The notch had nothing to do with the story, but it’s an example of the easy thing, or the lie we that we can tell everybody else and that everybody will accept. He had to buy an Android phone to begin with. You have to get past the surface crap people tell themselves.Īll of a sudden, we start to talk through what’s wrong with the notch, and then talk about what else was going on, and I learn that he actually needed to build an Android app. I asked what made him decide to buy it, and he said, “I looked at the iPhone X, and I looked at the notch, and that notch is the thing that caused me not to buy the iPhone and to buy the Google one.” And I said, “I don’t think so.” Can you give an example?īob: I have a great story: the other day I was at dinner, and one of the gentlemen had the new Google phone. Finding underlying causalityĭes: It sounds like people will say why they buy something, but that’s not really why they bought it. That’s how we end up being able to see it and size it, and then we can decide how to actually build better experiences to actually deliver on the jobs. It’s almost like theory development, to understand how to look at big data. How do you begin to learn what these moments are?īob: I usually start with interviews to understand the difference between what they say and what they do, and to understand the things that happen to them or the things they want to happen – what we call the “causal mechanisms.” From qualitative interviews, you’re able to actually see behaviors, and you can look into the data analytics and actually see what’s happening. What can you do to help people understand when it’s time to sign up for Intercom and to make sure you satisfy them so they’ll stay?ĭes: It sounds slightly magical. JTBD exists to understand both the context a customer is in and the dominoes that have to fall for them to say, “Today’s the day I’m going to buy.” What’s the outcome that sets their expectations? When are they actually switching? It’s the notion of really focusing in on those moments through space and time. There’s something that caused them to do that: an outcome they seek or some better state they want. There’s nothing random about somebody buying an Intercom product today, for example. What is it?īob Moesta: The basic premise of Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is that people buy things to help them make progress. You’re probably best known for Jobs-to-be-Done.

What drove their decision?ĭes Traynor: Bob, welcome back to Inside Intercom. The greatest single step you can make with JTBD is to talk to somebody who recently purchased your product and somebody who recently quit.The progress your users are trying to make is the same however, they’ll use very different language to describe it.The way you package and market your product will change over time, but the jobs your product is hired to do should be timeless.For larger companies to best utilize JTBD, you have to filter buyer behavior into quantitative data sets.Either a better option comes along or something disrupts their routine, and understanding these forces not only helps you acquire users, but retain them as well. Customers don’t randomly switch products.Short on time? Here are five quick takeaways: What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation. You can subscribe on iTunes, stream on Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. If you enjoy the conversation check out more episodes. They helped us uncover the exact jobs our products were used for in Intercom’s early years, a process that resonated with us so much that we wrote a book about it.īob’s appeared on our podcast to talk JTBD previously, and I welcomed him back to talk about how we can continue getting better at unpacking customer motivations. Today, Bob is President and CEO at The Re-Wired Group, a consultancy that’s helped develop more than 3,500 products and services. In short, JTBD is a research process that helps uncover a customer’s motivation for buying your product – the “job” your product is“hired” to complete. Bob Moesta pioneered the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework in the mid 90’s, alongside Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen.

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