Bob Moesta's Jobs-To-Be-Done: Your Fix for Selling Without Gagging

My product causes demand. Right. But it's correlation, not causation. And if you actually then talk to people about, like, why'd they buy that product? Oh, I had this struggling moment that caused me to say I had to go get it. And so you realize the. The chain of events is not product demand. It's literally struggling moment demand product. And that's really the difference, is that we're trying to take it and be really customer centric and understand it's not what are we trying to sell them, it's what are they trying to buy. And they might sound very similar, almost like synonyms, but our sales process is nothing like their buying process. It is not even remotely similar.

Bonjour. Bonjour. And welcome to another episode of everyone hates marketers.com, the no fluff, actionable marketing podcast for people Sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you're going to learn to stop selling and instead help your customer make progress in their life. I guess today is the OG of what's called the Job Tibetan theory. He developed that with the late Professor Clayton Christensen. He launched more or contributed to launch more than 3,500 products or services and all of that. And, yeah, has plenty of experience everywhere. And it's an honor to speak to Bob Mesta today. So welcome, man.

Thank you, Louis. Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to be here and share whatever I can pass on. That's what my goal is.

So maybe folks have already heard about the job to be done, Right. If they work in marketing, they probably heard about it. My biggest issue with it is that I think the reason why it hasn't caught on or people struggle to understand it to this day and still use customer Personas and all of those concepts that we know are flawed and we can explain that in a few minutes is because it's just too fucking complex to understand.

Yeah. So I don't. Yeah, I would say I agree. I think one of the things is that. So there's only. There's a few quotes that I memorized. One is from a Supreme Court justice from the 1920s. He said, he goes, I wouldn't give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity. And I think that's really what Jobs is about, is when we end up trying to create Personas and have a way to organize, but we do it on the wrong side of complexity. It doesn't help us See the future. And so part of Jobs is, look, human behavior is hard and trying to actually understand what we're going to do next. We don't even know what we're going to do next. So how do we see those patterns? And so Jobs is about a very complex thing of human behavior. But ultimately, it's hard to do because you have to go through that. You have to wade through all that complexity to get past the pablum of what people say to what do they mean and what will they do? And so this is where, like, focus groups didn't work for me and surveys. I was never smart enough to even know what questions to ask. And so a lot of this comes from just being able to realize that people don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their life. And if we can understand that, we can figure out what to go build next.

Why? Why do focus groups suck? To understand what people want to do.

And this is, again, these are all my personal experiences. But what happens is there's an energy when you have multiple people in the room where they end up focusing in, on, or going down the rabbit hole of one or two really what they seem to be important things at the time, but in the bigger context, it's literally like it's pablum. And so you start to realize you don't. The details that you really need are in everybody's individual story, not in their collective story. And so by putting people together, we feel like we can get a better collective story, but it's actually too abstract and it doesn't resonate. And so I find that it's very misleading. I think the other thing is focus groups are really good in some cases to test a little bit in terms of just marketing copy. But from. So my background is I'm an engineer. I build products. I've worked on 3,500 different products and services across many industries. And the work, the research that I need to do to understand how to build product is different than the research I need to do marketing. And that's where I think that's the thing that was actually, for me, the hardest part is that they kept trying to recycle usage and attitudes into what should I go build next? And so ultimately, it was too hard to figure out what product to build next because the details weren't there.

The second biggest struggle I have drops a bit on theory is relating to the method by which we extract the insight. Right. Which is mostly customer interviews. Right. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I've done them a lot as well. What we do is we would schedule an interview with either someone who's an existing customer, someone who switched to a competitor, someone who like close enough to an event that made them do something right or stop doing something which is the same. But then, so that works really well for those complex B2B SaaS, products with fucking long sales cycle or whatever. But those impulse buys, those ones when you go to the service station and you see this fucking bottle of energy drink and you just buy it, you go from first start to all the way to buy and consuming within seconds. So would you interview this person to understand the job?

So what I would say is that certain categories have certain kinds of behaviors. And so what happens is, for example, if you are trying to talk about a pack of gum, it's very different than buying a house. Though the framework we would talk about is you go through the process in a very similar way. You just go one at a very high speed and one at a very low speed. And so part of this is to know and, and when it's a, when it's a fast speed thing, it's typically very low risk. It's typically something that, that isn't that emotional. It's very mostly more transactional. And what you realize is the more emotional something is, the greater the detail of that experience is in their mind and you can actually extract it out. And so this is why, for example, I won't talk to people about the last time they bought a pack of gum, because at some point it's. They just don't remember if it's more than a week ago, they have no idea. But if you talk about, let's talk about the last time you chewed gum. Where's the place where you wanted to chew gum and you couldn't chew gum? Like all of a sudden I can get to a lot of understanding of like how they hire gum and what they use it for and when they use it and when they don't use it to then help me understand what to do next. And so part of this gets back to is the things that are bigger decisions, bigger behavior change are easier to get at. And those things that are little behavior changes are harder to get at. And you need to use a little bit different techniques.

So you switch naturally from. Instead of focusing on, okay, last week you bought a pack of gum. This is the event, this is the purchase. You switch naturally to talking about a different behavior, which is a time when usage, right? A time when they wanted a gum and they didn't have one with them. So what's the difference between those two? The purchase of the gum versus D.

So the thing is that the purchase is almost always around basically the, I'll say the fantasy of the progress they want to make. So it's like why do they purchase the bottle of Windex? Right. But it's ultimately, it's when they spray the Windex, when progress is actually made. And so purchasing is literally a prerequisite to actually making the progress. And you need to design the product for both occurrences. If I design it to actually be really good in usage, but I don't actually design it with the buyer in mind, nine times outta 10, I can never get sales. And if I design it with the buyer in mind, but not with the user in mind, then what happens? I end up getting a lot of sales but no traction. So the concept that I have to this is that there's a big hire and a little higher. And the big hire is when you choose to change. I'm not gonna do this anymore or buy that anymore, I'm gonna do something else. And then the little higher is when do I choose to pull it out and when do I choose not to pull it out though? I wanna pull it out. And that's where you find a lot of innovation opportunities in those spaces.

So let's go through maybe an example that you work with in the past. You don't have to mention the name of the brand or anything like that of this, where the product didn't have a good, didn't match really the buying behavior, but it matched the usage behavior or vice versa.

Yep. Are you familiar with the company Intercom? Yeah. So Intercom. Des Chener, Owen McCabe. Great people. I've worked with them for almost 15 years and their whole premise when they came out was the aspect of when they had previously done some startups and they realized that having all the data in one place was so important in terms of, in terms of chat and who our customers are and like when do they log in? And what happened is you'd have all these pieces of different programs and then ultimately when you tried to scale, you couldn't put it all back together. So their whole premise was we're going to put all the data in one place, though we won't be perfect across the board. It's all the value. The value proposition about, is about having all the data in one place. And they built it. It took them about two years to build it. So 2012 they got about 3 million in revenue the first year and then they went about another. Right. Another three and a half. And then they basically, second year was about a million and a half. And so it grew, but then it tapered off. And so we went off and actually asked people, why in the world was today, the day that you actually installed Intercom on your website to help you what. What were you hiring it to help you do? And we end up finding four very different jobs, very different reasons, very different pathways of why people actually came in. And it had nothing to do with data being all in the same place. And so ultimately what happened is we actually figured out it was, in some cases they helped it. People bought it to help them acquire customers. They were coming to this website but they wouldn't convert. That actually competes with HubSpot. Another reason why we heard people buying it as well. It helps us with support and basically building a support system that competes with Zendesk. And so we started to realize that we didn't have one product, we actually had four different products. And by breaking it apart and going from the initial value proposition of all the data in one place to look, we can help you convert, we can help you on board, we can help you find places to learn, we can actually help you fix support. And so by changing that, they went from 5 million in revenue to 70 million in revenue, primarily because they actually were able to talk about the problems people had as opposed to just the features. They were able to actually differentiate kind of the pathway. And ultimately, ultimately they didn't build four products. They just turned off features that didn't relate to the progress that people were trying to make. And ultimately now they're about a billion dollars.

Yeah. Of valuation. Yeah. So I know very well that story because I'm in Ireland. And they were the big startup success of the 2010 era where everyone wanted to create a startup. So there is one thing that was very interesting in Intercom is that you had identified those four stages. And I remember vividly in the menu, that was what they were leading with. Right. So they were leading with those verbs like as you said, acquire, convert. I think it was engage and something like that. Yeah. And then if I remember correctly, I read an interview from DES after a while and they said that they actually had to tone it down because that was too far into the. What people wanted to achieve and not close enough to actually. But what the fuck is it? Like engage. Okay, but what is it?

That's right, that's why. So they actually have a. They have a solutions part and then they have a product Part because as the market. So think of it this way, as the market matured, people didn't really know what chat was in 2010 and 2013. And so all of a sudden, but then chat became a feature and most people talked about the way in which to communicate was through chat. And so chat became now the shorthand by which to do that. And so they had to update some of those things. But what was interesting is when they went through their series B, they went to a more traditional features and benefits, positioning and sales slowed down. And so what happened is they actually went back in 2019 back to the original positioning and sales started to grow again. And so part of this is to realize it's a balance between the two and you have to be able to understand how the market evolved. But it's about the progress they're trying to make, not just the thing they're trying to buy. This is where we, I have this notion of the difference between a supply side, which is what we build, and demand side is what people buy. And when you flip the lens and you realize that the sales process is a supply side concept, ultimately our job is to help people buy or make progress in their lives by buying our product. And so that's where you flip the lens and you start to see the world in a very different way.

So it's a bit of the intersection of the two, like what you offer versus what people actually want. So I ask you this example. And so in this example, the buying part was unfulfilled and the usage was good, or was it the opposite?

It was the usage part. They didn't have tools. They were using Excel, they were using Google, they were using less sophisticated tools to do that. And so part of it was to talk about the struggling moments that people were having. Because this is what's the other part that was so interesting about is by the time people were coming to Intercom, they were actually problem aware, but solution unaware. And the more we talked about the problem and the easier it was to buy the keywords around the problem because most people were out there buying features and benefit keywords. We actually were able to capture a lot of people way earlier in the funnel because at some point they, they were just becoming passive looking of I have this problem, I don't know what to do about it. And all of a sud, they became the expert in helping them solve onboarding or helping them solve building a support team or help me build on board engagement. And so you start to realize like they made themselves the resource as opposed to Just be the pill you take.

So was it the buying or was. So it was the buying that was wrong, but they had a good.

Right.

Okay, so do you have an example of the other way around? And I'm going to challenge you. Try to dig deep into this non B2B non software, like a simpler products quote, unquote.

Yeah. Yeah. So here's the thing is, if you think about Snickers, the candy bar Snickers versus Milky Way, right? Do you. Are you familiar with. And the reality is the traditional thinking is that they compete with each other because they're both candy bars. But if you actually take a minute and understand, when do you eat a Snickers and when do you eat a Milky Way? And some people say, I don't eat both, or I eat one, but I don't eat the other. And. But what you start to realize is that in the moment of a Snickers, you. You typically have miss the past meal or your stomach is grumbling in some way, and so it's time you need to eat, but you also have a bunch of work to still do, or you still have something to do and you're not yourself. And so ultimately you're trying to actually put something in your stomach so you can actually fuel yourself to get through a busy draining moment, to literally get through it, but not spoil the next meal. And when you look at the competitive set turns out to be an apple, a cup of coffee, a Red Bull, but not a Milky Way. And when you start to look at when people eat Milky Way, it literally competes with a brownie and ice cream and a glass of wine and a run.

So is that based on your work or is that based on just reverse engineering their positioning?

Okay, it was one of the very first applications I worked on very early on in the 90s around it. And it was just basically understanding what caused people to say, today's the day, I need a Snickers. And what happened is what marketing was trying to do is they were trying to tell me who the target was and what they really wanted, what they wanted the brand to be. And what I tried to say is, what is the brand to them already? And how do we fit into people's lives?

Okay, so that was the question, meaning, was it created by the brand and the marketing over decades, this idea that sneakers is mostly where to feel you're not yourself when you're hungry versus the Milky Way, which is give you a treat after dinner or whatever? Or was it the other way around? Was it like just the Customer who naturally behaved that way. And it was matched.

Founded in the mid-90s, basically around that whole aspect of what caused people to buy it. And that's where that was the impetus of them building the Betty White commercial and changing some of the formulation and doing some other things to help it grow. And so ultimately, yeah, people were already behaving that way. They just. And all we did was align it to how people used it. And what we realized is it wasn't a candy bar at all. It was a food bar. And so it competed. This is way before kind bars and any of protein bars didn't exist. And that's how it got from 300 million to 2 billion.

Wow. So that's fascinating. I never heard of that. Those two.

What's interesting is if you talk to extreme athletes or runners or people who run Snickers is something they have all in their thing, because I need fuel, I need this. And it's. You'd say they're really healthy. They should be eating healthy, But a lot of them eat a Snickers.

Let's play the devil's advocate in everyone's mind thinking, okay, that's all well and good. We are taught to do Personas and whatnot. So how would I do my job as a marketer or as a founder of a company that sells this type of product with that understanding? Like, how do I connect that to sales?

This is where I take a step back, right? And you start to say, what is marketing's role? What is their function? What are they supposed to do? And ultimately, they're supposed to actually help lead people to us, right? They're supposed to actually figure out and help understand how do we get in people's way so people understand where we're at. So their job is mostly to buy media, right? To find positioning and to attract, which is very different than somebody who's in product. Because there's a difference between I got to get somebody to buy the product versus I got to get somebody to use the product. There's one thing to say, it's got to be easy, fast, and fun. It's very different to cause fun. Fun is very hard to make happen. And so part of this is why I don't necessarily see it as just a marketing tool. It's actually more of a product tool that I can use to actually help me with my positioning. And so, to me, this is not meant for just marketers to use by themselves, Though there's some really good people like April Dunford and Claire Sullentrope. And Gia, like all of them, have been using jobs to be done around the notion of marketing, and they have the same kind of attitude is we need to understand the progress people tried to make, not just shout features and benefits to attract people. And so to me, as a marketer, what I would say is the big difference is most marketing schools teach correlation, not causation. And so ultimately, what causes people to say, today's the day they're going to buy your product. And the more you can understand that as a marketer, you're going to then understand how to get in their way and where to get in the way and what to say and when, as opposed to just shouting.

So I'm sending a new type of chocolate bar. It's organic, it's healthy, there's not seen it, very passionate about it. I used to cook it in my house and my neighbors started to like it. And so now I'm thinking to do business around it. So how do I figure out what caused people to buy such a product?

First thing is what I would tell you is what will people stop doing when they start buying your product? Because if you can't see that, you can't see where it's going to go, because at some point, nobody does. There's no more time in the day, there's no more. There's no more minutes, there's no more. There's really no new consumption. It's literally people reprioritizing their time to do something different. Different. And so what are they not going to do if they're going to do you.

Okay, let's say I don't know. That I don't know the answer, right? So how do I go about finding it out? Especially it's a new product, so I don't have that many customers. What do I do?

So, for example, I worked on. Let's see, I got to think about how to say this one. So I worked on a marketplace, right, Basically to build out a marketplace, but we didn't have the marketplace. So what we did is we basically said, if we build this marketplace out, who will literally they stop using, if they use our marketplace instead of somebody else's. And we went and then studied basically what causes people to join ebay and what causes people to join Etsy and what causes people to join. And by understanding all that, we were then able to build a basically a platform that literally was better on the right dimensions to then figure out how to, if you will, disrupt those other people.

So I would go to folks I know that consume this type of product in the category loosely enough. Right. And where would I tell them?

I would ask them to tell me about the. So I would find what you would think are the competitive products. So there's other things that they would use instead of yours. And so ultimately it's okay, let me go find when and where do they use these and how do they buy them. And so if it's. If this is a dessert kind of thing, it's. Tell me about what desserts you make at home. Tell me about what desserts you buy. When do you buy dessert? When's the last time you bought a dessert? I'd never ask people about the future. I would always ask people about the past because at some point, most people can't. Don't know the future, but they can. They clearly can articulate the past, the.

Recent past as well, because people start making shit up more and more. And. And okay, so you would ask this question about past behavior, Recent past behavior. Why did you do this? Or would you ask why? As a question I ask?

Yeah. So I'm. So I was actually trained in the late 80s around criminal and intelligence interrogation. But what I would tell you is there's a book by Chris Voss called Never Split the Difference. And that book is the approach I take in terms of being able to understand why people did what they did. And the one piece I will tell you is that when we do these interviews, a lot of the times people who are listening in will say, oh my gosh, that was an anomaly. That was just totally an anomaly. And you start to realize that everybody's story sounds like an anomaly until you start to put them together. Right. And so part of it is to realize that there's sets of things that have to happen to somebody to make them ready to buy or use your product. And so part of this is about understanding the conditions by which somebody needs to be in in order to value what you're doing. And so that's ultimately what you're trying to figure out is where are those moments in space and time and why now and what are they hoping for and how do they know that they get it? And ultimately, if I can answer those questions, I then can understand what to go build.

So why now? Why what are they? What were they hoping for? And.

Yep, and then what I was. Is what were they worried about and what trade off did they have to make?

And so that people can visualize a bit because it might sound like gibberish to some who have never heard of the methodology, but actually when you visualize it, it's actually much easier. So how would you help people to visualize that concept?

Quickly think about it as people moving from point A to point B. So they went from doing this to now doing that. They went from the old house to the new house, right? And ultimately we think there's two types of there's fuel and there's friction. Fuel are the things that enhance or enable the change and friction are those things that actually keep you from changing. And the fuel is a combination of two things. It's a push of a situation. It's the struggling moment they have in their life. It's the thing that's basically saying this isn't good enough, combined with what we would call is the pull of the new solution, which is the outcomes that they're actually seeking, that they want. And so that you can talk about as pain and gain, but it's a little bit more than that. It's context and outcome.

So what's. So let me cut you here and then we'll finish. But I hate the word pain as a descriptor of why people do stuff, right? Because no one is in fucking pain like deep pain when they're just buying a sneakers. It's not like that bad. So pain is always an exhilaration. So you said instead, it's not pain and gain. It's what, it's context and it's context and outcome.

So it's the context that's making you realize that I can't do what I was doing before. And so this is why it's gone from again. It started as pain, but I call it the struggling moment. Where it's. I know I can do better or I've. I see I can do better or this just isn't good enough. Like it's. I don't know what to do, but I know that there, there's gotta be a better way. And those, those are the moments where innovation really happens. That's little space and time of struggling. And so that to me is like, that's where the gold is finding where people struggle. And ultimately they struggle to change. They struggle to overcome, they struggle to make trade off, they struggle to give up things. And the more we can actually understand that, then we can, we realize that we're not the center of the plate. We're typically an ingredient into a larger thing they're trying to do. I always say, you're not the sandwich, you're the mustard on the sandwich that makes it delicious. So the question is, what are the other things wrapped around you that people have to do in order to make progress.

And so it's. I see it almost as a tug of war type thing, right? Where it's, there's the pull, there's the push, and there is stuff that prevents you from going there because if it was that easy to get the job done, they would have done it already. So there is either things that are for real, like barriers, like maybe they don't have the money to buy, or stuff like that, and things that are in their head that might prevent them from moving. What if I make the wrong choice and this I fuck it up? Or what if my husband or my wife disagrees? Or that kind of stuff.

So what's interesting is you bring up the point of I don't have enough money to buy, right? And you can say that's a real. That's a real thing. But when you dig down past that and you start to uncover the causation, it's. I'm not willing to give up money that I'm giving to something else to give to this. And so it's a trade off they're not willing to make. It's not the fact that they don't have money. And so part of it is to realize. And again, sometimes you have to take half steps. So if I don't have the money, I have to save the money. If I can't save them, there's. There is a progression. You have to actually understand a causation that is actually inherent to every change people make. And the more we can understand the, the nature of that change, the. The better we can actually then figure out how to help people.

So I'm selling those, those chocolate bars. I've found a few people to talk to about those moments where, like, they're making dessert or they're eating dessert recently. Right. I don't ask questions such as, do you think it's a good idea? Or would you buy my product? I don't buy. I don't ask the future behavior question. Now, I have plenty of data in front of me, but I feel a bit lost. I'm like drowning in data. I don't fucking know where to start.

Yep. And so part of this is to realize that everybody's story is unique. And so instead of pulling the stories apart, what we do is we look for patterns between the stories. So what two stories are more alike and what two stories are really different. And by understanding the contra, I can say I use contrast to create meaning. I can then understand that there's not one reason or two reasons. But there's several reasons. But there's not 100 reasons of why people buy our product. And so you can start to see the patterns by looking at the entire. So instead of think of a Persona is usually you take all the people and then you mash it back together. And if you try to then figure out and go find that person doesn't exist. Right. What we're doing is we're actually taking stories and saying that's this story existed and we're not going to distort it and we're not going to create a new story. But we're trying to see what stories have similar mechanisms, similar context, similar outcomes. And from that you can start to see that there's 2, 3, 4 pathways by which people pull your products into their lives.

So it could be any of the, any similarities, any type of similarities. Meaning like it could be maybe everyone, roughly everyone is starting to think about it in the same context. Or is it, are we talking about especially those moments, those little moments.

So it gets back to. So this is the interesting part is most people want to end up then using the variable is oh, like these people were lived in a city and these people lived in a, in a rural place. And it's yeah, that didn't cause them to do it. That happens to be the condition they're in. But the reality is what about that condition made this happen? And it was like, oh, lots of traffic. When we have lots of traffic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you start to realize I can have traffic in a lot of different places. It doesn't have to be just an urban. And so part of this is getting it back to the causal mechanisms as opposed to traits and, or features. And so lots of time people will end up trying to characterize the solution. And what we're trying to get to is actually a solution agnostic view of the problem they're trying to solve. That's very difficult. That's why this, that's why. But once you see it, if I understand the context they're in and the outcome they want, and now I actually have access to 20 different ways to help them make that progress, I am actually in a way better solution than coming in with I have a fixed solution, who wants to buy my solution? And so ultimately it's way easier to help people make progress than it is to say, all right, I got an idea, I'm going to build this product now I got to go find of the 8 billion people in the world who needs it? And when do they need it and why do they need it? As opposed to, look, these people are struggling with this. How do I target them? And what are five different ways I can solve it? It's how I've been able to work on so many different things is. So instead of trying to just bring it to market and hope for people to buy it, it's literally, I'm studying where people are struggling, where people already want something but can't get it. And that's how I basically are able to iterate so fast.

How do I. Okay, so I've started to see patterns, right? Let's say I've seen. I'm seeing three main stories, right? To go back to your intercom example, like a four. And I'm able to almost summarize each into one or two words so that in my head it makes sense.

So let me give you a very concrete. I helped a not for profit. Basically, they're building a community of people, and the communities are out helping veterans with ptsd. And as they built this community out, they got to about a thousand people. And what we end up doing is just interviewing, why in the world do you. Did you join this community? And what we heard were stories of, like, people of, I've made a big transformation. I want to share it. And somebody else is saying, I have this thing and I'm at my ropes end and I'm here to learn. And another people say, oh, I've made the. I want to help other people. And you start to realize there's three really different reasons why people join this community. And just by separating it out to say, no, we're building a safe community to no, we're building a community to help you share, learn, and help. They went from a thousand to ten thousand in six weeks.

And you didn't even charge for that?

No, that's. That's. I actually, I did it so I could tell the story because most of the stuff I do I can't talk about.

Oh, yeah. Which is annoying. Okay, I'm going to give you a few examples and you tell me if. If I was. If I'm full of it or if I did a good job. I'm just going to give a few examples. I've done that exercise when I was working at Hotjar a few years ago to really find out why people will start using a tool like that. So Hodjar is a tool to help people see what people do on their website. Right. Roughly what, overwhelmingly, the biggest pattern by a long mile was that they were using Google Analytics conversion rates were dropping. They didn't know why. And that the unknown, the lack of control, that was always the key trigger.

Having done some work. What I would say is this is where people go, I'm. I have a restaurant, and I can literally see in the windows, but I can't go in. And it's. And people are. Less. People are coming to the restaurants, but I can't talk to people why they're there, and I can't. Like, all of a sudden they're like, I don't know what to do. And so the. It's the whole aspect of when everything's growing, Google's great, but when it's not growing or it's declining, it's like, it's just not enough. And that's where they start to say, I need something else. Exactly. So that's a struggling moment.

We spend a lot of time then writing content for Google Analytics, actually trying to write better pages for Google Analytics. Terms relating to this kind of struggling moment to be there first. And we change the positioning around. We tell you what Google Analytics doesn't tell you. And it worked really well. Another thing, I've worked with a few clients who share their own. An interesting one was the solar panel company. And they interviewed the customers based on the question I gave them and whatever. And they found out that something that happens quite a lot is as soon as. Or in the moment when they are buying an electric car, they know for sure they are buying an electric car. The next step is, okay, let's get solar panels as well, because we don't want to pay too much electricity. So that's another one just to illustrate what you're saying.

So this is one of those things where, like, I've worked with people where they're like, I want people to buy our product before they buy that other product. And it turns out, like, no, this is how human behavior works. People, like, if they improve their house, they improve it from the inside out. They do the kitchen, they do the bathrooms, then they do the other rooms, and then they start to do the outside. Unless these other conditions are. And you start to realize those patterns are very true. And all we did is. So their strategy was to say, we want people to buy windows before we do kitchens. But the reality is it's like, after they did the kitchen, they were going to do the window. So let's go buy lists of people who just put in kitchens.

Yep, exactly. And once you understand that, you just opens up.

And so Clay would always say that jobs are as Murky as mud as you look forward, but once you see them, they're obvious as the air we breathe. So every time I tell people jobs are like, oh, that's obvious. It was never obvious going in. Right. This is the complexity of going through it. And this is what's very hard for people to get, is once you see it, it's, like, hard to unsee. But at the same time, the reality. The reality is it's very hard work to get to that clarity.

It's always this acid test of, yeah, if it feels obvious to everyone, duh, in hindsight, it's so easy, then you have the right one. And sometimes what I found is people are almost worried that it's too simple. Right. Because we long for, like, complexity. We like, no, if it's not complex enough, it's not smart enough, and therefore it's not good enough.

Oh, yeah, I get that problem all the time. Because to be honest, I only do 10 interviews. We can see the patterns in 10 interviews.

Yeah. And they will tell you, is that statistically significant? Like, how am I going to bring that to the cmo? So what do you say to that?

Is that from those 10 interviews, I can go build a survey now that's smart enough to get the statistical significance, but the reality is I'm not smart enough to build the survey before I've done those 10 interviews. And so this is where people don't understand. It's like the foundation of your product, of your positioning of everything. And if you don't have these underlying causation of what causes people to say, today's the day, I need your product. Like. Like, if you don't understand that, you're literally just shooting stuff at a wall and hoping it sticks. Because it's causation that makes people. It causes people to say, today's the day I can't do what I used to do and I got to do something else. And innovation comes from the market. Demand is not created by supply. Demand is created by struggling moments in people's lives. And there are many examples of where there are no solutions and there's many struggles, but nobody's actually going after it.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves is folks talking about demand generation. And there's two types, right? What they mean actually is demand generation to make you demand their product. But a lot of people understand it as creating the problem, almost creating the urgency, educating people about the problem. And exactly as you said, it's not that way. You're not fucking God. You can't create demand from scratch, you have to lean on what already exists. Like, you need to surf the wave, not try to create the wave.

That's right. That's right. And so the interesting part is if it's correlation, my product causes demand. Right. But it's correlation, not causation. If you actually then talk to people about like, why'd they buy that product? Oh, I had the struggling moment that caused me to say I had to go get the. And so you realize the chain of events is not product demand. It's literally struggling moment demand, product. And that's, and that's really the difference is that we're trying to take it and be really customer centric and understand what. Again, it's not what are we trying to sell them, it's what are they trying to buy. And they might sound very similar, almost like synonyms, but our sales process is nothing like their buying process. It is not even remotely similar.

The what's interesting here, I think it goes back to the very irrational emotional side of people who want to feel like what they are doing is important. And they almost like giving up power to, to be customer centric. You almost have to forget that you are. You have such a great product and such. Whatever.

So what's so interesting is every product, every positioning, there is an irrational part of every market. There's just a part. And what happens is you start to realize that the irrational becomes rational with context. Meaning what happens is most people will look at something and go, oh my God, that's that, that would never happen. And they, they rather actually try to decide in a conference room with logic, then understand the irrational behavior of real customers and realize, I don't understand their situation enough. That's really the. It's easier. This is simplicity. On the wrong side of complexity is we're going to sit in a conference room because we're smart people and we have lots of experience, we know what our customers want. That's simplicity. That's Personas. Here's the thing is most people don't behave irrationally. It's the fact that they have these forces in their head. They have anxieties, they have pushes, they have pulls. And ultimately, when we can't see the full iceberg, we only see part of it. It makes it look like they're crazy. And at the same time, the fact is, no, if I'm going to die and I'm stuck here and I'd rather not die, I'll cut my arm off because I'm in this context. But there's no other context in the world where I'd say, yeah, I'm going to cut my arm off. And so Jobs is about when and where and why do people change behavior? Demographics, psychographics all tell us about the momentum of where people are going, but it doesn't tell us how people change. And innovation and growth is about how people change.

If you're wholly predictable, people learn to hack you. Being rational means you're predictable, and being predictable makes you weak. And then he says, Hillary Clinton thinks like an economist, while Donald Trump is a game theorist and is able to achieve win one tweet, what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting can replace that example with marketers in boardroom versus people who do 10 interviews.

But I think the reality is there's a rational path, but it's not. It's not in our purview. Right. It's the fact that when you say people are healthy eaters, but yet they're eating Snickers, it's like in this context, Snickers fits very well. And it's not. It doesn't meet any of my healthy criteria, but it does the job very well. And so you start to realize, like, how do I predict the anomaly? And, yeah, the anomaly behavior, and that's the things we're trying to do is I might not be able to predict exactly when, but I could tell you when this situation is setting up, they're going to be ready to do something.

So I'm going back to my homemade chocolate bars now. I've seen patterns, I've identified the core stories. What do I do next?

So, for example, right, My belief is you're going to find probably five or six, let's say, five different jobs around chocolate. And you're going to say, my chocolate can do each one of these jobs, but which one is going to be easier for me to actually go do? For example, you might start like chocolate as a gift. And so this is where people will basically give it as a gift. And so you're actually doing it and starting it as a gift business to then move into kind of, let's say, the candy that's out. And so part of it is to realize, where do I go and where do I start? And it might be you start in the small chocolate business and then move over to the gift business. So then once you have the jobs, there becomes a strategy piece of your supply side. What do you know? What are your resources, what processes do you have? And ultimately then mapping your supply side to the demand side to say where do we start?

Okay, so let's maybe give a couple of metrics or criteria to look into. Right. So let's say I'm picking the gift as the first angle. Why am I picking this? Is it size of the demand? Is it what is might be.

So the reason why I like having helped some small entrepreneurs in chocolate, I would say that it's batchable. I can actually, from a supply side, I can see if I can make it big enough. I know that there are certain holidays I can gear up for and there's certain themes I can do around it. And it's usually started as a side gig, not like I'm going to quit everything and go. And so typically this is a place where they can build up to Christmas or build up to Easter or build up to certain places and learn about it. And ultimately they also learn the process. They get down to buying and purchasing and all the other aspects of build the scale. So then they, they almost are building from a batch to then going to a continuous business.

Interesting. Okay, so when you're starting out, you would try to find the job that enables you, as you said, to batch and to. To start slow. Right? You.

Yeah, in the chocolate. In the. And this is where I say in the chocolate business, because it's very crowded, it's very local, it's. There's infinite number of gradations from really bad chocolate to really good chocolate. And having access to it, I think is hard for people. And so being able to help people understand and I think gifts is a hard business. I think most people don't know how to buy a gift.

So give me another example because I'm sick of chocolate now. Talking about it. I want to eat chocolate now. Let me. Maybe you can give me another example. Bar like you mentioned, intercom. They went at the four jobs at the same time. They had the money to go for that. The chocolate we passed. So what is. What other example, real example could you share about that concept of which job to first pick? Is it sometimes that it's chronological? Like it's almost that and then this and then that.

So for example, I'm doing one. I'm. I'm writing a book around basically I've been studying people switching jobs or careers. Right. They go from being working at McDonald's to working at Chipotle to being a teacher to being a nurse, to from being a lawyer to being a judge. Like what. What would cause somebody to do this? And when you start to look at this, there's. And so I've Been doing the research for 10 years. It's just, it's been a side gig for me. And just it's. I've always been coaching people in it. And so it's one of those things that I've been trying to figure out, like how do I find the right process and resources, et cetera. And ultimately from this research we've been able to realize it's a two sided problem. There's a, first of all, employees hire companies more than companies hire employees. And so if that's true, then what you really need to do as an employee is understand what progress are you trying to make from your current employer. And so ultimately we're building a process out to help people figure out what progress are they trying to make, why are they frustrated? What's the next job really look like? And teaching them how to prototype and almost be true to themselves. The other side though is we have to actually help employers change the way they do, for example, job descriptions, because they're just made up stuff and they end up being wish lists that we want people to do. And when people can't do everything on that wish list, we end up putting them on pips and usually getting rid of them because they can't do the five things we knew they couldn't do when we hired them. And so what I realized though is trying to go to change the employer, employers first is going to be very hard because at some point in their mind their system is working, but employee satisfaction is down. We have quiet quitting, we have all these things happening. And so part of it is if I can actually help people find and be more fulfilled in their work, then employers will start to listen to me about how to help them attract better talent. So that's the logic for it. But knowing how all of that worked and knowing the different kinds of reasons why people leave and go, it like it can change the whole strategy of how I actually go recruit.

Right?

So what happens is, is we try to find people who are already in the category. But for example, I worked with a company that is a factory that basically assembles things. And what they found is people who were sous chefs can actually work on an assembly line very easily. They just don't think they can and they don't understand that they've been doing, you know, that kind of work their entire life. And oh, by the way, they can get vacation and they can get paid every week and they can get benefits. And all of a sudden they're like, holy crap, we actually filled the whole plant by Finding people outside the industry to come work in the industry.

Is there something I haven't asked you that you really want to rant about or mention?

Huh? So I have a couple things. One is, my bucket list is, I think in the end, what I'm really trying to do is help consumers be better consumers, because I think we don't spend enough time thinking about what we want and why we want it. And so we end up buying a lot more things than we actually probably need. And so to me, my first part was learning all of this stuff around from how to develop better products. But ultimately, like, I wrote a book called Choosing College. And it's like, why in the world are you going to college? Like, most people talk about where they want to go, but I want to talk about why they want to go first. Because if I know why, it makes it easier to choose where. And. And so I'm working on a product right now around vacations. It's not where do I want to go on vacation? Which is what every travel site asks you first, it's why do I want to go on vacation? I can actually figure out how to go anywhere, but I have to know why I want to go. Do I want to basically go spend time with people that I miss? Is it more about me having an adventure of a lifetime? Is it more about me just unplugging, relaxing? If I have those things, then I can actually then figure out I can go to Des Moines, Iowa and do any of those things. And so part of this is, so I have a series of books that I've been writing around basically, big decisions, Career, college. I'm working on one at home. I'm working on one on vacation. I'm working on one on partners. Like, how do you choose your life partner? An amazing journey when you start to realize, like, how does it actually work? And what's the causal mechanisms? And then the other set of books are really around methods and tools. And I want to articulate the fact that I was blessed with four very different mentors who taught me. Like, I had three close head brain injuries before I was seven years old or when I was seven years old, like seven and younger. And I was told to be a baggage handler at the airport or a construction worker because I couldn't really read. I could. I'm pretty good at math, but there's. It was just told to be that. And so ultimately, those four people poured their expertise and knowledge into me. I would say I was a sponge and grabbed it from them every chance I got. But I end up. I could have never dreamed the life I've had in terms of working on 3500 different products and services and the people and just amazing things. And so I feel like my job is to pass it all forward. So I have a series of books around, methods and tools to make sure they don't get forgotten from my mentors who passed it forward.

Thanks for sharing that. Can you just go back briefly to this four portraits that you're sharing?

Yeah, yeah.

So from left to right, who do we have?

Let's see. I don't know if it's reversed or not. So you got to tell me, who is it? Who's there for? Is it. Is it a Willie Moore? Is it a woman?

Or is it a woman? To the left.

There we go. So that is Dr. Willie Moore. Dr. Willie Moore was an amazing person. She was my very first boss at Ford Motor Company. She was a Ph.D. in particle physics. She was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Michigan with a PhD in particle physics. And she taught me how to. She taught me the human side of building, and she taught me the molecular side of thinking, which is just amazing things. But like, she would say when we'd have a problem, she says, all right, I want you to become the molecule and tell me what happens to you to cause the problem. And I'm like, oh, my God, that is just so awesome. The Next one is Dr. Genichi Taguchi. He is the father of quality engineering out of Japan. He worked for Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. He's one of the fathers of the Toyota production system and how Toyota developed product. And I learned from him to help Ford reduce their cycle time from 72 to 36 months. The third one is Professor Clayton Christiansen, who's at the Harvard Business School. He and I were colleagues for almost 27 years. I would say first I was a student and then I was. Then he was a mentor and then we were peers. And he helped. He helped turn jobs to be done into a theory where I. I had it more as a method and a tool of something that it just helps me do something. Clay polished and honed and refined it into a theory. And the Last one is Dr. Deming, who is the. He is the father of quality management and he was in Japan. He's also responsible for the Toyota production system and Lean and Six Sigma and all that kind of stuff. And I met him when I was 18 and he was 85. And I worked for. I was an intern at Ford Motor Company and I worked with him implementing his methods on new products.

Thank you for all of that and thank you for all your wisdom today. It means a lot. And thanks for sharing all of those stuff. I'm sure folks have.

I'm humbled to be able to talk to your audience and share and hopefully I gave you some thoughts to make you think a little deeper and to strive to get to the other side of complexity.

Where can listeners connect with you?

Learn more from you LinkedIn Bob Mesta M O E S T A I have a small design firm in Detroit, Michigan, called the Rewired Group. I have a podcast where we just. It's called the Circuit Breaker, and it's the notion of taking 20 minutes to just reset the circuit. So, like, in my office or at home, when things get a little too crazy, I just literally go downstairs and turn the circuit breaker off for the entire house and reset it. It gives you like 30 minutes to like, all right, let me think about something else. And so while everything comes back up. And so that's really the name of the podcast.

That's cool, actually. That's actually a very cool story. Okay, Bob, thank you.

Yep. Thanks, Louis.