth - with Bob Moesta

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Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Bob Mester, the founder and CEO of the Rewired Group and co creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework with Clayton Christensen. In his 40 years working with products, he's helped over three and a half thousand companies bring their ideas to market and launched eight startups himself. As a dyslexic teenager, Bob couldn't make sense of traditional market research reports. Despite being told to stick to manual jobs, he refused to let his dyslexia hold him back. Everything changed when Bob noticed something surprising. Many customers weren't just giving incomplete answers in interviews. Many they were actually lying to themselves about why they bought products. And this led him to study intelligence interrogation techniques to uncover what really drives people to buy products. Those insights have helped companies like Basecamp, Facebook Marketplace and Casper solve their growth challenges. Today, the Rewired Group helps both startups and big companies build better products and bring them to market successfully. In this episode, you'll learn how to conduct customer interviews that reveal the underlying struggles preventing prospects from buying even when they seem interested. Why most founders misunderstand what their product is competing against and how this insight can transform your go to market strategy. We talk about how to use the Jobs to Be Done Framework to avoid building unwanted features and focus on problems that drive customer purchases. Why strategically interviewing just 10 customers can give you deeper insights about product market fit than broad surveys of hundreds of users. And why most companies build features that try to do everything for everybody and and end up doing nothing for nobody. And how you can avoid this trap. So I hope you enjoy it. I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They combine AI, real engineering and product thinking to help B2B SaaS founders move fast from early idea validation to scaling real products. For over 13 years, they've helped launch more than 70 platforms and including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One Bank. Through the end of September, you can book a free strategy session and get 20% off validation, discovery, prototyping or embedded engineers for your existing team. Visit Gearheart IO. That's Gearheart IO Bob, welcome to the show.

Hey Omer. Thank you for having me excited to be here.

My pleasure. So let's start by talking about what you're doing right now. So you're the founder, president and CEO of the Rewired Group. What does, what does your company do? Who do you help? What's the main problem that you're trying to solve?

So I've been building product for over 40 years. I've worked on over 3,500 different products and, and I've done seven startups, or actually eight now. But the one that I'm working in the most right now is called the Rewire Group. And it really, what we do is we help people basically bring products to market and we do everything from help large corporations do, revamp their entire innovation process, to helping startups figure out what opportunities to go after to bring a technology to market, to helping with, helping them pivot. And so we do. It's a small, it used to be bigger. I've taken it to make it smaller so I can stay connected to the work. And so there's five of us and we do about 20 projects a year.

So today we're going to talk about obviously, jobs to be done. And really I think the goal for me was to try and figure out how we can Help early stage SaaS founders to use the jobs to be done framework to figure out what are the underlying reasons why customers are buying my product or not buying my product or buying my competitor's product instead. And, and the default thing always is they have this feature, I don't have this feature, but there's so much more. And whether it is a feature issue or whether it's about some other sort of differentiation or pricing or messaging or anything else, ultimately it goes back to understanding the mindset of the customer and what they are trying to do.

Yeah, it's more, it's more about what they're trying to do or to be honest, what they can't do today, but they want to do tomorrow. And ultimately it's the fact of studying what I call the past to learn how to predict the future. And so part of this is a lot of the framework of jobs to be done came about because as a dyslexic, I could never read the marketing research reports and they'd give me all this information about the customer and they tell me who they were and they'd give me a Persona and they'd give me all this stuff, but I'm like, I don't get it. And so I'd ask them if I could just go talk to A few people who have the product or, you know, are thinking about the product, and literally, I would go talk to them, right? And then I started to realize that they were lying to me. They weren't lying to me. They were lying to themselves about what was going on. And so I actually turned to criminal and intelligence interrogation methods to literally figure out how to tease out of them what they're really doing and why they're really doing what they're doing. And so one of the things that came out of it is the notion is that, like, you talk, talk to customers, and there'd just be this irrational moment where you go, like, this makes no sense. Why are they doing that? And what I realized is that context makes the irrational rational. Once I actually understand the context they think they're in, all of a sudden their behavior becomes very predictable. And so what I learned from all that was that the more I can understand where they're coming from, not only the mindset, but what are the struggling moments they have? What are the outcomes that they're seeking? What are the anxieties that they have? What are the habits they have to give up? How do I understand their world in terms of buying a new product is really a form of transformation to them from going from the product they were using to the new product that your product that they're using. And ultimately, I've been studying that for almost 40 years. What causes people to say, today's the day I'm going to stop doing this and I'm going to start doing that. And what you start to realize is, number one is it's not random. Like, everybody wants to say, it's like, oh, if I get 100 people, I can get 30 proposals, and 30 proposals will get me to the. Like, they're treating it as if it's probability theory, but the reality is it's not. It's causal theory. What causes people to say, today's the day that they need your product. And most people can't answer that because they can't answer it in a complete way. And so this is about studying what causes people. So what we do is to be asked, what I do for a living is I go talk to 10 people who bought your product. And then from that, I can deduce actually, what are the reasons why people. What are the struggling moments they have? What are the outcomes they want? And ultimately, what are the different pathways to get to your product? And so you start to realize that there's not one answer, but usually there's three to five answers. Of why they buy your product. And they're distinctly different. And what happens is you end up kind of mashing them all together and building a product that tries to do everything for everybody and it ends up doing nothing for nobody.

Right? Yeah.

Right. So the crazy part to me as a founder is that I was told a very big lie in college, and I think it stems from engineering school. And that the way they try to make you feel so smart, and they basically say, build it and they will come. And it's just a lie. It's just a blatant lie. And the fact is, if it has happened, it's the anomaly that is one in a million. But for the most part, in my very early years, the stuff I built, nobody came. And so I had to start with understanding what are the problems. We can talk about pain points, but it's more than pain points. It's the context that makes them ready to buy. What's the situation that they're in that says, today's the day I got to do something different? And ultimately, what are the things that they want to happen? And so ultimately, what they're doing is they're. Because we speak most. Most marketing and salespeople speak in features. They associate the feature with the outcome. But the reality is the outcome can be actually achieved through different sets of features. But ultimately, sometimes you don't need the feature. So people keep trying to match each other in features, and then they actually outpace the customer. So my favorite example of this is when you talk to, like, look at the camera industry, the camera industry literally just looked at each other. Nikon looked at Canon, Canon looked at Hasselblad, somebody looked at Fuji, and they just had a race to the top of most features. But the reality is the person who owns the camera market is Apple. They produce more photos than anybody else in the world. Anybody else. And the reality is that it's because they forgot the very simple fact of the best camera is the camera with you. And it started with a really bad camera. And that bad camera, that bad picture was better than no picture at all. And if you look at the industry, the camera industry is they literally match features of, we can go this fast, we can get this biggest sensor, we can do this kind of lens, we can do this kind of thing. And they literally out outpace the market to the point where they're off 90% in units in 10 years. And they literally, all they did was look at basically Apple and laugh at them and say, that's not a camera. That's Not a camera. And the reality is, and now they're not a camera company anymore.

Right. So maybe we can kind of help our listeners sort of clarify the difference between product features and the jobs that customers are trying to do. So for maybe a SaaS founder who's listening to this and has maybe been spending a little bit too much time thinking about features, can you help us understand the difference in that context of.

Yeah. So a good example. So I worked with Basecamp for almost the last, let's say, 15 years or so, and one of the things that came up was that people kept asking for a calendar. I need a calendar. I need a cal. We need a calendar feature. And they kept going like, God, I don't want to build. Google's got a great calendar. We don't need to build another calendar. It's like, but I need a calendar. And so they finally broke down and said, all right, like, all right, we're going to build a candle. Let's talk to people. But we started by actually saying, like, why do you need a calendar? What is going on? That this calendar, like, you already have a calendar. Why do you need another calendar? And it turns out that what happens is in Basecamp, the way that it sets up is like it. When you start to put tasks in, you start to put kind of the pro. The information in it populates with all the things you have in it. But it doesn't tell you, it doesn't give you a calendar. It just says, hey, this is due on Tuesday at 2 o'. Clock. This is, this is here for next Thursday. Here's a meeting you're going to have. But it doesn't actually have the calendar feature. And one of the things they realized is what people were really struggling with is the fact that they wanted to actually know what time slots were available. It's like, I need a calendar because I don't know what's available and I don't want to over override something if that's not available. And it was like a resource, like a conference room piece, right? So we need a calendar to do that. And ultimately what we realized is we didn't have to build a calendar. We just had to actually show them what was available. And so what happened is, is they just literally took the calendar, almost like the, the Apple calendar that has the dots on it, and basically said, all right, let me show you where things are free, where there's nothing. And so we just showed the inverse of what was booked, right? And ultimately everybody and they, they implemented it and everybody Goes, oh my God, thank you for the calendar. And it wasn't a calendar at all. It was just a way to see resources. And so part of it is, is customers don't know what features they really need. They, they, they, they, they. You need to actually dig past the feature and say, what could you do with this feature that you couldn't do yesterday if you had the feature? Because ultimately you'll find three or four ways to get there. And like this case, it was instead of being a six month project to build a calendar, it was literally a six week cycle that was actually very, very easy to do.

Yeah, I remember. And it was basically like a month view of a calendar as an example where you could see either a day was completely blank or it had some dots and you were like, oh, there's something there.

Yeah, what is it you can see. Exactly. But the notion was it didn't have to be a fully functioning calendar with editing and all this other stuff. It was literally about the, the whole reason for the feature was I want to see what's available. Like the thing that just kept coming back is I want to see what's available. And so you start to realize, well, how many other ways can we see that? And it turns out we don't need to build a full calendar, we just need to build a view that actually shows them what's available. Right. And so this is the example of like a lot of times what happens is when people say they want a feature, my question is always very simple. It's like, so what do you think that feature is going to help you do that you can't do today? Because ultimately that's what I want. The outcome that they want, I don't want the feature they want. Because nine times out of 10, they don't even know what's possible. Right. They don't know the technology stack, they don't know everything that's around it. And we might be able to do it way easier or way differently than they prescribe. Customers really don't know what they want, but they know the outcomes they want.

That's a great example. I love that I want to unpack the sort of the elements of a job a little bit. So maybe could you walk us through the different aspects?

So here's the thing is a job to be. The basic premise of Jobs to be Done is this is that people don't buy products. They hire them to do a job in their life and make progress. And so ultimately it's the fact of being able to say if People are switching from A to B. The first thing to say is, like, at some point, there has to be a struggling moment. My belief is that in my, again, 40 years of experience, if people aren't struggling, they're not actually looking for anything new. We are creatures of habit, and we'd rather do the same thing over and over again than try something new unless we have a struggling moment. So it's trying to actually. And it's not a problem per se. It could be a potential problem. So this is why I call it struggling moment. But the other half of it is they have to actually not only have a struggling moment, but if they don't have an idea of what's the next way, this is where people bitch, but they don't switch, right? Complaining, complain, complain. But the moment that they can see the other side now, they actually have a weight reason to change. And so you're trying to go like, what's wrong now? What's the conditions that say you're ready for something different, and then what are you hoping for on the other side? And if I can frame the market that way, I have this notion of this is the struggling moments, this is the things that are pushing them to change, and these are the things that they're pulling for to make progress. If this is a river, I can now start to think of how many different ways can I get across that river? Well, I can build a bridge, I can dig a tunnel, I can get a boat, I can do a ferry, I can teach them to swim, I can get a rope. Like, there's just infinite number of solutions. But now, depending on how severe the struggling moment is and how much they want to get to the other side, the reality is that helps me then decide the value proposition of what's possible for them and what I should go build. And so what happens is, nine times out of 10, I can actually end up, if I frame the job to be done right, I can actually make the solution way easier than if I tried to do it on my own without actually talking to the customers at all. And so the way we think about this is this aspect of what we call the supply side of the world and the demand side of the world, right? And ultimately, the supply side of the world is where we have a business system with a product and features and benefits. But we look at customers and we literally look at this wall that divides the two worlds. And typically we climb to the top of that wall, which is, I think it was 10ft thick and 100ft high, and we look down on the market. But if you actually flip over on the other side of that wall and you say what causes people to buy a new product? It turns out that they have some current product or they're doing something. In some cases, doing nothing is doing something. But there's some context that happens in their life that causes them to have a struggling moment. The moment they have that struggling moment, they're like, should I do something about this or not? If I am, well, what do I want? And then they start to think about candidates and they have higher and fire criteria and trade offs and they look over this wall and they see brands and products. And so ultimately the fact this is what we want to be able to do is understand how do we understand this side of the world? First, to understand the requirements before I go build something. Because nine times out of 10 I build something and then I got to go find people who need it. And ultimately that makes my job ten times harder. But if I actually have a group of people that have a problem, I actually know how to actually go build something for them. And it's actually easier to build. And so that's how I've been able to do so many products is that it's not that I'm trying to build the best product in the world. I'm just trying to build the product. Product that'll help make progress in a very specific moment.

So you talked about this struggling moment and also this phrase of like, they bitch but they don't switch, which I love, by the way. What do you think is the trigger that, okay, I've got this struggling moment, I've got this struggling moment, I'm kind of living with it, I'm whatever. And then something happens that just pushes them too far.

So, so there's, there's several different things. But the way I think about it is most people think about buying a product as a game of dice. And I think of, I think of buying a product as like a game of dominoes. What dominoes have to fall in their life to make them ready to buy your product. Right. And so it's a very different kind of mindset of like, it's not just a trigger, a trigger, like, so think of it as there has to be some energy that's built up that literally is like, I gotta get out of this. And if there's not enough energy, they can't actually make it to the other side. At the same time, if they don't know what they're actually fighting for, they don't know where to go. The fact is, they have all this energy and they don't know how to dispel it. This is why they bitch all the time. And so you have to realize that part of this is providing them a pathway in order to make the progress. But you need to understand their outcomes, because their outcomes are not features. Features are the things that help them make the progress, but the outcomes are the definition of satisfaction.

So let's talk a little bit about how a founder could go about identifying some of these motivations, understanding customers better. What's a good way for somebody to get started if they're going to do, like, if they're going to go out and talk to customers like you do on behalf of clients, how should they or how could they structure an interview, for example?

Yeah, so the first thing is, I never talk to people who want my product ever, because what I'm doing is I'm actually making them think about the future. And none of us can predict the future. If you can, you're amazing. But the reality is the world would say we're really bad at predicting the future. So the way we start is by actually uncovering the past and saying, what are the dominoes that have to fall for somebody to buy my product? So I would go say, like, let me go talk to 10 people who recently bought your product. Right? And ultimately, the fact is, as I talk to those customers, saying, like, what happened? What was going on? What were you using before, why now I call it the who, the when, the where, and the why. Right? To help me understand the what, the how, and the how much. And so ultimately, I'm trying to actually interview people about what was the struggling moment, what were they hoping for, what happened, what was the journey they went through. So I can actually decipher what I call the forces of progress.

And I think going back to your domino's analogy, I think that's great because often we're like, we talk about, why did you buy this product? And they might give you one answer, which might be the final domino. But if you talk about the journey, you might discover, well, actually, these other things needed to happen first before they got to that point.

That's right. So we're trying to make sense of what they're talking about. And so what happens is, as they're at this old way, there's gotta be a push of the situation, has nothing to do with that solution, but actually has to do with, like, why is this so, Is this so hard? This is too slow. This is too. It takes too Many resources. It's just too. Too much. Whatever it is, the reality is there's gotta be a push. And it's typically described as when I am. And it's written in the form of the customer, of what they would say to say, like, when I'm losing sales, when. When the system keeps going down on a regular basis, when my team is confused, when. When, you know, when we have. When we have to have. When we got to cut costs by 20%. Like, there's something that goes on that pushes people to change. Right? And if the push isn't big enough, there's no way they're going to change. So part of this is it's not just pain, but it's context. Right. The second part is they can't actually see the idea unless they have a push. So the way Clay talks about it is questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And so the question is, like, why is this so slow? What else could we do? Those create the space for them to see this new idea. And the moment they see this new idea, it creates pull to the solution. Oh, my God, that would be great if it could do that. Oh, my God, that would be wonderful. It could have this. And so we talk about the two green arrows as more or less the fuel for the change, but the reality is, is that there's also friction in the change, which is, as they see the new idea, there's anxiety of the. Of this new solution. Like, how much is it? What am I going to do with the old thing? Right? It's the. It's the aspect of, like, how do I handle my data? How much, you know, what, what's the ongoing cost for it? How do I convince the rest of the organization? Like, there's all this anxiety that comes up, and then there's the habit of the present, which is, what are the things you need to stop doing in order to actually put this in place? It's like, you know, you need to stop using this program or you gotta. You've gotta create a new process, a new set of behaviors, and so they gotta stop doing this old behavior. And so what we have to do is not only understand the push and the pull that help people get to your product, but we also have to understand the anxiety and habit to know how to actually reduce the friction. And so what I always say is this. This. This lower right corner is really the goldmine, the anxiety of the new solution. So, like, one of the things I did was I built houses here in Detroit, and one of the things that I realized that was the fuel was basically, I built for basically first time home buyers, downsizers, like your parents and thirdly, divorced family with kids, right? So what causes a downsize, you know, your parents to say, today's the day we're going to sell our house, right? There's a whole bunch of pushes, things like, you know, when I, when I'm sick of shoveling snow, when the kids have moved away, when the house is paid off and I got all this money tied up in the house, right? Like there's just a whole bunch of things that say, like, we need to do something else. They see my condo and they go like, oh my God, first floor, first floor laundry. I don't have to do any of the maintenance. They're like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that pulls them towards it. But then there's this anxiety about how am I going to take 2500 square feet worth of my stuff and put it into 1500 square feet. I haven't moved in 40 years. I got so much stuff, like I don't know how to do that. And so what happened is as I would have people buy my condo and six weeks later come back and say, yeah, to be honest, it's just too hard to move. We've got 13 closets. In the last three weeks, we've gotten rid of one closet, three boxes of Kleenex, and it's impossible, we have to cancel. And so I literally said, fine. I went and said I'm going to actually include moving and two years of storage and a place in the clubhouse for you to sort your stuff when your kids come to visit. Increased my sales 22%. I didn't. It had nothing to do with my, as a builder to add anything to my condo. It was more about the fact of being able to understand their context and the problem that was around it. And so all I did was partner with a, build with a mover and say, like, here's what you're going to do, here's how this is going to work. Raise account. I literally not only made more money, I actually, I sold more houses at the same time. Right. And so part of it is being able to understand. So the first thing is for founders to literally go talk to people who have already bought. Right. And understand and listen carefully to what was going on in the business that made this the right time to get this solution. And then ultimately, when they got the solution, what you want to ask for is what were they hoping for? What was the outcome that they thought this was going to bring to the table. Not the features, not the benefits. It's ultimately what are the outcomes that they thought were going to happen along the way, and then ultimately, what were they worried about and what did they have to give up? And once you actually do 10 of these interviews, you don't need a lot of them, but we end up doing about 10 to 12 of them. And you start to see these patterns, and you start to see three to five patterns of how people, you know, decide, today's the day. I need a new CRM. It's like, it's not one reason. It's literally three different sets of reasons. But there's only three, there's not a hundred. And so you start to realize these patterns are the things that then give you the scale to not only fix the product, but to talk about sales, to talk about marketing, to talk about partnerships, to work. Work at M and A. So it's this foundational research that actually kind of has tentacles into the whole organization.

I love this idea of the anxiety of the new solution. What kind of questions would you ask them to sort of dig deeper there?

So as we were at the table, what were you worried about? What were your concerns? And here's the thing is, like, everybody talks about ghosting, like, in the sales process. Oh, my God, they ghosted me. What happens is, you ask them a question, you create an anxiety that is on their front. Like, what's the contract look like with the other vendor? What are we going to do with this data? It has nothing to do with you, has everything to do with them. And they disappear. And then four months later, they come back and go, like, yeah, we're ready to buy. And you think, like, wait a second, what's going on? And it's because they don't see that as your problem. They see it as it's their problem and they need to resolve it. And the reality is, if you can understand it, you can actually head it off at the pass, because everybody has the same set of patterns. That's the clue of this, is that once I know the patterns, for every person who's made it, there's 10, 100, a thousand, a million people behind them wanting to make it, but they don't know how. And so you're trying to teach them how to do this, and your product is just part of the solution. Again, my condo is just part of the solution. But moving was something I had to add. I had to add mortgages. I had these other things to be a complete solution to help people move from their. From the house you grew up in to the new condo that they live in now. And so part of this is to look at what is the complete solution from their perspective, as opposed to us being the complete solution.

I'm interested in this number you came up with. Like, you interviewed 10 to 12 people who've bought your product. I've often heard some people say, you know, 10 talking to 10 people is not statistically significant. I've heard other people, founders, go out and say, well, we interviewed like 100 founder or 100 potential customers. But why do you think that that number 10 to 12 feels like the sweet spot for you? And you've proven this over many decades, I think.

So here's the thing, is that if I'm doing a random sample, I gotta have 40 to 60 people. But I'm not doing a random sample. I'm actually handpicking. I'm looking at your market and I'm saying, all right, let's say we go from, let's say we're selling software SaaS to, for marketing, let's say HubSpot, right? The reality is like, I want to be able to understand the markets and how you have them defined. So it's like, I need to know, like, if, if, if I go from, you know, people with a million ARR. I've got founders who have nothing. I have people who have a million ARR. And I have big corporations. It's like, okay, I want to understand, like, I'm going to talk to three, three founders. I'm going to talk to three big corporations. I'll talk to four people in the middle market, and then I'll. And then it'll be like, so, for example, if it's, if it's consumer, like, consumer stuff, right? It'd be like, okay, I need so many people under 30, so many people between 30 and 50, and so many people over 50. I need people in this income bracket and I need people. I need so many males and so many females. And ultimately I'm designing an experiment to make sure that I'm covering the space. I'm not randomly covering the space. I'm purposely covering the space so I can see the patterns in 10. The fact is, is that I can. I've. As a, as a builder, one of my things is that I would go to ask to do research, and I'd go to research, and they would take six months to do the research because they'd go out and ask everybody else what questions they wanted. They build a Survey. The survey was actually questions we wanted to ask and answers we wanted to hear, not the answers they wanted to say. And I always say that I'm not smart enough to even know the answers they're going to give. And so ultimately I have to do this as hypothesis building research. I'm not doing research to prove a hypothesis. Right. So it's very, very different kind of research. And so ultimately, once you have the 10, you actually start to see the patterns. You can go back and do quant afterwards, but the reality is, is at some point in time, those patterns are very, very solid. And they start repeating after about 6 or 7. By the time you get to 10, like there's not anything new. If you go to 12, you've literally heard it all. And if you go to like, I have people who say, like, they want to do 50 and I'm like, this was early in the. I'll say in my, in this business. And I did 20 and I begged them to stop. I just, like, I couldn't do, like, we're not going to. This is, again, this is not a statistical exercise, but it is a math exercise. How close are these stories? How many different patterns do we have in the story? So we use math to help us with the 10, but it's not statistics because this is not a statistics problem. This is not a probability problem. This is a causation problem. Very different.

Yeah, great answer.

Sorry, I'm getting excited. I apologize. But this is like, it's a, it's a big, it's a big thing where most people argue with me all the time about it. I'm like, look, we'll do 10, and if you think we need to do more, we'll do more. And what happens if we do two more? And they're like, yeah, we don't need to do anymore. I would much rather do 10 people who came and 10 people who churned and do two versions at 20. If I'm doing 20 interviews, I'd rather do 10 and 10 than do 20 of the same thing. I don't get any more information after about 10 or 12.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to answer your one other question about when people do a hundred. When they do 100, they don't go deep enough. And so they're just getting pablum words. They're getting words that have no meaning or very broad meaning. And so what happens is they, they comment back to the theme of, oh, it's gotta be fun, it's gotta be fast, it's gotta be healthy, and you end up being like, what does that even mean? And so you don't know. And so what happens when people do a lot of interviews and they see a lot of differences in the interview? They haven't gone deep, deep enough. But when you go deep, you end up realizing the causation is, you know, this had to happen and this had to happen and that had to happen. You start to see the common themes of the elements of what had to happen for people to be ready to buy your product.

Do you, do you have like a mental checklist when you interview a customer to know, okay, I've gone deep enough. So when you, when you walk away and you say like you just said, okay, I understand the steps they had to go through, I understand the, the main anxieties they had. Right?

Yeah. So I don't have a checklist. But like if you, if you look like I have interviews that are online you can listen to. But like, what happens is, is I play back the stories and the reality is what I'm doing is when I play back the story, I'm, I'm trying to make sure when I get to the design table, I represent them at the table, not my preferences, their preferences, who they are. So I look at this exercise as more like an understudy role. I'm studying this customer enough that I actually understand what makes them think and can make sense of it. And so ultimately now I can actually figure out kind of what to do next. And so the thing is, is I'm trying to actually empathetically understand where they're coming from, what they mean, and what is their intention behind everything, as opposed to just listening to the surface level words.

What if a founder is listening and they don't have 10 customers, they're like super early stage. What, what could they do? Could they go and interview 10 customers who bought their competitors product?

Yes. So what I would tell you is, so I did this with Facebook and one of the things we found is we found people selling things on Facebook messenger and we're like, this is kind of weird. And so what we did is we kind of realized, could this be a platform for selling things? They hadn't thought of that. Right. And so what we did is we went and studied Etsy, Craigslist and ebay and said, what causes people to start an account on ebay? What causes people to start to go buy something on ebay? And out of it they basically learned everything they needed to do to basically build Facebook Marketplace. And if you look at it, it's A blending of. It's like, it's a little bit better than Craigslist. It's not quite to where ebay is, and it's nowhere where Etsy needs to be. But the reality is, like, they were able to learn kind of like how it was going to work. It's 6 or 7 billion at this point. Right. And they started from nothing. Right. It was literally an anomaly that they basically saw and said, like, what is this? And can we do? So are there more people who want to do this? And then we basically said, all right, well, let's go look at these other things and see what learn.

And. And did you. Or did they actually, like, talk to, like, Etsy customers and. And go through a similar exercise?

Yeah, you just. You just go. There's. There's places you can go and just say, like, I'm just looking. We didn't say who we were. We just basically said, like, look, like, tell me, like, why in the world, like, I want. You sold something on Etsy. Tell me about the first time you sold something on Etsy. Why now? What was going on? Why Etsy? Why not somewhere else? What was the choice? You know, what were you hoping for? What happened? How did it work? All of that came out. Give us all the insights. We need to be able to go build Facebook Marketplace.

So when founders are talking to customers, are there specific signs or phrases that they should be on the lookout for to try and understand the job that you know?

So I talk about the layers of language and that most people talk in three different layers. And the first layer is like, what I call the pablum layer. This is where people talk, like, how do I say? They don't talk with much precision. So, for example, I would go home and ask my wife, how was your day? Standard answer, good. What does that mean? Was it really good or was it not good? And then. So what you have to realize is the moment you say, well, like, what happened? That takes you down to the next level, which is. I call it the fantasy nightmare layer. This is where people exaggerate what actually happened. Say, oh, my God, I had these meetings and they were just running long, and this happened, and that happened. I'm like, okay. Then you get to the next layer down, which is the causal layer. What actually happened is like, oh, this meeting land ran late. This actually happened. This meeting got canceled. Okay, now I understand. And that made it a good day. It's like, no, it really wasn't a good day. So you lied to me. This is how I do interrogation Is because most people don't know how to actually answer half the questions we ask them.

You've mentioned interrogations a few times, and when we were talking earlier, before we started recording, you mentioned never split the difference. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's. So that's the greatest book in the world. Like, so for the example is when I'm interviewing, I'm actually working to have people tell me no. Because the moment they say yes, like, so, you know, was this, did you like this? And they'll say yes. There's nothing more to ask. You could say, well, what did you like? But if you said, no, I didn't. It's like, oh, what is it? And so. So, for example, I'll play back things incorrectly because they'll actually then tell me, no, no, no, that's not how it happened. And they're actually prioritizing stuff for me. So the whole notion of trying to get people to say no is actually way more important than getting them to say yes.

Can you give me an example of that? That's a really smart strategy there. Just to play back things incorrectly.

Again, it's that aspect of being able to realize that people can expound on the word no, but the word yes becomes more pablum. So if you ask them about, like, why they like something, like, it's kind of like they'll say, I want it to be easy. And, well, what's easy? Like, it just needs to be easier. And then you say, well, what's hard about it? Oh, my God, too many steps. I got to remember too many things. I got to be able to go, like, all of a sudden it starts to move from one frame of, like, I don't have any language to, like, all of a sudden, I have a ton of language. And so it's that aspect of being able to go between those two levels and two areas to basically get them to be articulate. Here's the thing is, most people don't choose. Most people eliminate. And what I mean by that, if I give you three choices, the first thing you do is you pick the one that you don't want the least, and you eliminate it. You put it to the side, and then you got two left. And the most rational thing to do would be compare those two things. But the reality is that thing you eliminated gave you confidence because you made a decision about it. So you compare those two things to the thing that was out. And so what happens is then you actually eliminate the next thing and you say, oh, I'll take B. And the fact is the way they picked B is because they eliminated A and C. So they really didn't actually pick it, they eliminated to get to it. Here's the thing that I want to say. These conversations are 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes up to 90 minutes long. If you do it in 10 minutes, you're at the pablum level. If you do it at the 20 minute level, you're going to be probably at the fantasy level. But when you get to 30, 45, 60 minutes, you're now at the causal level. Because it's like, what are we talking about? It's like now you're unpacking all that language, right? The other thing we do is that for every hour of interview, we do an hour of debrief for the team. Because what we have is a cross functional team to listen to these interviews as we do them. They don't know that they're all in the room. We might only have two people talking. But the thing is, there might be five to seven people in the room. So when we hang up that phone or turn off the zoom, the reality is now we argue about what we heard. So now we're building language about what does easy mean? And the engineer says, well, easy means this. And the salesperson says, no, easy means that. And then you say, well, which did they mean? And then we have to make sense of it. And we realize there's easy to buy and then there's easy to install, which are two completely different versions of easy. But it's not easy. It's easy to install or easy to learn, right? And you start to realize you have to actually do those things. And so the interviews, this is where you go slow. So for 10 interviews, it's going to take you 20 hours of work. But now what you have is you have a database of terms and languages and stories that are all completely independent. You're not modifying one interview based on the previous interviews. Every interview is exactly the same. And then what we do is we throw all the interviews on the table and we keep the stories complete. And we say what two stories are most alike and we put that in one corner. And then we say what story is most different from that one. We put that on the other side of the table. And then we literally start to look at each story and say, how many different stories do we really have here? And you start to realize there's not 10 different stories and there's not seven different stories. There's usually three, four, maybe five stories. And that covers 90% of the market. It's crazy. Like, I never, like, this is where I. Like, I didn't believe it when I did it, but I've been doing it for years and years and years. It's like 10 interviews helps me understand 80% of the 90% of the market and I can, I can actually action it. Right? So. So I just did a. We did some work with a company called Nvidia and. And they're, they're. They basically help you edit videos very quickly so you can post them on Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Right. And what they had is they actually had two. We ended up doing jobs to be done for them and they had. They had three different jobs that we had three different patterns. We found out one is somebody who had never done videos before. The second job was like, I have a business that I need to actually learn how to do video for my business. And then there's a third one is like, I'm an expert at video. And to be honest, I use this because it just saves me time. And so the fact is, is what happens is if they listen to those three sets of customers, the people at the high end are literally wanting it to be more and more complicated, more and more, like take more and more work on where the people at the job one want it to be simpler and easier so they can actually make money. And so you start to realize that literally you'd create a feature and half the people would like it and the other half would scream about it. And you realize that that's the problem is that we are actually have too many. We don't have this segmented the right way. And so they basically decide to say we're going to abandon the high end of the market, the people who are the experts, because they're only going to complain and they really aren't going to pay us the money that we need to have. So we're going to focus on making it simplest and easy as possible to build a video. And within six months, they went from zero to 25 million in revenue just by focusing on that one place.

Wow, great example.

But they had been working for three years with this bipolar nature of like, oh, we're doing this, we're doing this and they're segmenting more. And they end up having so much complexity, they literally couldn't figure out a new feature which they wouldn't get pummeled on.

Right, right. Because it was like the polar opposites and you're trying to make everybody happy.

Yeah, that's right. I'm trying to like in the same segment, I've got too many people who are telling me different things, which means I can't do anything. And they just started to die slower and slower and slower. So they literally said, we're going to restart and we're going to launch this lower end product. And it didn't exist at all. And they just stripped it down. And like in, for example, in video, the big thing was you had to have a timeline. Well, if you've never done video before, you don't need timelines, right? So all of a sudden they're making it easier and easier and the people at the high end of the market are laughing at this, going, this is joke, we don't need to do it. Meanwhile, they literally got 20 million users using it all day.

I want to talk about this idea of you've got these insights and we've talked about how you can apply them to the product and the features you're building and getting more focus. But founders also have to think about marketing and sales. They have to think about their messaging. And so how can they apply these insights to that part of their business?

Oh, I wrote a book called Demand side Sales, which is how do we apply? Like, so the first thing I realized is there are no sales professors at MBA and business school. Why are there no, like having done seven star or eight startups? The hardest part of anything I've ever had to do is selling. And why is there, no, why is there not teaching? And what they would do is they would teach me the sales process, they teach me psychology. But the reality is, what I realized is what we really need to teach is how do people buy. And so that's all we've really been studying is how do people buy? And ultimately we want to have the sales process map the way they buy. Most people think the sales process is the way we should force them to buy. Like, and here's the, here's the. Really the craziest question is I teach the salespeople to ask the question, how do you want to buy versus how do we want to sell? And most salespeople think of that as the same thing, but the reality is like, so I ask people, where are you in your, in your buying process? And they'll go, oh yeah, we're just starting. But if I ask them, where are they on the sales process? They don't have a sales process because they're not selling, they're buying. And so you can't ask him that question. Right. And so what you start to realize is that when you start to understand the job to be done now, you actually have to realize that, for example, well, there's a, there's, there's something called the timeline that really helps in this thing. So in the timeline we basically say the way that people end up buying, right, is there's a first thought. This is where the, like Clay would say questions create spaces in the brain for, for solutions to fall into. So a lot of times what you want to do is ask people a question but not answer it. So like I worked with Casper, and one of the things we basically said is you just ask the question, how'd you sleep last night? You don't say anything else because if they didn't sleep well, they're thinking, God, I didn't sleep well, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to. But if you say, didn't sleep well last night, need a mattress, the answer is always almost no, right? And once they actually realize they're not sleeping well, they start to passive looking, like, what else could I do? I could go to bed earlier, I could do this, I could do that, right? And then they start to actively look. What's interesting is most people try a thousand other things before they realize it's the mattress, right? And then ultimately it's into deciding. So one of the things we did in advertising was we realized that our competitor wasn't other mattress companies. Our competitor was Zquil, which is a sleep aid. So we basically ran the ad of how many bottles of Zquil do you need to take before you realize you need a new mattress? 37% increase in sales. Crazy. And so part of it is we start to look at this as each phase of this is about a system of what they need to learn to move to the next system, which is, if you think of first thought, it's about making space in the brain. And passive looking is about learning the problem and seeing if it's big enough. And then it's basically seeing possibilities is acted like, what could I do with this thing? And deciding is actually about making trade offs because they can't have it all. And ultimately that's where things lock in to make the progress. And then you can build it into a habit. But ultimately it's about helping people manage their way through this process. And it's not a funnel because at some point I could be in the middle of deciding and the pandemic hits. So I move back to passive looking. I can go backwards in this thing because all of a sudden I see something that didn't make sense anymore. And so you have to realize that. And people can't go from passive looking to buying right away. And so like when somebody asks for a demo, where are they? If I'm. If they're a demo and they're in passive looking, it's kind of like I'm trying to see the problem. Tell me more stories about how it works versus if I'm down here and deciding and I see and you ask for a demo, the demo is like, how do I make sure it's not going to fail? Totally different demo. So I helped. I help a company basically realize that they didn't need one demo, but they needed three demos and it cut their sales process in half or the time to. Time to close in half.

Is it, is it more like the left side of this is more about marketing and educating and getting people to kind of move to the stages on the right where you can start to have more of a sales conversation.

Is that I need marketing at first use as much as I need marketing up here. Marketing has its own role in all this. Sales has its own role in this. Customer success has its role. But there you can say they're biased. But the thing that I realized is the handoff between marketing and sales is the problem because it goes from marketing to sales is one handoff and sales to customer success is the other handoff. And so much gets lost that they are actually one team, they're not three. That's the problem. And so this is where I say I need all three of. I need sales, marketing and customer success to be part of making like first thought. My thing is customer success has to be part of that as well. Because at some point if we open the space in the wrong way, then their expectations are all wrong moving forward. Right. And so this is where like what we end up doing is connecting them as opposed to trying to actually make them more independent. And so this is where like I'm a big, big believer that sales, marketing, customer should have one lead. One. One. One executive, not three. Because if you look at the friction between sales, marketing and customer success, they spend more energy fighting with each other than actually fighting competition.

And that's starting to happen. I think many companies are kind of having this CRO, chief revenue officer type role. Marketing, sales and CS folks are sort of.

But to have the market, if it's a chief revenue officer, then the fact is they should be connecting basically marketing, sales and customer success into one group and teams.

Yeah, I don't see that happening that much.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's happening. I'm doing it with. I probably have a dozen or so, two dozen clients that I've done in the last year, three years around that, for sure. So it's happening, but it's very rare. And it's, it's the fact that it's usually a power struggle. Like, the Chief Revenue Officer wants more and the brand, you know, the, the, The CMO wants more power. And you start to realize, like, like, look, the. The whole thing is we got to focus on the customer. And the reality is the brand is an effect. It's not a cause. When people come to you, they don't know who you are. You. Your product causes them to have a brand awareness or a brand image because they have a struggling moment. And it fits in the struggling moment. If you don't realize that if you think your brand is out, like, in terms of it doesn't need a struggling moment, you're wrong. Because at some point, if they didn't have a strong moment, they wouldn't know they need your brand.

Right. Right. Let's give founders an actionable takeaway here. So for founders who are just getting started with jobs to be done, what's. What's one small step they could take?

So I would tell you to go, like, if your product doesn't exist and you're. And you're in the midst of kind of framing it out, I would literally go and say, I. The advice I give them is go, if, if your product, your vision for your product is successful, what will people stop using? If you are great, and those are the people I would go interview. So they'll stop using Etsy, they'll stop using Craigslist, they'll stop using that other stuff. Like, we're going to go interview them and then we can build a better product. Right. If you have customers, I would tell you talk to the last 10 customers. Or I would pick. Like, if you have, let's say a hundred customers, I would pick 10 out of that last customer and say what caused them to say today's the day that they needed to have your product, and what did they give up to get it? And part of it is to realize that, like, most things compete. This is, this is the crazy. In SaaS, most things compete with Excel, Word or the Intern.

Yeah.

And so you start to realize, like, they're thinking it's like, oh, we're competing with, you know, HubSpot, or we're competing with Zendesk, or we're competing with. And the reality is, like, no, we just did it in Excel. This just seems bad. And you start to realize, like, you're overthinking the entire thing when you realize, like, half of the people who are switching to you are moving from Excel. It's like, you don't need to talk about anything else. You're. You're actually making it way too complicated.

Now, before. Before we. Before you go, we should talk about your new book. This is your. Is your fifth book, is that right?

Yeah. So, first of all, I'm dyslexic, so it's. It's kind of like I feel like a little bit of a fraud because I don't really write the books. I have people help me write the books, and so I do a lot of research around stuff, and then I literally package it up and then go find people that would want to write a book with me. And so my next book is called Job Moves. And one of the things I've been doing is talking to founders for probably almost 15 years and asking, like, what is the biggest pain in your ass? Like that if you could wave a magic wand and fix it, what would you fix? And literally, talent has always been on that list, and HR in that space. And to be honest, it's one of those things where, like, I didn't really want to go there, but the reality is, like, it's where people pointed me. And so I studied what causes somebody to say, today's the day I want to leave this company, and I'm going to go to this other company. It's not random. It's just not random. And the exit interviews we do are garbage. Like, get the real story of why it was. Part of it is, like, I turned 30 and I wanted to be a founder, and it was time for me to go, because if I didn't do it now, I could never do it. It had nothing to do with the company. Right. And so part of this is to realize, like, at some point in time, what causes people to leave is fairly complicated. But the reality is, if you get it down to the causal layer, it's these. To be honest, there's, I think, 25. There's like, 12 pushes and 13 polls that some combination of them actually cause you to say, today's the day I'm going to leave this company and go to that company. So I can predict it, but I also can start to predict when people are going to leave. So we just did our HBR article off of this of why people quit. And so if you actually understand what pushes them and you eliminate the pushes nobody's actually ever looking. And so it's a secret way in which to actually create loyalty by actually understanding the progress they want as opposed to the progress I want as the owner. And the more you can actually help people make progress, the longer they'll stay.

I would never have thought about applying jobs to be done to career, but it kind of makes sense when you describe it like that.

Yeah, well, the funny part is it's jobs of jobs. And it's like it's the meta part because I use jobs to be done as the frame around product. And I'm like, well, maybe we should apply this to careers. And it turns out it's very useful there too.

Awesome. Bob, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Really enjoyed conversation.

I hope your audience loved it. And if they have any comments, you can find me on the Rewired group dot com. LinkedIn is the best way to reach a hold of me. If you like the podcast you want to follow me, just Find me on LinkedIn. All my stuff goes out there and if you want to send me a comment, just connect with me. And I'm more than happy to connect.

Great. We'll include a link to your website, LinkedIn profile, and I think your several of your books. I think.

Yeah. So I have Learning to Build, which is like a homage to the people who basically help me. As a dyslexic, illiterate teenager, I was told to be a baggage handler or a carpenter. Right. Or a construction worker. My mom said no, I have a math ability, but I've had three close head brain injuries that limit my ability to kind of read words. And so ultimately, the fact is, like, I have these amazing mentors of Clay Christensen, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Ginichi Taguchi, and Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. They literally poured all their knowledge into me and enabled me to basically work on, like I said, Over 3,500 different products and services and companies. And like, I'm just a vessel of their knowledge. And that was learning to build demand side sales. There's one called Choosing College, which is about how do we actually think about going to school, not where do we want to go, but why do we want to go. And then this one around careers. And then I have a Jobs to be Done handbook as well.

Of course, you've got to have that one. It's like, yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Bobby. It's been a pleasure and I wish you the best of success.

Thank you. Thank you, Oliver.

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