Getting Started with Jobs to be Done
Learning About Jobs to be Done Interviews
This is a quick, effective and fun way to get experience with the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) interview — a key component of the JTBD theory popularized by Clay Christensen and Bob Moesta.
If you want, check out this blog post first for a list of resources introducing the Jobs to be Done framework.
All you need is a few friends and a little time.
- Identify a group of three participants, one of whom will be interviewed by the other two.
- Ask everyone to watch a Jobs to be Done overview video before you meet. One suggestion is “Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek — Uncovering the Jobs to Be Done,” from the Business of Software conference.
- Ask the interviewee to select a purchase they have made fulfilling these criteria: a purchase of a single item over $100 in the past 90 days.
- Get together remotely or in person if you can do that safely.
- Discuss the overview video.
- Then, two members of the group interview the third. Allot 30 minutes, enough time to give everyone a feel for the experience. But go longer if you would like. JTBD interviews have a structure but not a script. Treat the interview as a conversation. The interviewers want to uncover the story of how the interviewee experienced a struggle in their life and set out on a path that led them to make (or fail to make) the progress they desired with the help of the product they purchased. Be curious. Ask the interviewee to clarify vague statements. Get into the details, and like a good detective, piece together how one event led to another. These are examples of questions interviewers might ask in the course of a conversation (again, not a script to be followed):
- When did you initially notice [the product]?
- What was going on with you? Were you using a different product then? How was that going?
- Was that the first time you thought about [your underlying struggles]? When was that if not?
- How did you figure out what to do next? After that?
- Later, what caused you to say, “Today is the day I am going to buy [the product]?”
- What alternatives (e.g., a work-around) did you consider along the way? What other product(s)?
- What will change in your life now that you have bought [the product]?
- Are you already using the new product? How is that going so far?
After you complete the interview, discuss it. What situation was the interviewee in when they noticed the product? What were they struggling with? How did they decide to purchase the product? What progress were they trying to make when they purchased the product? What competed with that product to help them make the progress they desired in their life?
Can you tell a colorful, complete, end-to-end story? What did you learn that was surprising?!
A big idea behind this interview approach is that a story-based interview focused on a specific past experience is going to provide you with more valid and reliable data than, for example, asking people what they want or might do. We human beings are not good at reliably drawing conclusions about our behavior without context. We are not good at predicting our future behavior either. We are prone, when asked, to sharing our ideal behavior. Or we might just guess.
We need to understand people’s actual behavior to build successful new products and services. By taking an ethnographic, story-based approach about something specific in the past, we can help people to surface what really happened — when events occurred, where they were, what they did, and why.
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Photo by Tim Gouw from Pexels. This post is inspired by one of the exercises in the Disruptive Strategy course offered by Harvard Business School Online.
Updated October 22, 2022
