Tag Archives for jobs-to-be-done radio
This week Jason Fried, the founder of 37signals and author of Rework, joins us on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio to discuss how he came to discover the JTBD framework and apply it to Basecamp and how he does things at 37signals.
Jason was first introduced to the Jobs-to-be-Done concept by another 37signals team member, Ryan Singer. As the story goes, Ryan saw Clay Christensen describe how he and a colleague uncovered the jobs that a milkshake does in a web video. After watching the video, Ryan went on a search to find out who the “milkshake man” was, and found Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek from the Re-Wired Group. (more…)
This week we’ll give you a glimpse into what went on at the Switch Workshop that was held at the 37signals office in Chicago on October 1st.
We’re joined by Nick Owsley, the co-founder of PromoSimple, who shares his thoughts about being an attendee, and the steps that he’s taken to understand the jobs that his product does since he left the event.
Nick joined 23 other attendees (mostly entrepreneurs, start-up founders, and product/marketing individuals in the software and technology space) at 37signals to spend a day learning about one of the fundamental premises of Jobs-to-be-Done: People don’t just buy or start using your product. They stop doing one thing, and start doing something else.
Using that premise as a starting point, the attendees at the workshop were exposed to the way that we conduct consumer interviews at Re-Wired, in an attempt to uncover the progress that a consumer is trying to make when they hire a product or service. After watching a number of off-the-cuff live interviews (people that we picked out of the audience), the attendees spent time learning more about the details of the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework, and then broke into groups to conduct interviews of their own.
In this episode, Nick talks us through the experience of conducting his first JTBD interview with a customer and gives his candid review of the Switch Workshop.
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This week we continue to share audio of a recent trip to Boston to visit Clayton Christensen. Clay shares the story of when Andy Groves of Intel asked him to explain how disruption would affect his company. He reinforces for us the concept that when applying a framework such as Jobs-to-be-Done, it’s always important to show people how to think, not what to think.
A framework such as Jobs-to-be-Done should give you a common language and a common way to frame the problem so that you can reach consensus around a counter-intuitive course of action.
This week we also say farewell to Tom McBrien, the 2012 Summer Intern at the Re-Wired Group. Tom walks us through his experience at Re-Wired, including his take on how Jobs-to-be-Done helped him understand the importance of causality, how it prompted him to think hard about the job that he was hiring college for, and how it eventually prompted him reconsider his major at the University of Michigan.
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This week Bob and Chris are honored to be joined by Clayton Christensen on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio. Clay discusses why he thinks the JTBD framework is so important and talks through how it is used to understand causality and what drives consumer to buy.
He also uses OpenTable as an example of a company that has experienced success by nailing the job-to-be-done and understanding the progress-making-forces at play when making a reservation at a restaurant.
Also, be sure to check out Taddy Hall’s recent article in Time: Differentiation: A Surprising Story of Sameness.
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Coming Up Next Week
We’ll be joined by Tom McBrien, an intern at The Re-Wired Group to discuss our method of pulling out dimensions and coding interviews.
This week presented a great opportunity to bring some special guests to the Jobs-to-be-Done Radio Show.
Bob and Chris are joined by John Palmer, who worked with Bob in the early 90s to create the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework, as well as Bob Barrett and Ervin Fowlkes who are colleagues at The Re-Wired Group.
In the middle of an intense two-day working session focused on identifying the Jobs-to-be-Done in some specific situations for two of our clients, we decided to take a break from the work and discuss summarizing a job-to-be-done in 140 characters or less.
In an earlier Twitter exchange on the #JTBD hashtag, Chris took the stance that distilling Jobs down to short phrases and sentences would risk losing the essence of the Job. Listen to the show to hear John Palmer how it is possible, and necessary to explain Jobs succinctly using images or icons.
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We’ll unpack some of the interviews that we have conducted in the building space to gain an understanding of how demand dimensions are identified.
This week’s show features guest Stephen Mohan, Managing Director of Operational Services of Cofunds. Stephen joins us to talk about financial services through the lens of Jobs-to-be-Done.
We contrast how the financial planner’s view of the competitive set (retirement plans, mutual funds, stocks) differs from the competitive set that consumers construct (buy what I want now and go into debt, keep my money as cash to avoid risk, do nothing). The discussion then moves into the solution space, and we talk about a few methods that financial planners could use to match their offering to what consumers are looking for in order to draw more people into the market.
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Coming Up Next Week
We’ll discuss Facebook’s new Facebook Camera offering and how they’ve leveraged the Instagram offering; Instagram for Video, and Social TV.
This week’s show starts out with a discussion around the swell of recent media that the Jobs-to-be-Done framework has received. We discuss the recent jobs-to-be-done Forbes article, as well as Clay’s guest appearance on the Critical Path radio show.
We also begin to explore the concept of engagement in the shopping process. We attempt compare and contrast the shopping behaviors of consumers as they purchase various products with seemingly low engagement (margarin, laundry detergent) with their behaviors as they purchase products with high engagement (homes, cars).
Finally, we hand out our first ever Jobs-to-be-Done Award to this week’s winner, Hello Fax. Listen in to hear about how the leadership team at Hello Fax has managed to zero in on a key job-to-be-done that exists in the document faxing market.
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We’ll continue our discussion on engagement, evaluate the pressure that Instagram is experiencing to move into the video space, and talk about Bob’s recent trip to France and the conversations he had around JTBD in the financial space.
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Is education really a “job” if the student is forced or prompted to consume it in the way that we’ve designed it? There are a lot of great start-ups in the education space that are attempting to answer this question as they roll new products out into the market.
How can start-ups in the education vertical apply the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework to their products if the student’s consideration set is pre-determined for them? Should we focus on the teacher’s jobs, the student’s jobs, the administrator’s jobs?
This week we unpack each of these questions and discuss how JTBD can be applied in education.
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Next week we’ll dive back into the tools and tactics of JTBD, and discuss interview tips, and the creation of the timeline.
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In Case You Like Reading More Than Listening
Hey, this is Doug Crets. We’re talking again on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio. We’re here with Chris and Bob. It’s been another week. Thank you, guys, for joining us. Good to see you guys here again. Today, my thoughts are I wondered if Bob could right my ship here and tell me if I’m on the right track or if I’m on the wrong track.
I was thinking education and I was thinking about how education in the public school system K-12 is like an obligatory forced product.
I was wondering, could you even use Jobs-to-be-Done theory to think about education since kids are required to go to school. They are required to learn. How do you do Jobs-to-be-Done theory if the product isn’t in a choice set? It’s more, “This is what you have to do. You have to go to school every day and get it done”?
Is that something off limits for Jobs-to-be-Done or am I thinking about Jobs-to-be-Done in the wrong way?
Bob: No. The thing is, as much as you can say education is obligatory there are many choices that the kids have to make along the way. The fundamental premise of Jobs is that people want to make progress. Kids want to make progress. Kids want to get through school to get to college or to get into a job. It depends on their definition of “progress” and what they choose to engage with to help them make progress.
So in some cases it’s not that they are buying it and using money, but they are spending their time on it. Spending time can be seen as part of the equivalent.
The other thing is there is a notion of consumption. The kids have to learn how to consume the education to demonstrate new behavior so they can get on to the next class or get on to the next college or get on to the next job.
We’ve actually done some work in that area. Looking at how kids, for example, consume education and what teachers can do. If you think of the student as the consumer…
Doug: Right.
Bob: …and it’s the teachers’ job and school’s job to help the students make progress and consume.
You’ll find that one thing that is most interesting, most people talk about education as having a motivation problem. We interviewed 9th and 10th graders. Everything from kids who had good grades to, I’ll say, medium grades, to bad grades, to kids who have dropped out. They were 11th graders and they dropped out.
What you found was that they had all hired education to make progress. At some point, the kids who dropped out, I interviewed a couple of kids from a gang.
What you found is that they felt they could make more progress in the gang than they could school. I don’t believe there’s a fundamental motivation problem. I think there is a blockage problem. I don’t think the kids can consume what were giving them.
Doug: So wait. We’ve got in 2010 I think there were 6.2 million, or something like, that dropouts in America. Go back to this blockage thing.
Bob: My belief is that…
Doug: Wait. What does “progress” mean though in that sense? You said that they could find more progress in the gang.
Bob: That’s right.,
Doug: These kids you talked about. What does that mean?
Bob: They talk about progress in their life. “I’m going to either be better off. I’m going to learn more. I’m to have more self-esteem. I am going to basically feel better about myself. I’m going to make progress because every time I go to school I get a D, they tell me I’m stupid. They basically make me feel like I don’t understand what’s going on. They won’t help me understand and all they do is tell me I just need to sit down and figure it out. They don’t help me understand how I am going to make progress.”
Eventually, it’s like, “I can’t make any more progress here. I might as well go to gang. I might as well get a job. I might as well go do something else.”
Doug: Yeah.
Bob: So the dropouts are really about the fact that they can’t consume anymore or school is not helping them make progress in their life.
Chris: So, is part of this conundrum that we are in, I don’t think we intend to use the show to bash on traditional education system. Is part of the flaw rooted in the fact that we approach the problem or the education system through the lens that Doug described? It’s just, “Kids don’t have a choice. They should plant themselves in the seat and learn.”
We don’t view it with regards to how kids can choose to consume or choose not to consume. We view it through sort of this “push” mentality.
Bob: Right.
Chris: We need to continue to push whether it’s an old way of learning or a new way of learning, we need to continue to push content onto these kids until something sticks. There’s very little attention paid to how kids choice and how kids…
Doug: Well, Chris, I think, just so I can just add to that. I think teachers work in a system that enforces a system on teachers that they then must enforce on students.
Bob: That’s correct.
Chris: Absolutely.
Doug: It’s not that students and teachers are not capable. Or that teachers are not imaginative or that teachers aren’t even good at what they do, it’s that they are extremely good at what they are doing but they are copying a system of thinking that is more about the bureaucracy and more about the administration of education than it is about actual teaching and learning.
Bob: That’s right. I think that it has outgrown where it came from, if you think about it. Formal education, you could say, universities and that have been around for quite a long time. Actual public school hasn’t been around for more than 150 years. Right?
Doug: Right.
Bob: It was mostly put together for the Industrial Revolution to train people to be able to work in the factories and to teach them skills that they needed to be able to do that.
If you go prior to that, it was really that not everybody was supposed to go to school to begin with. It’s kind of this building block that has built up and it’s almost like an inverted pyramid that’s ready to just turn over. Again, we think that every kid should go to college.
Not every kid… You know, some kids can actually get through college in their 18 years, but we don’t let them. Part of it is that we need a differentiated system that allows people to consume and make progress at their own rate.
The system is not designed for the kid. It’s designed for the academics who have basically said here’s the pedagogy of what people should know and learn as opposed to helping the kids figure out where they want to go and what they want to do.
If anything, we’re not helping kids envision what their future can be and then guiding them with the right types of education to get to them there.
We’ve got a mass customized consumption of auditory learners, visual learners, and kinesthetic learners, and all gardeners’ kinds of stuff. Literally we’ve got to be able to help students consume. But at the same time, what we’re doing is we’re saying, “In the textbook. I’ve got to put everything in the textbook.”
When there’s something that’s an auditory learner, and the visual learner has to sit and wait while the auditory learners hear it.
It just screams for a kind of online or some kind of a computer-assisted learning, but the fact is the union rules and the administrative pieces, they can’t break out of the old mold.
Doug: Well, should we be excited that Apple has come forward with this new textbook publishing software and stuff like that?
Bob: Absolutely.
Doug: Yes, or is that really the first fundamental change needs to be happening?
Because it seems to me that the publishing game is just as much a behemoth as the education game. What other things could we be doing to break open or crack open this block that you’re talking about for students?
Bob: Think about it for a second. Since you have graduated from college, how do you learn? Where do you get your content to learn and what do you consume to make progress?
Doug: That’s a great question. I actually made a career. I interview people or I read their books or I visit their websites. Basically, I create relationships with people I want to learn from.
Bob: That’s right. What you find is what people don’t understand. Something like a podcast has already disrupted a lot of education. It’s the one-off consumption education where, I want to learn about something, I can go listen to a podcast.
At the same time, the reality is, we get no credit for it. There’s no accreditation. So part of it is that there is still this world that values a degree in education and that kind of thing. So there are notions of how to make progress and certifications, if you will, of whether you actually can do things or not.
I feel that the education system is really pushing itself by raising its prices to where they’re at. The jobs that are out there can’t warrant the education that they have piled into themselves. You see a bubble happening that’s going to happen just like the housing crisis where these kids can’t go get jobs based on the education that they’ve got.
Chris: Let’s get tactical for a second. I think this could be interesting.
Bob: Right.
Chris: There’s a huge proliferation of startups in the education space. We’ve talked to a lot of people that have unbelievably cool technologies around dynamic learning and dynamic content, all of the work that Michael Horn is doing with people at the Innosight Institute which people should go check out.
If you are in that space and you are heading up a start up and bringing new technology into education, how should you be applying the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to ensure that you are going down the right path?
We have grappled with things in the past, like, the students have jobs and I think I am acutely aware of it, but the teachers have jobs and the administrators have jobs. At the state level, those people have jobs too. And, who actually buys this content? The parents have jobs.
Bob: Right.
Chris: Do you go direct to the consumer on the parents’ side? Do you deal with the bureaucracy in the school system? If I’m leading one of these startups, where I start?
Bob: I think you’ve got to start with, I’ll say some of Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation principles. I think that you could try to hit the mainstream head on and just not get anywhere.
To me, it’s just really to find those struggling moments and who’s struggling and then figure out from the struggling moments, how are they going to be willing to reach for something new?
The problem you have is that the system is so subsidized.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: …and so convoluted in its spending habits, that the actual dollars spent are disconnected from the challenges at the front line. For a startup, it’s easier to go to the parent market, where they are frustrated, willing to shovel out their own dollars for it. I’ll say the administrative side is very, very difficult to connect the challenge in the actual classroom with where I am spending the money.
Chris: Sure.
Bob: Some of the real good places to me is to go to the remediation market, which is, if I fail biology, when we went to school you would just take a different science class.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: If you fail biology now, you’ve got to take it because it’s a graduation requirement.
Usually what happens is that kid that has to repeat biology is like, “I don’t want take it from the same teacher…
Doug: I didn’t learn it the first time.
Bob: …and I didn’t learn it the first time you gave it to me. So by providing a different way in which to learn biology and providing it in a way that the kids could be adaptive learning and that kind of stuff, that’s where I’ve seen most of the success.
You don’t have resistance from the teachers or the administrators because they don’t want to have to do the rework, if you will. They would prefer to have someone else do it. When the kid learns that way, all of a sudden they realize, “Can I take the next class this way?”
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: So you find it’s really about finding the cracks. To me, it all starts not with not the notion. If you look at most of the innovation that has happened in the education market over the last 15 to 20 years, it’s all been focused on helping the teacher teach, or a majority of it.
Doug: Sure.
Bob: As much as they put computers in the classroom… Some of it has been focused on special ed. For the mainstream, the kids haven’t change the way they consume. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation around how kids have consumed.
What you find is the whole idea of the smartphone, and the tablet, and what Apple’s doing, I don’t think the education system is actually prepared for how much it’s going to accelerate the learning, how much more kids can learn, and how much faster they can learn and whether the teachers are really prepared to be “the guide on the side as opposed to the sage on the stage.”
Doug: It seems to me that the quickest transition will come, and the most rapid amplification of learning and learning styles will come, when people realize that a lot of this interactive and online learning and a lot of this sort of manipulative learning using objects and learning objects on iPads and tablets and whatnot, are not only fundamentally resourceful ways for kids to learn quickly, but they also immediately transition into the real world. There is that component of online learning that allows you to communicate, not with people just in your “cohort,” or even people just in your class, but people all the way around the world.
What I think, and this is just me putting on the visionary for second, is that the thing that kids are always wanting to consumer when they are educating themselves are being taught, is they want to create their own kind of community and they want to create their own culture.
What I think is going to happen is that when we realize that fundamentally the web is a instant way to learn because of the way it allows us to communicate with people, our problems that are going to need to be solved are at once going to be global and our solutions are going to be global and the people who participate in those are actually going to be these hyper, local cohorts if you will, who have solutions on the ground in their area and are going to have to need to share those with people all the way around the world.
I think that we’re talking at once about this traditional education system, but I think when, Bob, you talk about how rapidly it’s going to amplify our accelerate learning. I think it’s also rapidly going to deteriorate the old district, regional, or state model, and it’s going to be a global education system.
Bob: Right.
Chris: I think the thing is I believe that education is a very personal thing. You make progress and you consume what you want to consume
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: …when you want to consume it. The thing is as much as we are learning that as adults, the fact is, I’ve seen kids who are failing math work their cell phone or their computer like there’s no tomorrow.
Doug: Yeah.
Chris: Part of it is two fundamentals, anything about jobs is about relevancy and engagement.
Doug: Yeah.
Chris: If I’m trying to make progress in something, the question is it’s got to be relevant to my situation and it’s got to engage me to make progress. The whole thing is if you really look at the people who have been studying education for a long time, it is about relevancy and engagement for the kid.
The more you can make it relevant and engaging for the kid, the more they will learn it and the more they will actually change their behavior or add to their knowledge bank.
The whole thing is, at least the way that I look at it, every kid has got to consume on their own and now, instead of having the resource of the teacher and school and maybe library, they now have the Internet and now they have the world at their fingertips to be able to learn.
It’s not trying to look at it from the big picture. It’s trying to look at it through the students’ eyes to say, “How can I actually learn how to design a pump to bring water to a place in Africa that doesn’t have a well?”
Bob: Yeah, but that’s my whole point. I think that’s what the web teaches us. It’s not only global, it’s both local and global at the same time.
I don’t think that you can actually talk about the localized way that a student or a community can learn or a school in a community can learn, without also talking about the fundamentally huge reach that learning can have on the web.
Chris: So, so…
Bob: Go ahead.
Chris: The point is that the world can build relevancy and engagement to do the social job and the emotional job of, “I can make a difference in the world by bringing water to people who don’t have water now.” Where, I could never do that before.
Part of it is, that by learning some of the new things, it’s adding that engagement. When we talk about Jobs-to-be-Done, it’s the social, emotional, functional job.
Well as much as I may learn about how to make a pump, the reality is that there are social and emotional things that can make it more engaging and make it more relevant that isn’t around the functional side of just knowing the equations of how to make a pump.
Doug: I think that’s true.
Bob: If you had a new technology that you were trying to bring and education, we always talk about the struggling moments. How do you uncover that struggling moment? Do you want to go into households and talk to students and talk about the last time you struggle to learn something? How would you start that? Tell me about the timeline that you would want to draw.
Chris: To me, it’s about trying to understand where are those struggling moments and how does your product or service fit? What would they stop doing or what would they give up in order to get?
Bob: Yep.
Chris: Again, if we go back to the forces model it’s like, think of Sylvan Institute in any tutoring type.
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: The struggles that you go through as a parent to help your kid get a tutor.
At what point do you actually admit you got a problem? When do you actually say, “We need a tutor”? How do you find a tutor? How do you test out the tutor? Which one do you figure out? Where’s the chemistry?
Again, it’s support but it’s really not helping them get real engagement and relevancy. It’s more about building focus to them.
To me, there’s other things to be doing to help reframe when the kid is struggling. Again, it might be a web-based solution. It might be a nonperson solution.
But right now I think where people struggle right now is the support system is, “I’m going to get a book. I’m going to go get a workbook or I’m going to go get a tutor.”
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: I think that the reality is it’s much broader than that. Part of it is to really look where students are struggling and they want to make progress but they can’t. That to me is the real essence of it.
Once I find those moments. So what we did is we actually looked at students in 9th and 10th grade and talk to them directly about the last homework assignment that they struggled with and walked through what was going on and why they struggled with it.
Most of the thing is that they didn’t get clear direction on it and they couldn’t find relevancy to it.
Doug: They couldn’t connect it to real life or a problem that they were aware of?
Chris: They couldn’t connect it to themselves. The whole thing is that they felt they felt they were going through the motions. So part of it is, how do you take Othello and relate it to real world today’s stuff that they deal with. It’s right there.
Bob: It’s still about progress. If I don’t have the light bulb and I can’t connect this to how I am actually moving myself forward, I think we can all put ourselves in their shoes. That’s like the classic, “Why do I need algebra? I’m never going to use this in real life.” It’s tough to push yourself along in those situations.
Chris: It’s being able to balance the theory with the practical application. Again, some people want to learn the big picture and go down to the micro-details and some people want to know the details and then abstract up to. Again, it gets back to how our brains are wired.
We’re doing a lot of work in the physiology of how the brain works and remapping the brain and new neuro-pathways. There’s just a lot of work out there that says no two brains are exactly alike. We’re doing kind of mass production education to a very mass customized market.
Bob: Even as simple as the DISC model is that explains to us how a more dominant person would want to consume education when compared to a more conscientious style person.
Chris: Conscientious style person. You got it.
Bob: I mean you could see how somebody in a conscientious behavior style would really struggle if it’s like they jumped to the end and they didn’t provide you any details and vice versa. That is very interesting.
Chris: I think that if you are an entrepreneur in the education space, it’s really about finding those struggling moments. Whether it’s helping teachers just be able to help students. You’re helping who’s struggling and who’s willing to pay? Pay is really about values.
It’s really, “Who really will value that being fixed or done or the reduction of struggling, and what progress can they really make?” In a lot of cases you find a lot of education products are just repackaged things that don’t really…
Bob: Don’t address the struggling moment.
Chris: Don’t address the struggling moment and there’s no reason to switch. So when there is no struggling moment everybody is looking at it going, “Man, that’s a great thing but there’s no reason for me to switch.”
Bob: Yeah.
Chris: The struggling moment is the reason to switch.
Bob: Right.
Chris: That’s where we are. Think about when a kid switches schools. Think about when a kid drops a class. Think about when a kid drops out of school. I mean, all of those are opportunities to get to the next level.
Doug: I wonder how this conversation would go if we actually had a practicing teacher and a practicing student in here. Maybe that’s something we can do sometime.
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah, that’s a great idea.
Doug: I think that this old saw that you hear would also work here in teaching and education. Education is a little bit different. The one thing I kept thinking about is, okay, student has a struggle to learn a certain algebra principle but there’s also another struggle of whether or not they grade actually fits that persons profile.
Chris: Right.
Doug: The struggle is, “Okay, I’m getting a D.” But the struggle is also, “I’m not learning.” And the struggle is also, “I’m not fitting into the family’s expectations for doing well in school.” I mean, there are like compounded struggles there. Again, I bring it back to that sense of choices.
It’s not really the same thing as going up to a counter and ordering a milkshake, if you think about it. It’s something a little bit different to me. Am I off by saying that?
Chris: For me I don’t see it as different. It’s just like when I go to buy a cell phone or a kid goes to buy a cell phone. They have to make the decision of which one and how it works and which one is going to be best for them, without ever actually using the cell phone.
To mean the whole thing is that they are responsible for their lives and their choices. If they’ve chosen not to be engaged that’s one thing. I would say when you dig deep into kids, they are more paralyzed from social pressures than they are from knowing that they need to make progress.
They all know that they need to make progress. They just don’t know how. They don’t know how to walk up to the counter and order, is my aspect.
Doug: Great.
Bob: Putting it back to the milkshake.
Chris: Putting it back to the milkshake. The thing to me that really hit home is I went and did a talk to, I would say, university level administrators.
There was somebody there who was talking about the University of Phoenix, the for-profit companies. How they were charging so much. They weren’t good value. We should be figuring out how to go after them, how to shut them down and everything else like that.
They literally were stealing students right and left from the public school, the public universities.
Doug: Right.
Chris: I sat through it for the first day or so. My talk was near the end. My thing is, I look at it and say, “I would love to compete with you guys. The reality is that when you start to look at that market, people want to be able to better themselves and take education but you won’t offer classes at night. You actually make me have all these prerequisites to try to get into class and charge me all this money that even though it’s not there, you make it so inconvenient for me to actually try to better myself and get another degree, the reality is I’d rather pay double and have my employer help me pay it than try to fit you.”
They’d say, “Yeah, we don’t like to teach at night. We don’t like those big classes.” It’s all these excuses that they were making. To me the private education business kind of highlighted is, how many people will want to actually go back to school and do better but the education system is not allowing them to do it in a way that is convenient and easy for them to do?
Doug: Right. This is a fascinating conversation. It’s all the time that we have left to do it today.
Let me just ask two things, one for Chris and one for Bob. We touched on it a little bit, but if you could model a different kind of public education system, what is one very small tweak that you would make in a classroom?
Bob: I would really work out of what, I would say, is meta-cognition. Helping kids understand how they learn and understand what they need to do. I think every kid is different. There is a lot of these different kinds of tests to help them realize whether they are an auditory learner.
Half of the time when we do interviews or we talked to kids, they don’t even know that by writing things down, they think it’s the notes that are important, but if they are kinesthetic learner, it’s just the fact they wrote it.
They could remember writing it. Not that they can see it. Where as a visual learner has to see the notes.
To me, helping kids understand how they learn, is I think one of the fundamental most important things that we should be working at.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s a good one. I think one of the other big ones is something that Clayton talks a lot about in Disrupting Class. That is the batch process that kids go through and how everyone is lumped together and then you either move forward or you don’t move forward. It takes away from the natural flow of learning.
The interesting part about it is, I think there has been so much work done when you look at dynamic difficulty in the video games space. How those game developers are able to keep kids engaged at such an unbelievable level by understanding how to vary the difficulty as the kid plays. So it’s always on that edge. You can’t quite beat it, but it’s not so easy that you’re just disengaged.
I think to be able to capture some of those things and say you are not all lumped into the same pace of learning. You actually have the ability to learn at a pace that is really engaging for you. I think that could unlock a lot of potential in kids that is just locked up right now.
Bob: I think that’s a really good one.
Doug: Great guys. Well, thank you very much for joining us again. We’ll be doing another one next week. You can always find these podcasts on TheReWiredGroup.com\blog. You can also tweet us. Bob Moesta is @bmoesta. Chris Spiek is @chriscbs. I am @douglascrets. Thanks for joining us.
This week Lou Franco, Vice President of Atlasoft Product Strategy at Kofax, joins us as a special guest on Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio. Lou is gracious enough to take talk to us about his attempts to find differentiation in his sector of the software industry, and how he has employed the JTBD framework successfully with some recent product launches.
His story is a familiar one to many people in the product strategy role who are constantly challenged with finding new ways to set their product apart. Tune in to see how he found answers by applying Jobs-to-be-Done.
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Topics for discussion for next week will include Jobs-to-be-Done basics, and the Jobs that Custom Software Shop is hired to do.
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In Case You Like Reading More Than Listening
Hello, everybody! This is Doug Crets with Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio. We’ve come to that time of the week that you have all come to know and love, we’re recording our Jobs-To-Be-Done podcast. We have actually a very special one this week. A couple weeks ago we started this off and we talked about, I don’t even remember what we talked about. We talked about Quora and LinkedIn. The next week after that we talked to about Jobs-To-Be-Done, the job we hire 5-hour ENERGY® drinks or Red Bull to do for us. Now we actually have a special guest. We’re joined by Lou Franco who is a VP of Product Strategy for a company called Kofax.
You actually work for Atalasoft, which is a subsidiary of Kofax. We are joined also with our partners from The Rewired Group, Bob Modesto and Chris Spiek, and of course me.
I thought we would kick it off just really briefly. I got to know Lou from Quora were he was actually answering some really great questions about Jobs-To-Be-Done. Chris and Bob, you’ve known him from a little bit longer before that. Why don’t you help in also introducing Lou and just bring us to the topic that we are going to be discussing today? Which is, I believe, the jobs we hire PDF to do for us in our work.
Chris: Go ahead, Bob.
Bob: Lou reached out from one of the podcast that we did with Horace Dediu at Asymco. Lou basically has had an interest. He happened to be in Boston and he drove I think a long way, almost 2 hours, right, Lou?
Lou: Yeah.
Bob: To come see us and we sat down and had dinner. We had a great conversation and he really is one of the ones who has spurred us to create the new Jobs-To-Be-Done course which we are doing online in an asynchronous and synchronous way. He’s actually one of the, I will say, founding students in the class.
Doug: Cool.
Bob: In the meantime we’ve been going back and forth. As we have talked Lou has come up with… You are a product strategist so, to me, you’re in the midst of formulating all these different plans and being able to execute on new products. You have some really good examples that I think that our listeners would really like to hear about. To me the one I love is the notion of the PDF generator and that.
Can you tell us a little bit, Lou, about what you do, but the software company does, and then, tell us a little bit about the PDF story?
Lou: Okay, great. Atalasoft publishes .net STKs for image processing and PDF manipulation. We’ve been in business for about 10 years. We were acquired by Kofax last year in May. We continue to produce STKs that manipulate images and manipulate PDFs.
Around the same time that I had been introduced to Jobs-To-Be-Done we are launching a new product that was going to take our PDF abilities to the next level and be able to do a lot more with being able to generate PDF programmatically.
For developers, our customers are other software developers and we’re targeting those that need to create PDF in their application. Our normal way of doing that, and I think a lot of companies’ way of doing that, is to think about what features you have and talk about what those are. What benefits you might have over the competitions. Whether our model are the exact features we have.
I think it would’ve gone down a very typical road with that. That’s what we had been doing. We have been successful with that. One thing that really intrigued me about Jobs-To-Be-Done is how it turns it around.
I started to try to introduce that idea in our prelaunch meetings. I would say it was an early understanding of the framework. Maybe not doing all the activities that you guys talk about yet. But trying to discover these jobs on our own just by our own interactions that we had with customers. We really started thinking about not PDF and generating PDF, and the futures of PDF and PDF generation, but why you hire PDF in the first place and why our customers might do that.
Bob: Yep.
Lou: When we did that we generated one idea of invoice generating. There are a lot of applications and a lot of different niches that need to generate an invoice. And not just invoices but POs, quotes, and those kinds of documents.
Bob: Yep. All that, accounting documents.
Lou: Yes. And not just accounting software needs to be, but lots of different kinds of software that has… Even time tracking applications need to do that.
Bob: Yep.
Lou: And in all kinds of different verticals. One of the things about invoices is that they tend to have a common part, that is like the same in all invoices, the logo, the address the fact that they have a list of line items, the total. And then a part thats variable, that gets filled in programmatically. You’d want to generate that automatically. You wouldn’t want to have to type it in if you can get it from data.
With this perfect melding of a data source and a template which our product happens to do really quite well, we identified that as a niche.
Once we get that, one thing it really did for us, it really gave us ways to think about how to reach people because we could enumerate the companies that need that.
Bob: Yep.
Lou: That’s something that is very researchable. You can go find every company that makes accounting software that makes a PDF. You can find every company that makes time tracking software or consultant management software. And there are tons of them.
In fact you can find shows where that’s all there is there. It opens up a whole way of thinking about the market. If I had only thought about, “Who needs to make PDF?” I guess everybody could need to make PDF. I kind of went, “How do I reach them?” This gave us a way in.
We have since identified other kinds of niches like that. That was our first breakthrough on it. Really thinking about the opposite way, not the features we had, but more of why you even care about having PDF in the first place.
Bob: Right. What happens usually is that people will stick with the PDF kind of round. What they’ll do is, again, they’ll sock it out to try and differentiate themselves and, again, never look at it through the customers eyes and say, “What are they trying to do?” If you think about what they are searching for, the first thing is, “Hey, do you have an invoice PDF generator? Do you have an invoice generator?”
Lou: Right.
Bob: People are going to solve specific problems. As much as people think that their niches are limiting, the fact is you have that trade-off between being non-differentiated in to a commodity and being really focused and being able to take share.
The whole thing is that by turning the lens around and looking through the telescope the other way, you start to realize you can see actually the market is bigger and you can differentiate yourself more than trying to be a PDF generator that does everything for everybody.
Lou: Right.
Bob: Which you can’t win at that.
Lou: And then one thing we are able to do because we had enough time is we actually generated a list of invoice specific features that we could add that would make it even a little more suited to the purpose. We were able to generate sample code that related to invoices. We commissioned a video specifically about that one area, discussing that one area.
A couple of little things, we didn’t have enough time to really go whole hog, and were doing a little bit more now.
Bob: Yeah.
Lou: But it gave us at least some talking points of why it would be perfect for invoices. If you are considering a lot of different PDF generators, well here’s one we were thinking about this problem.
Bob: Right.
Chris: So, Lou, Bob and I talk a lot about the somewhat formal process that we use to do research and tease out jobs. We recruit. We have consumers who are struggling with an issue tell us, help us draw the timeline of consumption of when they are making a decision and what they’re considering at all that sort of thing.
I think our listeners would be pretty interested in understanding… You touched on the idea it was probably a real ad hoc process that you went through to arrive at the invoice generation job. Talk us through, if you are at liberty to, how did you guys leave the PDF generation stage and arrive at this new invoice generator?
Did you have actual discrete conversations with customers? Were you looking at data that led you down that path? How did you arrive at that?
Lou: Yeah, it was really more, I have to say, it was the beginning of an experiment for us. It was way more brainstorming.
Chris: Sure.
Lou: We’ve talked to a lot of customers over the years. We definitely have a handle on what a lot of people use this for and we had already had, not PDF generation but PDF consumption toolkit, viewing and annotating all kinds of ways of consuming PDF. We definitely had been exposed to different things that our customers have been using.
Chris: Sure.
Lou: One of the things that I did do, though, a difference of scenario. Kofax, our parent company, actually makes invoice processing software. I did call the head of that business unit, because they also create invoices, and talked to them about their specific problems because I had at least one friendly person who I know will talk to me for half an hour and tell me all the ins and outs of what he needed, what he was looking for, because he had already solved the problem for himself. That did help.
Afterwards, I have been having these conversations after-the-fact. To do it to begin with, not knowing any of these things, I’m starting to learn a little bit more now, it was just purely trying to brainstorm. We came up with a bunch of things.
Invoices were a really good fit for us because we happen to have templating features. That suited it really well. We did identify other jobs, but there were just some that seemed really like a good fit for us. That’s why we ended up with that.
Doug: Lou, could you…
Chris: That’s a great point.
Doug: Go ahead.
Chris: I just want to touch on something. I just think it’s a great point because I feel like a lot of marketers and track developers are, fearful isn’t the right word, but cautious of the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, because they have this perception that it’s like, “We’re going to get these deep insights that are these unique situations that people are struggling with. And we’re going to just have to throw out everything we know about our product and start from scratch and attack this very specific job.”
I think this is a good story about how it was so adjacent to what you are already doing.
Lou: Yeah.
Chris: It’s like, “Man, we can take three things out and add two things and it’s like we have this entirely new category to go after.”
Lou: Right.
Chris: It’s a laser guided, really acute market that you’re attacking. You already have everything you need to do it.
Lou: Right. And our product still works in the broader market and people still find us for that. It’s just that it’s not as easy to figure out what the marketing should be there. That will just happen organically and that’s great. We will find other jobs to attack, too, as the product matures. This one is one that we’re doing a little more focus on.
Doug: I wonder, could I redirect basically what Lou is saying back to Bob and Chris?
Is there something that marketing could be looking at in looking at the process that Lou is going through with his team, and being able to say, “Aha! That’s the moment”? How do they identify a moment using Jobs-To-Be-Done where they could pick that up and use it for marketing? Does it work that way?
Chris: Bob?
Bob: I think for jobs, what we end up doing is it really is all about aggregating from the problems or the struggles that people have of why they didn’t switch to something new.
In most cases, from the way the marketing and markets are formed it’s all about creating bigger things so you can advertise to larger audiences. What you find is that you need both, the larger view but you also need the job and it’s about tuning them both into the right focus.
To me, I think the thing is, it’s almost like a salesman and a marketer. It’s trying to make sure that the salesman knows how to close the sale where the marketer is knowing how to get the person in the door. The fact is in the end the sale only really gets made not from the marketer but from the salesman, it’s knowing those problems.
In a lot of cases, to me, marketing’s job to aggregate up to the most common set of language that the most people can resonate with. A PDF generator is what most people can resonate with, but the ones who have the problems who are going to value that PDF generator more are people in the invoice market, for example, or trying to generate invoices. They have tried five or six other things.
To me, it’s making sure you focus on those very specific problems or challenges that the customer has and go after those.
Bob: And that’s also, interestingly enough, we talk about magnetism to a job when we do clustering. If you nail one job very specifically you’ll end up drawing other people. People will self identify with that job and pull themselves in. It’s actually interesting to think about.
That happens pretty uniquely in the software and modularized software space. One consideration is always, “I’m going to buy this thing that has an STK, how much am I going to have to bend it in and shape it to make it work in my solution?”
There’s almost like a very literal magnetism that takes place. I can pick this thing and then I’m going to have to shape a little bit so it better be pretty close to what I needed to do off-the-shelf.
Chris: Bob, I think it gets to one of the things that we talked about with Lou when we were together was the notion that what’s the job of a STK kit? At some point it’s make versus buy.
Bob: Yeah, right.
Chris: It’s trying to make sure that you understand at some point if it’s so different that I have to customize it, I might as well start it myself. Part of it is understanding those really unique problems because at some point programmers think they can do everything. I think, Lou, what you’re doing is you’re selling to those programmers who are trying to make that decision, “Do I go create this and buy an off-the-shelf art do I go create my own?”
Lou: Right.
Chris: Right?
Lou: Yep. We think about things like risk reduction, ongoing maintenance; again, those are attributes of the thing itself.
Essentially what the job an STK is being hired to do is related to some extent to another job that our customer is also seeking their customers’ job. There’s this thing like we’re making a tool for someone who makes a tool to someone who does the job.
Doug: That’s getting kind of meta there.
Lou: Yeah. I’ve been much more aware of that after meeting you guys and trying to really think some of those things through.
Someone might use an application that uses our toolkit and they might be doing that to sign up for a mortgage. That might be the job, getting your mortgage processed faster, might be the job that they are trying to do.
What can we say or do to make the person in the middle who is solving that problem knowing we are the toolkit that’s going to help them do that job?
Doug: We’ve got about 10 min. more for this call, or less than that. That brings up in this whole thing, “What is the job that’s done through Jobs-To-Be-Done?” That’s the broad overarching question. If I were listening to this podcast and wasn’t familiar with it, that’s where I would be looking to place it.
So what does that do for me? Why would I even use this process?
Could you guys talk about Lou’s personal experience with coming through to this, you have the great PDF story? Just where you feel that it fits in the whole business category that you work in?
I guess Bob, and Chris, you could probably weigh in with all the experience you guys have with different types of customers that you work with. All right.
Bob: We asked Lou that question, but we asked Lou that question when we sat down with him. “What are you trying to hire Job-To-Do that other marketing methods you’ve tried doesn’t?” To me, please answer it, Lou, because you did a great job.
Lou: Yeah, sure. One of the things that you guys talk about is discovering the early timeline of when you first really thought about it, those early podcasts, hearing you guys and Horace, and hearing that constant talking of job. I was trying to figure out like, “Where did this come from? What is this?”
It was incredibly hard a few months ago to find anything about it. I kept on looking, and looking, and reaching out in Twitter and luckily Bob saw that I was doing that and got in touch with me.
When you asked me this question I was really just for the first time thinking about that. Why was I even doing this? When I realized what was, I had been for the past year or more very interested in the idea of differentiation and trying to figure out how to achieve it.
I had been reading. I read, a couple years ago, different, I’m sorry I forget the author…
Bob: Youngme Moon.
Luke: Youngme Moon, right. She’s also at Harvard, in the Business School at Harvard. I read a couple of different Jeffrey Moore books, he writes about that.
What they were really good about is talking about why you need differentiation and giving good examples of companies that achieved it. There was no systematic way to achieving it.
That’s the thing, really the “Aha!” of Jobs for me, even just from the elevator pitch of it, of how you even think about the world. It starts to open up like activities you could do, and that’s what I was missing.
I tried to hire different, I tried to hire Dealing with Darwin and some other things that talk about differentiation, but they weren’t clicking with me in terms of a thing I could do when I sit at my desk that would help me achieve it.
Bob: Right. That’s really where a lot of the Jobs stuff came from. The fact is I don’t think there is a lot of information about that you need to differentiate. But it is, “What’s meaningful differentiation?” It’s not meaningful differentiation from the product perspective. It’s meaningful differentiation from the customer’s perspective.
You have to start with what’s their view. It’s like a Snickers doesn’t compete with a Milky Way even though they are all in the same aisle, they look the same, they have the same components. In reality, in the consumers mind, they don’t think about them in the same way. To differentiate you need to start from what’s the customer’s competitive set not the category.
Lou: Right. That’s the eye-opener there.
Bob: Yep. That’s where I look at growth and I think that growth really comes from stealing from other categories that people don’t realize you’re stealing from.
I look at podcasts for example. People bought magazines to learn but the reality is now that podcasts are out there people are learning all through a completely different medium of podcasts and audio that literally the magazines are in decline. They’re like, “Well, what do we do?”
The reality is that people have been stealing a share from them all the time because this does a better job than me having to read and write it all the time.
Doug: Well.
Bob: It’s actually easier for me as an author to talk than it is for me to write.
Doug: You’re going to get me started on education, my big bailiwick. I think people will always point to the students or the teachers being the problem with education and the truth is, no, the people in that category are finding their education somewhere else.
They’re actually losing interest. They’re losing interest in how it’s formatted for them. But that’s my bailiwick. That’s a whole new radio show I think.
Chris: Bob?
Doug: Speaking of which, what’s going to be our next call? We really appreciate having Lou on board tonight.
Chris: Thank you, so much, Lou.
Doug: I think we would love to have you back anytime to really get this covered. Absolutely wonderful.
What are we going to do next time? Bob? Chris?
Bob: We can do education. Education is always a good one to talk about because we’ve done quite a bit of work in that space. I think that… Chris, do you have any topics?
Chris: I’ve got…
Bob: Anything from Quora?
Chris: Yeah. I think we ran out of time. I did want to discuss a great question from Rodrigo that was posted this morning on Quora. The think, Lou, you might have thrown an answer in there already.
Lou: Yeah.
Chris: It was, “What is the job that a customs software development shop does?”
Having run a custom software development shop for about 10 years, it’s something that I’ve laid awake many nights pondering over the years. I do think that’s worth getting into. I’d like to do that on the next call.
Bob: That’s right.
Chris: The other thing that I think we should talk about is we’ve had some user feedback, our listener feedback, rather, that’s just touched on the idea of, “You guys need to take it up to a real high level and talk about consideration sets, and why do we evaluate people when they are struggling, and really why you use Jobs-To-Be-Done to take it back to basics? I think that’s a good show.
Bob: And Whitney also suggested that we do a base Jobs-To-Be-Done. Just the basic framework of walking through the forces and put some notes on it because we started the podcast out at a very high level…
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: We should maybe add one that’s also the basics. I suggest that we think about the basic one and then maybe move in to either the consideration sets side or the software side.
Doug: I would always like to open up the listeners, too. If you are listening to this right now thinking, “There’s no way that Jobs-To-Be-Done could be applied to my weird crazy industry,” or you’d just like to hear us pull things apart…
Chris: Challenge us!
Doug: Yeah, I think.
Bob: That’s awesome.
Chris: Lou, thank you so much for being here.
Bob: Yeah, thank you, Lou.
Lou: No problem, it was fun, very fun.
Doug: Okay. I’ll try to wrap it up, which I know I’m not allowed to do with The Rewired Group, neatly. And just say, “If you are interested in following any of us, it’s @bmoesta on Twitter; @chriscbs on Twitter; @ douglascrets on Twitter. And, Lou, how can people find you on Twitter?
Lou: I’m @LouFranco.
Doug: Well, that’s easy.
Lou: Yep.
Doug: All right, thanks everyone for the call. And, we’ll look for you all next week.
In this week’s episode of Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio we examine energy-related jobs and the 5 Hour Energy Drink product through the lens of Jobs-To-Be-Done.
Bob talks through how the Kano Model can be used to categorize dimensions of value once the jobs have been defined, and the pitfalls that can be avoided by doing so (spending time and money optimizing around the wrong product attributes). We also discuss how to approach the identification of jobs that have a ritualistic or emotional aspect to them.
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Next week we’ll have a special guest on the show to discuss how he has applied the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework in his role as the platform manager at a software company.
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In Case You Like Reading More than Listening
All right this is Douglas Crets. We’re back with Re-Wired Radio or as we like to call it at the Re-Wired Group, Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio, and we’re talking with Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek, two of the partners at Re-Wired Group. We’re doing another Jobs-To-Be-Done discussion about competitive sets involving things that consumers choose to get jobs done for them.
The last time we talked we were talking about LinkedIn and Quora and the competition for the Q&A for consumers. Sort of like what are those two things doing to get the consumers Q&A job done.
Now we’re talking about the difference between competitors in the energy drinks space. The ones that come to mind are Red Bull and 5-hour ENERGY® and coffee. Bob, why don’t you bring us into this little set up here? Why are these things different? And why are we trying to search for the difference here?
Bob: I think part of it gets back to how do you take a very powerful thing like 5-hour ENERGY® and walk into a space where there are very big competitors and literally disrupt it?
It’s to really articulate the different thinking that 5-hour ENERGY® from the outside and throwing the Jobs Framework on it, how it actually becomes so successful despite the fact that if you were to look at the category you’d say, “We don’t need another energy drink.” Yet it’s there.
Part of it is to realize how do you look at spaces and find those cracks were things like 5-hour ENERGY® can go in and have a very dominant position despite the fact that Red Bull and Monster and Rip It®, there’s all these different kinds of energy drinks that are out there and literally they’ve got a very solid position in the market.
Most people would say there would be no opportunity, yet 5-hour ENERGY® has come up to say, “There is a way to get to it.”
Doug: Okay. Is there a way to just… I would like to make sure that people listening maybe for the first time or even people who have come back. Can’t you just briefly, Bob, tell people why do we use Jobs-To-Be-Done? Is it specifically to find room for competition or is it room to find innovation? Help people to understand that and then we’re going to figure this energy drink thing.
Bob: The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework really is about almost taking the telescope and looking through the other end. Most of the time when you are developing products you look through your product out to the market and say, “Who needs this product? Who needs this software?”
Then you basically ladder and connect based on looking through the product lens. The Jobs-To-Be-Done lens really is irrelevant to the product form that you’re looking at and irrelevant of the set. It’s really about what are the situations where people are looking to pull products into their lives? What are they thinking about as a consideration set?
All of a sudden you realize that people don’t think in product categories. They think in solution terms. So what is the true solution set and consideration set that people are looking to hire from?
The Job notion comes that people hire products and services to do jobs for themselves irrelevant of product types and is understanding that hiring process and the important cues and considerations and then how well those products and services do the job is basically where growth comes from. They steal from other categories or steal from other things that they stop using.
Doug: Great.
Bob: So the notion… Chris, do you want to add anything?
Chris: No, I think you’ve got it spot on. Let’s dive a little bit into 5-hour ENERGY®. I don’t know if we just want to pontificate on some of the jobs, but it’s just by looking at their advertising and the way that they have wedged themselves in, it is somewhat obvious that they are attacking a couple of different segments are personas that they have identified such as we see a lot of advertizing around the “two o’clock feeling” or the “three o’clock feeling,” or, “I’ve got to get myself through this last part of the day.”
Then we also have, I think, more recently seen a more frontal attack on the coffee market…
Doug: Yep.
Chris: …where you have people who are drinking in the morning when they don’t have time for coffee but they need but the boost and it’s an easier delivery mechanism.
One thing that struck me as really interesting when, Bob, you and I started talking about this last week, was the attempt at displacing something that has a habitual or ritualistic nature to it.
Bob: Right, going after coffee, is like, “Oh my gosh, how would you think about going after coffee?”
Doug: Yeah, I love my coffee. I’m a little personally offended at it, if I’m to be honest.
Bob: Right.
Chris: Yeah offending interests works. At the point at which Bob and I talked last week about this I was actually was in my home office, had my laptop open, was going through the morning Wall Street Journal. I had coffee with cream in it and we started down this path of 5-hour ENERGY®.
I had the same sort of feeling of, “You’re going to displace this incredibly indulgent, rich experience that is warming. It’s winter here in Detroit. It’s soothing, it slowly wakes me up with this shotgun blast of sugar and syrup and all that sort of thing.
It was one of those things where, I was able to kind of understand my situational context in my moment. I won’t say it was a slow morning because no mornings are really slow but I had the time to make the coffee. Enjoy the coffee. Read the paper. Get on the phone. That sort of thing and it obviously felt very foreign to be able to think about injecting something like 5-hour ENERGY® into that.
Bob: Right and to that point, really you’re not hiring something new. You’re enjoying the moment with the coffee. So to think of trying to wage 5-hour ENERGY® into that moment isn’t there.
But if you think about moments where you wanted to have a coffee and you didn’t, so if you look back over the last week and say, “I’m running out the door. God, I’m not going to be able to get a coffee. I’ve got to run to the airport. I’ve got to do this, and this. I’m not going to be able to have my coffee until I get to the airport, or whatever.”
The fact is all of a sudden it’s what we call the “nonconsumption opportunities.” Where you wanted to have coffee but you didn’t that literally a 5-hour ENERGY® can slide in there.
Doug: Yep.
Bob: It’s those things where, again, I don’t think it’s to try to take a frontal assault to coffee, I think it’s trying to look at those nonconsumption opportunities where, “God, when did I want have a coffee and I didn’t?” Or, “When did I want to have something, and I didn’t have it with me?” It’s small enough. It can be with you. It’s almost like your “on you, with you” kind of energy, your own battery, if you will.
It’s a very interesting around going after what I would call nonconsumption. Instead of trying to say, “We need a coffee flavor version of this for the morning because customers want it this way.” The reality is that if you really go that route you’re going to kill yourself. It’s the fact of staying separate and going after those nonconsumption moments that are crucial.
Doug: Let me…
Bob: Oh, go ahead, Doug.
Doug: I just wanted to ask a question though. I can kind of understand that intuitively. That there might be a spot in my day where I don’t really know what I want to use to fill that opportunity but I know I need something like that.
Bob: Right.
Doug: So what happens from the standpoint of, “Wow, 5-hour ENERGY® drink really got successful at tinkling that opportunity for me.” Do you think that would change my feelings about coffee and then I would start reaching for something else instead of coffee more often? And change that landscape?
If that’s true what happens then to finding new opportunities? Does 5-hour ENERGY® drink sort of drift along the spectrum of those opportunities?
Bob: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s the notion of hatching a new product versus seeding a new product. I think once you get into the consideration set it’s now all of a sudden in the morning, “Do I have time for my coffee or do I go to my 5-hour ENERGY®?”
It’s the first couple of times they get people to think about it. A lot of times people are not actually taking the time to look through their consideration. You could have a Coke, there’s a lot of other things you could have. Once you seep into the consideration set it’s now all of a sudden there’s explicit choices being made.
So part of it is it’s those moments where you really want a coffee but you can’t. It’s like hitting those really high emotional opportunities where it’s like, “I’m dying for something but I don’t have time.” Once it’s there it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got that in my backpack or I’ve got that in the office.”
All of a sudden it becomes part of the, “All right, what am I going to have? Am I going to have a Red Bull?” In our office we have Red Bull. We have Coke. We have water. We have 5-hour ENERGY®. We have vitamins. We have kind of all those different kinds of things. Literally now it’s an explicit decision to say, “It’s 2:30, what do I want?”
Doug: The other thing that we can touch on, not to get too far off topic, the idea of actual behavior change is rooted in this.
What would actually be a tipping point in a consumer’s life where because there is the introduction of this new solution, can I actually change my morning routine by saying, “The 5-hour ENERGY® is not nearly as indulgent as the cup of coffee. I do enjoy the cup of coffee but, can I actually sleep in 15 minutes later because the 5-hour ENERGY® will get me going and I don’t have to brew the coffee and make the coffee and find my travel tumbler that I’m going to take in my car.” I can actually rearrange my morning and say I’m still going to show up at work energized. I can ditch the coffee. It doesn’t happen all the time but it enables that behavior change to occur.
Bob: One of the things it has actually helped me with is the notion of I don’t have coffee until you go downstairs for breakfast.
I have an elliptical upstairs where I work out. All of a sudden you start to realize, I can hop in bed. Have my 5-hour ENERGY®. And actually I find myself getting up earlier and working out. Actually the advertisers, they gave me the notion of it because usually it’s like I need my coffee to go work out. It’s like I need to wake up. It’s one of those things that’s really interesting that it’s now enabled me to do some different things.
This is a personal thing, but for the most part once it gets in that repertoire it’s very, very, you start to realize you can do a lot more things with it.
The other thing it does though it’s 5-hour ENERGY® and it’s seven o’clock, “Yeah, I don’t want one of those because I want be up at midnight.”
There are some places where I would say you have nonconsumption opportunities with it to say, “Boy, I need the energy but I don’t need it to last as long.”
Chris: Yeah.
Bob: It creates its own barrier in some cases.
Doug: That’s happened to me countless times. Most specifically just traveling and doing consulting work. You end up in a situation where you probably woke up and got on a plane in the morning, it’s now seven o’clock at night. You’re either going to dinner with your colleagues or the clients and you need to make it till 9 or 10 o’clock at night but you know after that, or possibly later. If you energize too much, you can’t fall asleep. You have a full morning of work ahead of you the next day and you’re just going to be toast because you’re going to be up all night. There is that little, once again, it’s like a data point of one.
Bob: But it’s where you reach for it. The nonconsumption is really the point that we’re trying to bring out. There’s opportunities when you go to reach for something and when you don’t. That’s an opportunity to say, “Well what else could you have had that would’ve allowed you to do it? It literally sneaks in to allow you to make progress in new ways.
This whole notion of the push of the situation and the notion of the idea and anxiety of that solution, the dynamics of that really is very powerful to look at, to understand.
The other thing I want to actually just touch on for second is some work I did a long time ago with Dr. Kano and what they call the Kano Model.
The whole notion is that people spend so time worrying about how much people like a product. If you really understand the job that’s going on here, it’s not about how much they like the flavor of the 5-hour ENERGY®, it’s actually really is part of the experience. Nobody would say they like the 5-hour ENERGY®, especially on the first couple times. It becomes a learned behavior.
The whole thing is this. It’s almost like you need to understand what they call the dysfunctional side of it. Most people talk about how much they like the flavor from 1 to 9, or whatever. The reality is, it’s “How much do you dislike to flavor?” As long as it’s something you’re not going to spit out, it actually adds to the value of the product. It takes it away from that hedonic state.
They can spend a lot of time saying, “How do we make this taste better and better and better?” People aren’t going to actually consume more of it because it tastes better. They’re going to consume more of it because it works for them in the job context.
The flavor aspect as much as people would say, “Oh, I don’t like to flavor,” it’s one of those things where as a company you would say, “Oh, we need to work on flavor. It’s the number one complaint.” My aspect is, “Don’t waste your time.” Find new situations where they can do it.
There aren’t people who aren’t drinking it because they don’t like it. They’re not drinking it because it’s not the right time or it’s not the right thing. As much as consumers say one thing, it’s about behavior and what they do. Kano actually offers a way in which to look at these attributes that consumer say and really put them in context so you don’t over invest in trying to say, “All right. We need to come up with 15 more flavors to do this.”
I can see if a big corporation was to take 5-hour ENERGY® that’s the first thing they’d do. “We need to get top two box on “liking” for the “liking” list.
Doug: Against, against, Red Bull and Monster.
Bob: Against Monster and it would be like, “Why are you wasting your time?” It’s one of those things where they will spend millions of dollars to fix it but they won’t.
Doug: Let me bring it back really quick to something because as a layman here I would have something that confuses me, but I think that I understand.
Intuitively I’m thinking about progress. I think what you’re saying, Bob, is a lot of the companies that are trying to find our position their brand in the market are trying to find progress for the product. “Let’s make it better, and better, and better.” They think of progress as, “Oh it’s just such a great product that nobody can say, ‘No’ to it.”
Bob: That’s right.
Doug: You’re saying something more about consumers need to seek progress.
I guess where I’m getting a little washed out in my head is, “What qualifies as progress? Is that singular to the individual? Or are there certain things that when we’re talking about energy drinks for example are obviously examples of progress? Can someone doing this kind of interviewing with the consumer say, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s progress.” How do you pinpoint that stuff?
Chris: Just to close the loop on the Kano Model. I think I’ll let Bob answer that question. I think that the biggest point is that you need to understand the way that consumers define the progress in the situation.
Doug: Okay.
Chris: If you’re going after the wrong dimension. If flavor is obviously one of the obvious dimensions of value of something that you’re going to consume or drink like 5-hour ENERGY®. It’s how most of the experience actually occurs outside of the packaging. It’s an easy thing to gravitate towards to say, “Hey, we can help consumers make more progress by making this taste better and then they’ll drink more.”
I think what Bob is saying is when you tease out all those different dimensions of value, portability and speed and absorption, and all that sort of thing, taste is probably going to be one of those things that is probably at the bottom of the list. It’s like one of those fundamentals that you can’t violate it and make it taste horrible because then we’re just out of the running completely.
Doug: Right.
Chris: But it can’t be at the top. I wanted to clarify that. You might’ve already been clear about that.
Bob: The ultimate thing of how do you actually find people and how they find progress is… The way we go about it is we actually actively seek what we call struggling moments. Where do people want to do something but they don’t? Or where are they doing something and they know that it’s not the best?
Where do they struggle in their life? Struggle implies that they want to do something better. Those are the things. I can’t talk to people about Tide® if they are using it all the time. Where they struggle to switch, “Yeah this isn’t getting good enough. I’m going to switch.” Or “I’m struggling. I just switched because I can save some money.”
Then they are struggling on different dimensions. It’s understanding where they, and how they struggle. At that point that’s the thing where they can’t make the decision to make the progress.
So we always talk about the switching mechanisms and understanding where people have switched recently. Again, it’s not about saying, “Tell me what you like about coffee. When do you drink coffee? Let’s talk about energy and coffee.” It’s more about, “Tell me about the last time you wanted a coffee and you drank something else.” “Tell me about the last time you wanted a coffee and you didn’t get anything.”
What you find is throughout the day, if you ask people about it. We have a process we will pull out over a week people will diary struggling moments. You realize that people struggle a lot on a lot of things. They’re not big things but there’s always these considerations of how to make the decisions and how do they actually frame it? When do they actually make the decision versus they think about the decision?
Part of it is always talking to people about that process of making the choice and delivering on it as opposed to talking to people who just say, “Yeah, I want to move but I haven’t moved yet.” Those who don’t tell me anything, I have to…
Doug: Exactly.
Bob: Struggling moments who’ve actually overcome the struggle. Embedded in that struggling moment is the value code of what they are willing to trade off in order to make the progress.
The value code is the secret part of this thing. Once you understand the value code, you realize, “I don’t need to work on flavor because it’s not about flavor. It’s about the fact that they can have it with them any time and it be with them. I’m not going to compete against coffee. I’m going to compete against the fact that they like coffee, and can’t have it.”
Doug: Great point.
Bob: That’s the opportunity!
Doug: We have a few more minutes, Chris, maybe we can lay some things out for our future call. Also maybe you can help us wrap up what we may have learned here in this discussion.
Chris: Sure. On the next episode I think we’re actually going to have a special guest on from the software world that actually is a platform manager, a platform director that manages a portfolio of software products and he’s actually applying the Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework in some pretty cool ways.
Doug: Great.
Chris: We’re definitely looking forward to having him on. Why don’t you wrap it up?
Bob: To me the thing is that a lot of times the Jobs Framework, it’s not a silver bullet. What it is, it’s a way in which to look at a market and be able to understand how to take technology and apply it to a market so you can find the chink in the armor. Find the crack that can literally allow you to grow it to something else.
As much as there’s all this, I’ll say, marketing research that will help us find white space, this is about being able to see the white space with the right thing because it’s where people struggle. To me the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework is a very powerful thing to be able to find where people are willing to switch and allow you to see the white space so it can grow into a big business like 5-hour ENERGY®.
Doug: That’s wonderful stuff. If anyone wants to follow up with this and if they want to listen to more of these podcast they are always going to be hosted at TheRewiredGroup.com. You can listen to the Quora and LinkedIn podcast we did last week. It’s already up there.
And for a full range of articles about what Jobs-To-Be-Done means, those are also housed on Rewired.com. You can follow @bmoesta on Twitter. You can also follow @chriscbs on Twitter. You can follow me at @DouglasCrets on Twitter and there’s also a Re-Wired account on Twitter at @rewiredinc.
If you have any questions and if anybody wants to suggest topics or has advice to give on things that they’d like to hear about, please shoot us an e-mail or leave a comment on the blog or get in touch with us on Twitter.
Folks, it’s been a pleasure. Chris? Bob?
Chris: Let me say one more thing. I think that the point is that I’m working with Clay. Clay is really trying to emphasize the point of we need to get the word out more about this and so that’s partially why we’re doing this on radio, but, really the interaction of people, to be honest, if you would like to come on and be a guest speaker, let us know and let us know the topic and would love to be able to talk about that.
Any topics, again, we can be as generic as we need to be but one of the challenges we have is that we have to pick things that we are not bound by confidentiality to talk about.
The more as you listen to these if you can suggest topics we’re more than happy to kind of throw our lens and our frame on this and have a conversation about it. Please, reach out to us and let us know.
We’re been trying to do one of these, sometimes two a week. We can get more and more of the practitioner base aware of what’s going on and build practitioners.
Bob: I think a couple of other things, too, and is, one, Doug, you’re never going to be able to do that nice clean wrap-up that you always wanted to do.
Doug: I know.
Bob: I think we’re always going to interject a bunch of stuff when you get done with your cool little outro.
A couple of things to add, one, I think people really should go on to Quora like we talked about last week and followed the Jobs-To-Be-Done topic. Beyond just us, there’s a ton of people contributing and asking some cool questions.
Also for iPhone and iTunes users, we are in the iTunes library as a podcast. So if you search for “Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio” you can find us there.
I had a third one but I can’t remember. I think that’s it.
Chris: Great, thanks, Doug.
Doug: Okay. No problem. Here’s your outro, “See you all later. Bye.”
Chris: Yep. See you.
Bob: Bye, Doug.