S1 E7 | Unpacking Jobs To Be Done

Yeah. I think that the thing we often say about Personas is they're a model of how we think that group of people always act.

Yes.

And what we know from jobs we've done is people are dynamic. People make decisions because of contexts that are in their lives all the time. So, yes, I can over index to being somebody that eats organic, limits my meat quantity to a certain amount of time, a certain amount over the week. You're talking about yourself and all those things, but there are going to be times where I don't fit that.

When we're on the road, for example.

It could be on the road. It could be when I'm with other people that don't eat the same way I do. We make compromises or we do things that are out of our behavior are out of our core behavior a lot.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast, where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're joined by Greg Engel, who is my co founder and chief, Bob interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize, and recharge your brain to build better products.

All right, Bob, so today I want to tackle the topic. We talked a little bit in past podcasts about supply and demand and that world view of that. But I wanted to dive into the tool we use to find demand. And that tool is Jobs to be done. As somebody that finally we get to talk about this. As somebody that was an architect of it, a pioneer of it that you were. I just want to get your ideas of kind of what it was or what it is.

Yeah.

And how it's used in those types of things we're going to do today.

Do we want to tap into where it came from or do we don't want to touch that one yet?

Well, we'll see how your mind works. I kind of know how the story is going to go, but we'll. We'll see. Okay, so give a little bit of. From your perspective, what is Jobs to be done?

So Jobs to be done is really about understanding the. So let's break it down. Jobs. And it's then to be done. Right. So it's. What are the people going to do next? And so how do we actually. So it's not about the job they do now, it's about what the job is in the future that they're actually trying to get done. So to me, that as its very foundation is about kind of innovation. So how do we build what's next?

Most people can't tell you what's next, to be honest. They can only spout what they know, talk about the problem that they have.

And in some cases tell you why something would work or they might have a solution, but they'll tell you what they don't want more than what they want. So you start to realize that when you go to develop a product, you need details that typically most marketing research doesn't get, which is they'll get the attributes and they'll almost create kind of a who's the person? Let's build a Persona around somebody. But the reality is that doesn't tell me why they do it. A job is really about basically the progress that somebody's trying to make in a very specific circumstance and understanding the outcomes that they're seeking and the trade offs they're willing to make.

So give us a little bit of what it means to do jobs you done to you. So I get it's progress, I get that part of it, but what else does it tell us? How does it help us? Why do it?

Well, the first thing is what I realized is almost as somebody who's dyslexic, it's like I can't read a report. And what I would realize is people would summarize what people would say, but it wouldn't actually carry what I would think is the intent or the meaning behind it. And so part of the process of actually uncovering jobs or discovering jobs because we don't create them.

The consumer creates them, it's understanding the context and understanding that outcome and being able to, what I would say empirically do it as opposed to theoretically do it, meaning we need to actually talk to people because most purchases have some angle of irrationality to it. And so part of this and the other part is when you look at a consumer from what I call the supply side, or what we call the supply side, we assume symmetry. If they have this problem, they want this solution or this outcome. So if it's like, boy, I'm really frustrated because it takes too long, okay? They want it faster and it's like, no, they might want, it's too slow and it's like I want to do more. And so you start to realize there's lack of symmetry between it and so trying to figure out what Progress people are trying to make, and how do they make that decision to say, today's the day, I'm going to pick something new? That's what jobs is about.

So when you use the word progress in the context of jobs beyond, what do you mean?

So.

In this case, it's a good question because I use the word a lot.

But progress is that feeling that you've done better.

That what you were doing before or what you're doing now is not good enough, and that I know there's a better way. And so there's that yearning to be better. And so inherent in the aspect of progress, it's trying to actually understand what does better mean and why.

Now, what I often tell people is the way we define progress is through what the consumer is trying to do. And the only way to do that is to understand all the elements of a job to be done. So it is the context, it is the desired outcomes. It is their pushes and pulls or anxieties and habits. It is the hiring and firing criteria. It's the kano, or the basic quality for each job. Because each job has different quality.

Correct. Different definitions of quality, if you will.

Right. So all of that is actually what progress means.

That's right. Or a way in which for us to articulate what they mean by progress. Correct. So think of it as, these are the ways in which we talk about what progress means for them.

I often hear people say, oh, a job to be done is my product has a job, this product does this job. Well, that's not really true. Right. Because the consumer's the only one that can actually judge progress.

Right. Well, and I'll say, in the early days, in the early days, we talked about functions of things, what's the function of something? And we would talk about it as the job. And so what's the job of this system? What's the job of this product? But the product really doesn't have a job. It's consumers who hire it for a job.

If a glass sitting on the table with no interaction with consumers, it can do a lot of things. But until it has people and context and desired outcomes, we can't tell you what the function is. Because I can throw the glass at you.

Right. So I think what we're talking about, we use shortcuts too, like everybody. Right. So we're using the word progress. And progress has a very deep meaning.

Yes. I feel like we could do a whole podcast on just what is progress?

Right. So we want to look at the progress that people are trying to make.

But you said something interesting because you said something, well, it's jobs to be done. It's what people are going to do. But then you said, well, people can't tell you what they're going to do, right? So how do you find the job if people can't tell you?

So I think the best way to think about predicting the future is you have to have some elements of the past, because everything is a derivative of the past, and everything's built on the past. And so we're not actually trying to predict. We're trying to actually identify what are the critical elements, the dynamic. So you mentioned in a previous context that everything's dynamic. And ultimately, this is not about people. This is about people through time. And so part of it is, if I can understand the kinds of things that have happened to people that caused them to think about doing something different, to basically figure out how to describe it and then actually how to do it, we actually then have a pattern or a pattern language that we can actually start to say, if they did it this way, how do we actually figure out other people who are struggling this way and. And help more? So Clay and I would have the phrase around the n of 1. Most people would say, well, no, we need a sample of 1,000 people to tell us what's true. And what Clay and I would talk about was, how do we actually study one thing and actually make sense of it, and in the end of one, explain it. And ultimately that helps us understand the patterns. And so it's analyze and then aggregate, as opposed to aggregating and then analyzing.

So if we said a product doesn't.

Have a job.

People only have jobs, companies don't have jobs, people have jobs.

But then that gets confusing, right? Because if that's the case, then how do I know who to interview and what am I doing? Am I looking at.

A segment or an industry? How do I rectify that?

So in math, there's the difference between taking a mass of something and then segmenting it or dividing it up, and the aspect of starting with individual things and figuring out how to aggregate them together. Though the math sounds very similar, the underlying principle is very different. And so part of this is actually being able to see the patterns by which people do things.

All right, let me try to ask the question differently, because I think I understand the answer there. But let me see.

That's not the answer you want.

Let's see if I can clarify my question.

Part of the banter. Let's keep going.

So stop that answer the question really is if I'm going to go in the business of health clubs.

Yep, I'm going to open my own gym, fitness center.

I'm going to open my own gym, and the gym doesn't have a job, who do I go interview? Am I looking at just other gyms? Am I looking at peloton? Am I. Who am I looking at?

So at some point in time, the way we would always start it would be as like, well, when you're up and running and you're really successful, what are people not gonna be doing or what are they gonna fire to basically say they're gonna come here? And it could be other gyms.

It could be getting off the couch, it could be.

It could be that they wanna lose weight. There's a whole bunch of different scenarios around it. And so the first way that we would start is to say, let's go talk to people who have basically gone from doing one thing to doing another. So it might be, let's go talk to people who lost weight. Let's go people to talk to people. Because here's the other thing is I wouldn't talk to people who just joined gyms. I want to talk to people who joined gyms and worked out versus joining a gym and not working out.

But what I think I hear you saying is you want to understand what a gym is. And a gym is many things to different people.

Well, and the competitive set is very wide because again, the objective of why somebody joins the gym is what's important, which is it could be that the gym competes with diet. A gym competes with.

At some point, going to the bar because it's social. And so part of it is to realize what are the real things that cause them to say, today's the day I'm going to go to the gym. And what are those underlying both, what big hire, why would they join your gym? And then why do they come to the gym? And what. When do they have, let's say, good workouts? And what does that look like? And when do they feel like they haven't made progress and understanding it at what we call the big higher level and the little higher level.

Right. So I think, I think what we're saying here is, look, you need to understand what your competitive set is from the consumer perspective. From the consumer perspective, an interview on that. And I don't know if I'd go so far as to saying I'd interview people that went to a bar. Little bit off my thing, but I have to realize people will pick between me and a bar at some point.

Maybe, Maybe.

Right. But when I'm starting the business, I'm probably not going to go interview people that are going to a bar.

No.

Right. But I would, I would want a vast difference of what, what I think fitness is.

Right.

But so I might, I might actually interview people that, that picked up an app that helps them run a 5K.

Right. Well, think, think of something like Noom.

Right?

Noom. Basically, it took off during the pandemic, but the whole aspect was beforehand was how many people want to go to the gym but can't. Right. And can I actually have something that's there when I need it? Right. And so it's like the trainer I need when I, when I, when I actually need them, as opposed to having to schedule everything and fit into their time. And so it's, there's a whole different aspect of where those struggling moments and out of it, when you see struggling moments, that's where you need to be innovating. Right.

So we talked a lot about different things of this and we're talking kind of what progress is, and we talked about what a job is, is progress. And then we define progress as the elements of a job to be done.

But how is it useful? So I get all this information. What do I get? I have like a million data points now what do I do?

I always say an interview has a terabyte of data in it. Right. And the thing is that it can be used in so many different ways.

Right.

So first of all, you know, it can be used both in product. Right. To be able to understand the underlying feature sets that you need to put into the product in order for people to have the big hire, you have to be able to understand in some cases the new features you're going to develop because of the struggling moments that this, that the app is actually creating. Right. Every new innovation creates a different struggling moment, which requires then a second innovation. And so that's why the evolution of products is always happening.

To me. It's about being able to understand it from a product side. The other part is from sales and marketing to understand where does the first thought happen? How do we create the space in the brain? How do people talk about it as the problem and how do they talk about it as the outcomes they want? If we just speak features and benefits, what happens is most people don't even know the features and benefits they're looking for to begin with. We end up spouting them. But the thing is, it doesn't resonate with the language.

The other part you realize is there's this notion of resonance, which could be another podcast. But the whole aspect of when you use the language of customers.

It'S almost like the words that are in their head is what makes them go like, you know me, right? And so part of this is to actually be very focused on the language they use, not the language you want to use. Right.

So marketing and in sales, basically, we wrote the book demand side sales, and it really, really has helped people understand kind of how to get people ready and understand then what job are they in or what progress are they trying to make, and then where are they in the timeline, their buying timeline to then how do you help them make progress through that timeline? So there's multiple places all the way to strategy and strategic alliances. And like, when we did the moving, right, we didn't want to be a moving, like a have the trucks and move people. But we knew that having that element as part of our offering.

In how we built houses and helped people move to our houses and move out of their old houses, that was an actually essential part. But we figured out how to make the right strategic alliances to do that.

I think jobs helps people because.

We look at the jobs we've done and we look at the clusters of people, and the way we do it is it's not one thing that makes somebody move. It's a group of shared context, shared outcomes that make up a cluster. So it actually makes it easier for me to make decisions when I take that pure demand and I look at my supply side. It actually makes it more clear where if I don't have that, that clarity of pure demand, without the bias of my industry, of my business, of my capabilities, I'm able to see more opportunities when I bring it over to the supply side because there are some groupings and I'm not trying to either titrate too high or too low on what I'm trying to hit. I'm actually hitting a group of people that is predictable behavior because they're ready when given the right context and outcomes that they want.

That's right. And I think it gets back to, how is this helpful? Well, this helps marketing actually realize how to actually help make people aware of the context they're in, actually help create the context, make people actually hear the fact that all of a sudden they need something. Because at some point, I didn't even know, I struggled with that. But now that I know it, it actually causes me to have angst to do something.

And there's A bunch of different consumer tools, demand tools out there, consumer centric tools out there. Right. There's jazzy done.

Yep.

There's Personas. There's segmentations.

Yeah. There's need state segmentation. There's demographic segmentation. There's psychographic segment. Like you can go all the way.

There's a lot.

There's a lot.

So how is jobs to be done different than. Let's just go with Personas. How's it different than Personas?

And again.

You'Ll disagree with me on this, but I think the fact is if you're doing nothing around the consumer and to do Personas, Personas is better than nothing because at least helps you understand kind of the range and where you're trying to do. But Personas, one, they don't take into account variation. Two is it's all correlative. It basically is an aggregation of basically a bunch of things put together. But when you try to go find that person or that Persona, the fact is they don't exist. You end up engineering something to something that doesn't exist. The reason why Personas are important, though, is that from a marketing perspective, I buy media that way. That's how they actually offer up where to put my ads. A lot of that work is having to do with placement. It's the exchange language between media and marketing. But it's not enough for us in product development at a minimum, because at some point in time, we need to know what causes them to do things. And we need to think about. It's not just who they are, but what's going on around them that actually make them make the decisions. And just because.

I work out all the time and I eat healthy and I'm a vegan and all this other stuff, but there are moments in time where, you know what? I'm going to have some ice cream. And so it's context that actually drives it more than just people.

Yeah. I think that the thing we often say about Personas is they're a model of how we think that group of people always act.

Yes.

And what we know from jobs we've done is people are dynamic. People make decisions because of context that are in their lives all the time. Yep. So yes, I can over. I can over index to being somebody that eats organic. Limits my meat quantity to a certain amount of time, a certain amount over the week. You're talking about yourself and all those things, but there are going to be times where I don't fit that.

Yep. When we're on the road, for example.

Could Be on the road. It could be when I'm with other people that don't eat the same way I do. We make compromises or we do things that are out of our behavior are out of our core behavior a lot. And we know that's true because of how many new products go into the world. Right. If people always stayed in their steady state, we wouldn't need to develop anything.

Yep.

People would be happy all the time.

Yeah. The amount of new products that go into a grocery store every year is astronaut. Like 27,000 new SKUs a year or something like that. And the reality is they don't obviously get everywhere, and less than 100 make over 20 million.

So if we know people want to change and we know people are willing to try new things, why do so many fail?

Because I think they're built on the premise of, again, build it and they will come. You know what? We should try orange flavor. We should try grape flavor. We should try as opposed to understanding what does flavor do to drive them to actually help make progress. And so you start to realize, like, at some point, you have what I call logical incrementalism on a pinhead. It's like, all right, we're going to have different sizes and different flavors. And now when I walk to the shampoo aisle, there's 47,000 things I don't even know how to pick. How do I know which when do I really have a problem? And half the time I used to use pert, and it was one of those things where it went away. I'm like, what do I do now? Right. And then you just trial and error. But the fact is that trying to be able to understand kind of what the skew is going to do to help make progress for people is what's most important. People don't want more choice. They want good choice.

So when we talk about that and we talk about how people make their choices and they go through life.

When. When doesn't jobs be done work?

Well, great question. I think what we found is that it's very hard to describe progress when there is no choice. So I always make the comparison between auto insurance and health insurance, because most of the time, health insurance is provided by your employer. You. You pick one of them, you don't choose it. Right. And so there's this notion of somebody give you a list of good, better, and best, and you figure out where you are and you make your choice. But when you do auto insurance, you got to figure out, like, how far am I driving? You actually know Way more about the details, because at some point you can do something about it. But health insurance does not work that way. And so for me, it's very hard to get people to actually understand what. When in the world do I actually. What does my insurance really provide me without them actually paying for it or doing something for it? And when it's given to them, it's very hard. Jobs is not a tool that will help.

And I also think one of the things that people often ask us for, and there's ways to do it, but in the qualitative jobs we've done, sizing a market is probably not something you want to do off of the 10 interviews or so.

No, no. But here's the thing is once you have the 10 interviews, 10 or so interviews, you actually understand the underlying, I'll say, 20% of causes that get to 80% of the effects. And from that, then you can actually build a quantitative study to actually start to look at some of those things and be able to say, all right, I can find people who switched or did this to this and understand people's contexts and then how many people are in that context and actually are dissatisfied. Right.

And I only bring that up because I think what's important to know about any tool, be it jobs be done, be it Personas, be it segmentation, is when. When to use it, how to use it, and when not to use it. That's right, because what we often see is people making decisions on per. With Personas, on things that Personas probably shouldn't be used for. So it's not that Personas are bad. And I agree with you. I don't think we're not here to tell anybody that any one research methodology is not useful because that's not my expertise. I can't make a judgment on every single piece of thing out there. And any knowledge is good as long as you know how to use it and you know when to use it.

And what I would say is, quoting Dr. Tucci, there's way more unknown than known. And what you need is multiple ways to look at it.

So we would never say don't use something or things like that. And anybody that kind of spouts those things off of this is the only thing to use or this is the best thing. I don't know how to deal with that because I just don't believe that's the case. I believe the case is knowing using tools that work for you, but not misusing them. And the one example I give often is we've all Been in the situation where we've had a hex screw in the wall but only had a flat screwdriver.

Yep.

And we jam that sucker in there three times and we twist it around and one of two things happens. We damage our screwdriver or we damage.

The screw or we damage the thing around the screw.

Right, right. So.

But we know. But we know.

Well, but the whole thing is I should know what tool to use.

Right.

And stop misusing tools, I think. And if I just went and got the right screwdriver, the right tool for the right thing, it would be a much easier thing.

Agreed. Agreed.

Do you want to tell a story? Let's tell a story of how Jobs We Dunn came about. Why, why, why did this even come to Bob Mesta's head?

Well, let's see. There's a couple things. One is it actually all started back in, I'll say the late 80s when I was working with Dr. Taguchi and I was working at Ford and we were talking about things around what we call the functions of systems. And what I realized is that in school we were always taught about problems, not necessarily about functions. And it was a very hard thing to basically get across. And so we talked about this notion of like, as you're building a braking system, what's the job that it does? So it was a surrogate for basically the function of the system, which is to stop the car and then how does it work? Right. And I would use that language with the development teams I was working with around those kinds of concepts. And it started as, what's the job of the system? It's very much on the technical side. It's very deep. It's way beyond the consumer side. They don't even know how a brake works. They just know they push the sound.

Supply side.

It is all supply side. So it really was born from the supply side. But as the concept, as I got closer and closer to the customer and realized in developing products, the closer I got to the consumer and customer, I could actually build better product and I wouldn't overengineer it. And so as I got closer and closer to that, I realized that the function we were talking about, we would talk about, well, what's the function the customer wants? And then we'd start to actually look at weightings, like, what's important? And you started to realize that when you do these importance ratings of what's important to one person and not. It's like somebody would give it a 10 and somebody else would give it a 2 and you're like, what is up with that? You start to realize that all of a sudden, context was different of when they would actually value one feature over another or one attribute over another. Ultimately, what happens is we end up getting to a point where we would see the basic understanding of consumers is not just about who they are and what are their important attributes, but what are they trying to do and why they're trying to do it. And so in the early days, I would get demographic segmentation or psychographic segmentation, and I would always go back to, but why are they actually buying it? What's causing them to say, today's the day to do that? And so ultimately, by flipping this over to the supply or the demand side of the world, we were able to actually then start to realize there's other methods and tools that need to be developed. Because at some point, we need to actually figure out how to fit into people's lives as opposed to pushing our product into people's lives. Pull versus push.

Can you give a quick example of something not working because of context?

Yeah. So I always ask people, do you like steak or do you like hot dogs? Right. And they're like, wow, I like them both. Most people say, well, not everybody anymore, but I'll say people of my generation. And what I would say is, but if you take the last time I had hot dogs, I have four kids, they play ice hockey, we're running around crazy. It's like the last thing we want to do is come home, they have homework. How do we actually pull dinner together fast enough that everybody we know is going to eat, that we can get the homework done and get everything done?

If I pull a stake into that situation, it's like, it takes too long. I don't know if the kids are all going to eat it. I don't want to waste it. It's very expensive, all those kinds of things. And I talk about a stake situation. It's typically.

Has some element of.

You did well reward.

Some accomplishment of some sort, or it's treating themselves, whatever it is, usually taking a longer time, making sure you're sitting down, usually doing it with several people enjoying it with other food. There's a whole different dynamic around it. And so you start to realize, if I put hot dogs in that situation, it doesn't work either. And so you start to realize that it's not that people like steak or they like hot dogs. It's the question of when and where do they like steak and hot dog and why? What is it about those experiences that make it fit.

So as we close, I just want to leave that kind of question with the audience. Right. I want you to think about a time or in the next couple weeks as you're thinking about this, that you've tried something and it didn't work, but you've had it before and it worked. Why didn't it work? And you'll learn that context, possibly location. Different things come into that context as a location, but different things come into that of why it didn't work for you.

Context creates value.

I think of like for me, you know, trying to eat in the car if you have something chocolate, it's not very good, but chocolate's delicious everywhere else, somewhere else. Right. So it's those types of things. I want you to think about those and think about why it didn't, why it didn't work at that time, even though it might have been one of your go tos at other times. And that helps, helps explain jobs.

I think the other example to think about is the one you talk about with the refrigerator. Like the black fridge we have in the back with all the drinks. You want to share that one that's in the blog.

So I'll let them read that when they read about jobs to be done.

You got it. Cool. Thanks.

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