Getting real with jobs to be done – Bob Moesta (President, CEO, The ReWired Group)

If you've heard of Jobs to be Done, you've probably also heard of Bob Mester, who not only is the co creator of the technique, but has some amazing stories and insights around it. This week we chat to Bob all about Jobs to Be Done and if you haven't heard of the Technique, then this is the perfect place to start.

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Yeah, thanks Randy. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here and talk to the audience like, you know, the people that mine the product. Amazing.

So your name is very well known in this community, but I'm sure there's a couple people listening who don't know you, so I'm sure there's a lot of people. Well, let's get a quick intro. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you first get into product and what are you doing now?

So my mom would tell you that I was into product the day I was born. She basically said I was an engineer out of the womb. I was breaking things by the time I was 3 or 4, fixing things by the time I was 6, building things by the time I was 8 or 10. And so I started building stuff very, very early in my life. I'm an electrical engineer. I have a mechanical and chemical master's and then I've studied at Stanford Design Program and I also studied at Harvard. And so to me, I've been wanting to build my entire life and I continue to build to this day. I've worked on over 3,500 different products and services ranging from the guidance system for the Patriot Missile to Pokemon, Mac and Cheese, and just about everything in between.

Fantastic. And the thing you are probably most known for is jobs to be done. Can you just give us a quick short history of how this came to be?

The history of that is. So though I was a very product oriented or engineering oriented kid. I was not a very safe kid. I had three post head brain injuries by the time I was seven years old. And I can't read and I can't write. And so part of it is it was, I consider it the greatest gift I ever got. Most people call it dyslexia. And the reality is that because I can't read and write, I could never understand the customer's information that I would get because I'd get it all from marketing and I'd get it in PowerPoint and it made no sense to me. And so constantly asking people, how do I actually talk to people who actually want to consume things? Because I was told very young that basically build it and they will come. Well, that's just a lie. It doesn't happen that way. Jobs to be done was basically born out of this notion of what causes people to say, today's the day, they need something new. If we can actually understand what causes people to change where there's struggling moments in their lives. And that the basic premise that people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life. And that's really what the whole method and kind of philosophy is kind of wrapped around this notion of being customer centric from their perspective, as opposed to through our product.

And it's a great approach. It's one, you know, we've all used plenty. But we've also seen people, you know, use it wrong from the perspective of, you know, any framework, any theory is great, but not when it's used as this, you know, to the exclusion of common sense or anything else. So I'm curious.

Dilemma.

There's a dilemma when you try to build something new like that. Like again, I'm not a market researcher, I'm an engineer and I'm trying to build a way to do market research, if you will, at our product research. And I have to make it sound different enough, but I can't make it sound too different. And if I make it sound so simple. So the whole notion of jobs to be done is people have hire your product, right? That's a very simple, simple idea. But when you get down to the nuances of it, it's actually very, very complicated. And it's not to say it's hard to do. And you have to be able to listen really, really well, which most people can't.

So what do, what do most people get wrong about jobs to be done?

So I think there's two things that they get wrong. One is I Call this hypothesis building research. Most people come in with a hypothesis and then try to do the research to prove the hypothesis. And so jobs to be done can be like, oh, I think people will hire it for this. And so you talk more about the product than you talk about their lives. And so a lot of times what happens is you get misoriented and you see the customer only through your product. It's almost like the product is the lens by which you define your customers as opposed to understanding your customers exist whether you're there or not.

Right.

And so I think the first thing is that they hypothesize what it is. They sit in a conference room and guess what the jobs to be done are and then try to prove that. I think that's the first one. The second one is that I think the other challenge is this notion of how do we understand what people are saying and what do they mean? And so you end up realizing that most people use this layer of language called pablum, where they just. How was your day? Oh, it was good, but it really wasn't good, but you said it was good, so you're lying. And so how do you actually get past the understanding of what people say to what they really mean? And so that's the second really kind of big mistake that people make. And then the third one is that what's. What I'll say, my little test is that almost every job has a degree of irrationality to it. And what I mean by that is that if I look at it from a very objective perspective, it's like, nobody would do this and do that at the same time. But the reality is that it's. Most of the time the irrational becomes rational with context. And the more you can understand their situation, what they did doesn't seem irrational. It's the fact that we didn't understand their situation. And so that's. The other part is most people try to think about just the outcomes people want, as opposed to realizing that context and outcome go together and they determine value.

You know, when you think of jobs to be done, when you talk to people about jobs to be done, you kind of mentioned a few things there around, you know, helping the sort of research side of things and understand customers, understand their problems, understand what they're trying to hire your product for, but also just understand them as individuals.

That's right.

The key point before you even think about your product.

That's right.

Do you see it as a. Like, this is probably a bit of a weird question, but do you see it as a framework. Like, do you see it as a. Kind of. As a thing that you follow, or is it more of a philosophy?

Because, yeah, it's a great question. So, to be honest, I just got out of five job interviews this morning. We did over the last. Since this morning. And to be honest, I see it as a framework. I see it as a way in which to follow kind of a very specific protocol to actually extract the information and the intent of what consumers mean and what they want to do and what they're struggling with. So, yeah, I do see it as a very. I see it as a method in that sense, where you can be very rigid. I also see it, though, as a philosophy in terms of a way to think about where opportunities lie and how to actually innovate, Because I think it provides a lens around this aspect of the struggling moment, is the seed for all innovation. And if people are really struggling with something, that's when they're going to change. And so what I've been doing for the last 40 years is studying people who struggle and ultimately reach for something. And so I want to be the next thing they reach for. And so that's how I think about it as a philosophy in that aspect. And then at the same time, so it goes from a point of view or a specific perspective on something down to kind of like, here's a way in which to gather the data down to. Here's the math we use to actually check and do the analysis. So it's all three of those things to me. And I think it started primarily first as a method because it was my workaround or my hack, because I couldn't read and I couldn't understand the market research reports I was getting, because all I heard was, make it easier, make it faster, make it more fun, and make it cheaper. That's all I'd get. And I'm like, okay, what does any of that mean? If I want to make it easy, it turns out there's 22 dimensions of easy, and I can't do all of them with the money and the time I have. So which versions of easy do you want me to work on? And so this is where that's why I end up kind of creating this, was because I could never get to the specifics I needed to build a better product.

And when you see people starting to kind of use jobs to be done, do you find that it starts with the method or the philosophy?

So it usually starts in three, let me think, three, maybe four areas. One area is it starts in market research. So I have people who basically have looked at different industries or different segmentations. They've done. Need state analysis, they've done all these different things. And what they've realized is they've run out of room and they can't see opportunity anymore. They need a new way to look at the. Look at the market. And so sometimes I have marketing people come, right? The majority of the people that come or come from product, because product, you know, and I've done the job, I do the job. I love this job. But it is a little bit like herding cats. And so the whole aspect of being able to kind of get marketing and engineering and product, everybody on the same page is kind of like that's usually where people are doing. So what happens is they're not buying the method. They're buying a language, a way in which to actually have a common set of language across functionally about the customer that then allows us to align and move faster. And so that's the second reason. The third reason really comes in when the fact is we keep building stuff and nobody ends up buying it or it doesn't end up being successful and people don't end up using it. And so it's like, help us fix the. You know, it's like we're launching things, but they're not being. They're not actually good things. Help us make better things. And so that's like the third kind of reason why people get it. But it comes from all across the organization. And that's where like I've been doing work with engineering for a long time and product, but that marketing has got involved. I have a book out on sales I've been teaching, like I'm actually flipping the whole lens on sales to say, like, stop thinking about selling your product and think about helping somebody buy your product. And by framing it that way, you actually have very different answers than trying to sell them something.

Bob, when we talked to prep for this episode, you said one of the key problems is, you know, we can teach people how to do active listening or we can try to. We can teach them how to do the interviews. But then you get to a certain point, you have the stories and they don't know what to do with the stories. They don't know how to work with marketing, with sales. And you're just going into that. So give us an example, if you don't mind.

Yeah, happens is you end up getting it. Like, what happens is people tend to abstract the stuff too high and so what ends up happening Is for. So for example, marketing wants features and benefits, right, which are very, very high. And they want us to say the roadmap is full of features. But when you start to really look at it through jobs lenses, what you want to do is the roadmap should be the struggling moments you're going to be addressing over the next 24 months and not be solution focused, but problem focused.

Right?

And so part of this is teaching the language across functionally to be able to do that. And so part of this is so, for example, just working with a software company that does basically, it's a fintech firm, right? And part of it is that they actually have to, they sell to banks and then they have businesses use their software at the same time. And so they actually have two sets of jobs they have to actually align with. And so you have to actually figure out what are banks struggling with and what are they buying. And then ultimately what are the small businesses struggling with and what are they buying. And ultimately you have to align those two. And the only way you can do that is by having common understanding of the jobs that people are trying to get done. Otherwise, it's literally always seen as a give and take as opposed to making explicit trade offs of how do we align those things. My favorite example is if I design like I work for a toy company, right? And if I built the toys that parents wanted, kids would never play with it. And if I built the toys that kids wanted, like the flamethrower I wanted when I was a kid, my parents would never buy it, right? And so you start to realize that at some point in time, you've got to be able to build alignment around it. And so it's not only alignment between, let's say the buyer and the user, but then the alignment between marketing and sales and product and engineering and everybody else. And so that's really the thing to me that's surprising is I did this primarily because as an engineer, I kept asking people what they wanted, I'd build exactly what they said they wanted. And then they tell me, no, I didn't really mean that, right? And so that's where this kind of rooted from. But now it turns out that this is being used in kind of all the different facets of a business. And to be honest, it can start in any one of them as well.

So you were telling me a while back about how you did this with an example of this with Snickers.

Oh, you want to hear the Snickers that when you tried to lay up the Snickers story. So there was basically, back in the 90s, I had the opportunity to work on them, the flagship product of Snickers. And at the time, it was basically not doing very well. Sales were flat, and they were trying to look for basically either a new market or a way in which to add some new features to it to basically make it better. I knew nothing about candy at the time. I had actually just gotten let go of one place where I was working on the guidance system for the Patriot missile and doing different things for the DoD. And my friend asked me to come look at Snickers. And to be honest, I went and looked, and the first thing I did is I went and saw how it was made and tried to understand kind of all the details of it. And then they took me to kind of the ideal customer profile. They talked about targeting. They talked about all the segments they had. They talked about all these different things, and I couldn't make sense of it. And ultimately, what happened is I end up, like, at the airport, I was in Newark, where the plant was, and I end up getting on a flight and it being delayed. And so I'm standing outside of the kiosk, and the person in front of me buys a Snickers bar. And so I just sit down next to him, watch him eat it. And I figured out the fact of, like, why in the world did he eat that Snickers now? And why not something else? And so you start to realize that there's this underlying causation of what happens when people basically eat a Snickers bar. Typically, they miss the previous meal. Their stomach is growling and bothering them to the point where they can't focus. They're not performing very well. They need to eat something. They've got a bunch of work to still do, and they need something to keep them going through a busy kind of draining moment. And ultimately, it's like, refuel me as fast as you can. So think of it as, like, what they do on the F1. How do I just take the food and put it in me? And you start to realize that. In 1996, we realized that it didn't compete with candy bars. It competed with an apple and a Red Bull and a whole bunch of other stuff that was. Had nothing to do with candy. And so we realized it was a fuel bar. And by changing that and realizing that it's you're not you when you're hungry, and it's about you getting back to you, ultimately, we were able to take it from about 600 million to over 3 billion in sales. And so you start to realize, once you understand the job it's supposed to do, as opposed to trying to make it compatible with all the other features. Because, again, if you look at the candy aisle, Snickers is actually not really that good of a candy.

Right.

And was it just the messaging that you changed, or did you tinker with the product itself?

Because at some point, think of the first bite of a Snickers. It's almost food. Like, when you bite it, it's actually the first thing you get is you go through the chocolate, and then you get into the peanuts. And what you start to realize is the peanuts are really, really important because it makes it food like. But at the same time, we realized it had to actually masticate into a ball. So we had to. We took the caramel and made it a higher melting temperature so it would be stickier. So the higher the melting temperature of caramel, it gets sticky, the lower the melting temperature. It literally coats your mouth. And so by changing the layering and changing some of the ingredients, we're able to make it more food. Like, so when you swallowed, would sit in your stomach and absorb the acid. And so it was all about changing and making the product do the job and fit into that situation, as opposed to trying to design a product and then find people who actually need it. Like, to me, I think about it as, I'd rather go find a struggling moment and a problem that is worth solving than Lily, go build something and then find out the 8 billion people in the world who needs it. That's a lot of work.

Do you find that people are getting better, though, at focusing on the jobs of the customer?

I feel like we're moving past kind of the ideal customer profile. We're getting past some of the Personas. What I would tell you is, if you've got nothing, ideal customer profile is good. A Persona is good. But the fact is, once you get to Jobs, it kind of like, you run out of room with those two kind of frameworks. And so that's where Jobs is more about, is more about who, when, where, and why. If I have those four aspects, I can then tell you what I need to build. But most of the people, they have a who, but they don't have a when, where, and why. And that's what Jobs is kind of adding as part of the ingredients to making jobs a little different than everything else, because it's taking into account all of those things to kind of build segments or buckets of what we should actually build for.

And one of the things you mentioned as well with the, the, the Snickers work that he did.

Yeah.

Is the way that you think about the, the Personas or the way that you think about your target audiences.

Yeah.

So do you feel like the Jobs framework replaces Personas or does it sit alongside it and you know.

Yeah, I see it as. Yeah, I see it as sitting alongside of it. Personas are useful in some contexts because think of it as almost like different cultures, different, different languages that they speak. And so sometimes you actually need the job. The mechanism of why they want something and the context they're in is the same whether I'm 25 or whether I'm 60. And so it depends on what I want to accomplish. And so sometimes I might have to talk to a 25 year old. A little different than a 60 year old though the product does the same job and so you still need to understand those kinds of things as you go through it. And so I think of Jobs as like a complement to Personas or Personas as a complement to Jobs.

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I'd love to know like in your experience that you know your tons of experience you've got working with jobs to be done. Like what's your sort of favorite story where you've uncovered something really Surprising by using this framework.

So one is where I built houses, right? And one of the. There's two or three really big insights that I kind of gathered from that. One of it was, so I built houses for basically first time home buyers, divorced family with children, and then downsizers think of like your parent. And one of the things that I realized is that as you look at people and understand what causes them to downsize, go from the house you grew up in to kind of this new condo, that is like a whole new form of living. Like, there's a whole bunch of things that have to go on. But one of the things I realized that was very insightful was the fact this is like most people at that age when they're in the space of trying to think about downsizing, they all read the obituaries every day. And so I moved my advertising from the real estate section to the obituaries. I literally got a 38% increase in traffic and I got a 70% reduction in my cost. Because the people who advertise in the obituaries are only funeral homes and lawyers.

Right?

So that was one insight. I think another insight I got from the same thing was most people would love the idea of moving. And they finally would say, all right, I'm at terms with it. Like, we gotta move. But there's frictional forces that kind of keep people from doing that. And one of them was, how do I take 40 years of stuff and fit it into a place that's half the size of my other place? And so you start to realize that one of the things we did is we actually brought in basically designers and movers and put stuff in storage. And part of our package of you buying a home from us included basically moving and two years of storage and a place to sort everything when your kids came to visit. And so. And that helped that increased sales over 20%. And so again, it's these things where I kept thinking about having to. What would I do to the home? But ultimately what I realized is my home was good enough. I needed to actually change the way I marketed and sold it. And so those were the kinds of things where we ended up doing it. One of the other things is they all said that they didn't want a dining room at all. And because at some point they say it's time for me to give up on the holidays, somebody else should be doing the holidays, not me. And so they literally go, I don't want to work. Wanted to take the dining room table with me. But it turns out. If they didn't have a place to put the dining room table, they weren't going to move because it was the emotional bank account of their. Of their life, and they weren't going to put it to Goodwill, they weren't going to put it out on the street. So ultimately, what you found is people going like, oh, you know, my niece Sarah took the dining room table, and then we moved. I was like, wait, what? And then I heard it twice, and then I heard it like 10 times. I'm like, something's up with that dining room table. And so I took the second bedroom, which was a suite, and made it a little smaller and actually put a. Put a small dining room table. It's almost like a place where it's a shrine, but you could never eat there. And an 18% increase in sales.

That's amazing.

Right?

And so this is actually learning how to do the. They told me they didn't want to do dining room yet. If they didn't have a dream, they weren't going to move. And so you had to actually figure out how to play that. You know, it's what they said versus what they did is what I had to actually focus on, which is if they didn't know where it was going to go, I had to put the dining room table back in.

Makes sense. These are great examples, but you're talking about Snickers, you're talking about houses, you're talking about things that, for the lack of a better way of putting it, they're legacy tech or legacy products. I'm curious about all the old school.

Stuff, but let's be clear. I've worked with people like Basecamp and Twitter and Meta and Intercom and auto books. And so right now, I work with tech stars and I help Neil Salas Griffin out of. He's out of Oakland in San Francisco, but basically, I've been helping him for 10 years on startups and software. So this is all really, really relevant to software. But what's interesting is if I talk about it in software first, most people lose their. Because they'll think that I'm not that techie.

Right.

And ultimately they're not going to learn anything. But if I talk about some basic things that they know, which is usually moving, and parents and Snickers, and they kind of get it, then they go, all right, now how does this apply to me? I love where you're going, Randy.

Yeah, I just wanted to hear you say something about it, because I know you do this. You know you do this, but I want to make sure everyone else knew you did that too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is where. So for example, I've done like again, the one was a fintech that basically is called Auto books. And one of the things we've done there is basically Chris Speck, who is one of my co founders of the Rewire group, actually went end up kind of having three children and realizing he couldn't travel. And so he ended up becoming head of product over there. And he really built out the product as it relates to how do we help small businesses get paid through sms? And so there's different ways in which they actually bolt into big banking systems so they can actually do what PayPal and Square does more or less.

Right.

But at the same time you have to actually figure out how the bank really. Why would the bank really want this? And so it turns out that we actually had to do interviews around this to actually understand. For example, there were three reasons why the bank would want this. One is it can help increase their deposits. Two is they actually have a very aggressive digital market or digital banking strategy and this becomes part of it. Or three is that they have a very strategic focus on small to medium businesses to help drive themselves as a bank. And if they have one of those three situations going on, they would entertain even talking to Otterbox. If they didn't have any one of those three, they would never listen to them. So we changed the whole sales process to fix that and we changed basically the marketing process to actually figure out how to cultivate people into those three jobs. And to be honest, in 12 months, they almost 10 xed both revenue and banks at the same time by just focusing on kind of what progress were banks trying to make as opposed to trying to convince banks that they needed them.

Right.

From a product perspective, we've done things like at basecamp where you hear about struggling moments and like at some point in time. I worked with Riot and Jason since almost 2009, 2010. And like we had one situation where people kept saying they wanted a calendar in basecamp. And we kept trying to say, all right, well, to build out a calendar was a very big deal. And ultimately we said, all right, well, what do they want in the calendar? How do we actually listen to them? And so what we end up doing is before we actually had it, we went and talked to people about kind of of why do they need a calendar in basecamp? What are the moments and the situations and the context that wrapped around it that says that the calendar I have doesn't work. And what we end up finding was, is that the bulk of these requests all came from the notion of they're trying to actually assign a resource like a conference room, and they don't know what's available. Not available. And so ultimately, they couldn't figure out how to schedule. So what happened is what they were trying to do is see what times were available. And in Basecamp, all we did was keep track of what tasks you had and when you were going to do it, and maybe the meetings you had. But we didn't actually have a calendar. And so all we ended up doing was looking at their solution. We were able to come up with a solution that was almost, you know, it took us like, three weeks to do it versus almost, you know, a year to do it, which was this aspect of taking the calendar and reversing the meeting. So if it said, hey, I have these meetings. Okay, let's take this minus every day, and you say, here's what you have open. And so ultimately, we just created this view so you could see what was available. Now, the crazy part is everybody said, thank you for building a calendar, but the reality is you didn't have to go out and build something like that, because at some point, you actually understood the degree of what they meant by calendar and why and where and when and what they were trying to do with the calendar. And so ultimately, nobody wanted a second calendar. They just wanted to be able to do these other tasks. And so. But the language they had was all about a calendar. And ultimately there was no language to talk about what they really needed. That's what you find most of the time, is there's. They don't have the language to actually tell you what they want.

Meeting room bookings and calendars are so deceptively hard. I've spent way too many years on that.

It's almost as bad as the old school telephone systems. Ridiculous.

I think. So we've had a slightly adjacent problem with interviewing our customers at BBC Maestro, where a lot of them tell us that they would like community features. And they're like, yeah, we really think that you need to build a community and have community features. I think it'd be amazing for the product. And then I always ask them, like, so would you use it? And they're like, no, I wouldn't use it, but other people would definitely really value it.

Exactly.

Well, I was just going to say, I think, you know, the key to this and the key to doing jobs to be done really well is that conversation. And having that conversation really well, so what are your kind of like, top tips for really uncovering the right information in those discussions?

So I'll give you the greatest resource. So I learned actually criminal and intelligence interrogation methods back in the late 80s for this specific purpose. So I literally went and learned from a detective and a retired CIA agent. Basically, how do you know people are lying and how do you know when they don't know they're lying? But there's this notion of, I'm not going to answer the question or I'm going to give you the wrong answer. There's a whole bunch of different forms of lying. But the person who wrote the best book on it to date is Christopher Voss. It's called Never Split the Difference. And inside it is everything that I learned 30 years ago. And what I'll tell you is it's kind of amazing. But the two big things to me, the two big tips I will give you is when interviewing customers, I absolutely never want them to tell me yes, because, yes, I have no follow on. I want them to say, no, that's not it. Oh, then tell me more. And they can tell you more. So you always go for the no. So if you're going to ask a yes, no question, you want them to say no to the question. You don't want them to say yes, because the moment you say, oh, so it was this and this and this, they'll say yes, and then you have. There's nothing else to do.

Right.

The other thing is to teach people how to be comfortable. And you do that through mirroring. And what happens is you mirror people's pace and language. And so the way we do these interviews is so, for example, the first five minutes we get some background information from them, but what we're really doing is getting the language that they have and trying not to violate or introduce new language till they run out of language. And so part of this is, and we mirror their pace, we mirror kind of how they speak. So we basically, that mirroring aspect makes people very, very comfortable to tell you, to tell you more emotional and social things than just the functional things. So there's lots of really good tips in there of how to listen with intent as opposed to just taking the transcript and finding the words. Because again, two people can say the word easy, but they actually mean very, very different things.

Right?

And so you have to realize that at some point, deciphering all that takes time and energy.

Bob, we've talked about all the places where it's great to use this and how to use this I'm curious. There's got to be some places where it's contraindicated, where jobs to be done is something that people try to fit in but it's not really the best solution. Can you give us a couple examples of what that might be?

I would tell you that this is based on the premise of choice. That people have the ability to choose when there is no choice or there's the fallacy of choice. So for example, think about your insurance. You have car insurance and you have health insurance and most people buy their car insurance and most people get their health insurance from their employer. And you start to realize that at some point you know more about your car insurance than your health insurance. But yet your health insurance is way more important. Why is that? It's because you actually picked your car insurance, but you chose your health insurance because you just get good, better, best. And because you really don't have a choice in it and you don't have any. There's no real economic understanding of it that the fact is you just accept it for what it is and move on. And so it doesn't come until you're sick that you actually do it. But so part of this is to realize that when there is no choice, it's very hard to do jobs be done because people don't really have motivation to do it. It's just like it's obligated to do it. And so it's like why are you doing this? My boss told me to do it. Why are you doing this? Because my employer told me to do this. Why do this? Because the government told me to do this. So anytime you're basically not given real choice, the fact is you can't use jobs. So it's like insurance is very hard because it's all, a lot of insurance is like life insurance. And that kind of is very hard work because it's all fear based kind of. It's not saying it's not needed, but it's a tough one to apply it to. But for the most part I've applied it across the like I'll say half the stuff in the grocery store, a third of the stuff in Home Depot and you know, hundreds getting to close to thousands of software companies. So it's, it's very, very applicable. And even in not for profit world, right? I've done it in not for profit, I've done it in like. So for example, I've done independent schools. What causes a parent to pull their kid out of public free school and send them somewhere to Put more and pay more money. Like I can't actually do jobs on why do kids send them kids to the public school? Because it's obligated.

Right.

And so these are the kind of places where there is choice is where jobs is actually uses is very, very useful.

And you told me you're working on it a different application right now, Something that seems really relevant to people. There's a book you're working on.

Yeah, so I've been helping people, I think for a long time, but I've been helping people with their career for probably at least 15, 20 years. And about 10 years ago, I realized that people randomly don't change from one company to another. There's a cause to it. It could be the past company, it could be the next company, but there's something going on that basically says, today's the day I quit this job and go to that job. And so I basically have outlined and done over a thousand interviews of people of why they switch from one place to another and whether it's a lawyer becoming a judge, you know, an executive becoming a, you know, starting a not for profit to somebody working at Chipotle and moving to McDonald's and just understanding what are those things that have happen that cause you to do it and seeing the patterns in it. It's called job moves and the nine steps to basically help manage your career. And it's. It's really about. It comes out in November, but it's really about trying to understand like where do you want to go? Or if you're a manager, how do you understand the progress your employees want to make? Because at some point in time when they stop making progress is when they will leave. And so if you don't help them get better at something or be better at something in their life, the fact this is the reality is they're not going to stay. And so part of it is being able to understand that part of it and understanding the motivations of what causes people to say, today's the day, I want a new job. And then conversely, what it does is it helps people who want to build teams. How do you build your team wrapped around this notion of how do I attract the right people as opposed to how do I just pay more money?

And is that book available now or on the.

That book is out in November, so. And I have two co authors on it, Michael Horn and Ethan Bernstein. They're both from the Harvard, one's from the Harvard Business School, one's from the Harvard Education School. Again as a DYSLEXIC I can do all the research, but I have a hard time writing the book. So I find people that help me collaborate to write the book.

Nice. Well, it sounds like a great collaboration.

And it'll be out November, we're just finishing up.

We will keep an eye out for it. And I just have one last question. Are you seeing much kind of application or use of AI to improve the way that people are using jobs to be done?

So what's interesting is I think AI, if you're trying to use AI to get to the jobs, I think that I find that it's actually misinterpreting easy. And so it won't actually know the 22 dimensions of easy.

Right.

So it'll just say easy and then there's no depth behind it. So trying to get to that is really, really hard. But I think once you have the interviews and once you have kind of the language that people are using, the fact is you can use that to help with positioning. You can use and help it for a lot of different things. But it's part of think of jobs as part of the data set to go into the large language model to help you actually see it. But I don't see it as people trying to. When people are trying to shortcut jobs and not do the interviews and again just get it from reviews and things like that, there's so much context overlapping that the words don't mean the same thing. And the way that the GPTs work is they're doing it contextually, but the fact is they're doing it conjecturally by words and so not by concepts. And so what happens is again that word easy can be used in so many different contexts that they don't understand which one that they're talking about it in. So what I would tell you, it's evolving, but it's not moving as fast as I think it should be.

I sort of have this utopia like vision of product management in a few years time where we just sit around drinking tea and walking our dogs and then we just press a button and go turn all of this data and information into a product.

So I think the reality is that what AI is going to do is it's going to take away the non thinking work because the thing is the harder work to do is the thinking work and AI cannot do the thinking for us. AI can do the research, AI can do the compiling, but AI can't come up with the next new theory. Part of it is to realize because half of putting together building a new theory or a new thing is seeing anomalies and understanding how to interpret anomalies and weave them into the standard. And so you start to realize that is something that AI is actually struggling with right now, because the fundamental premise of how it's actually wired is it's not wired for anomalies, if you will.

Makes sense. Bob, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's been really great hearing all about your views on jobs to be done and getting some of your advice and insights. That's been fantastic.

Thank you Lily. Thanks for having me.

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SAM.