Jobs to be Done: from Doubter to Believer by Sian Townsend at Front 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah

thanks for your patience there so let's talk about a technique called jobs to be done so to years ago I took a risk I left a job that I really loved as I use researcher at Google and I decided I would join a startup that very few people had heard of called Endicott and my new role was director of research and the first thing that founders wanted me to do was to get on a plane and fly to Detroit kind of an unlikely way to start the new job and the goal was to go work with these guys who are called the rewired group they're actually based in Grosse Pointe just outside of Detroit and they've been some of the pioneers around this technique jobs to be done which is really something that came from marketing and is now moving into the software design space and the founders of intercom had gotten very interested in this technique and they wanted me to go and figure out how to use jobs to be done with the rewired group to sort this nasty tangle of tools that online businesses use and create something much simpler and that simple single place would be intercom I'll tell you more about that in a moment but I have to say that my first reactions to this whole jobs to be done business were pretty skeptical it just seemed like snake oil honestly it seemed like something that had come from marketing and in all honesty maybe it didn't have that much substance or rigor to it and plus I'm British so I'm incredibly skeptical of everything and so you can imagine that my mindset the beginning this project was you know pretty cautious but I had also been living in California for four years at this point so some new parts of me was becoming more of an optimist much more open-minded is some like yeah let's try this jobs to be done thing maybe there's something interesting in it so this is the story today of how we at intercom have used this technique jobs to be done to turn the kind of tangled tools that online businesses and web apps use to run their businesses and talk to their customers so today that includes these kind of horrible marketing automation tools it includes help desks live chat and and we've used jobs to be done to bring great focus to our company and we've managed to create this very simple single place where people can do that now and in the course of using jobs to be done we've actually raised a huge amount of money over the last two years so I feel like we must have been doing something right it certainly feels like it's helped us so I'm really hoping that this technique and can help everyone here as well so first of all brief history of what the technique is and show of hands anybody that has actually it is familiar with jobs to be done the moment okay great so there's some people but definitely a minority so jobs to be done essentially helps you understand the real jobs that customers are using your product for not the jobs that you perceive or want them to use your product for and it emerged in the 90s as a technique that aimed to help look at cut customer motivations rather than customer attributes like a demographic information like people's age and shoe size and this quote was actually one of the inspirations for the original founder of the technique tony'll wick so he said that our Theodore Levitt quote so people don't want a quarter-inch drill they want a quarter-inch hole so it's really about trying to understand the the the core goal that someone has and why they're motivated to buy a product to address that that goal so the original pioneer in kind of early 90s was this guy Anthony all work he now runs a consultancy that specializes in jobs to be done based in San Francisco and over the years he became connected with Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School and in 2002 Tony wrote this article in the Harvard Business Review which was kind of one of the main things that really kicked off the technique and then over the years a guy called Bob Moe Esther started a group called the rewired group the consultancy that we worked with and he's now with a large team running consultancy and helping companies like intercom figure out how to use jobs to be done and the reason I'm pointing this out is that this is not some very rigid kind of technique the people here all have slightly different takes on the technique and I think that's worth pointing out because if you go and read up on this later you might find that say Tony is saying slightly different things to Bob and that's why so so I'm going to play a quick video because this more than anything else really kind of encapsulate what on earth is jobs to be done technique is so I wanted just to tell you a story about a project we did for one of the big fast-food restaurants they were trying to Goose up the sales of their milkshakes they had just studied this problem up the Gazoo they brought in customers who fit the profile of the quintessential milkshake consumer and they'd give them samples and ask could you tell us how we can improve our milkshake so you'd buy more of them do you want it chocolatey or cheaper chunky or chewy or make it very clear feedback they would then improve the milkshake on those dimensions and it had no impact on sales or profits whatsoever so one of our colleagues went in with a different question on his mind and that was I wonder what job arises in people's lives that caused them to come to this restaurant to hire a milkshake so we stood in a restaurant for 18 hours one day and just took very careful data what time did they buy these milkshakes what were they wearing were they alone did they buy other food with it did they eat it in the restaurant or drive off with it it turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 o'clock in the morning the people who bought them were always alone it was the only thing they bought and they all got in the car and drove off with it so to figure out what job they were trying to hire it to do we came back the next day and stood outside the restaurant so we could confront these folks as they left milkshake in hand and in language that they could understand we essentially asked excuse me please but I got to sort this puzzle out what job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake and they'd struggle to answer so we didn't help them by asking other questions like well think about the last time you were in the same situation needing to get the same job done but you didn't come here to hire a milkshake what did you hire and then as we put all of their answers together it became clear that they all had the same job to do in the morning and that is they had a long and boring drive to work and they just needed something to do while they drove to keep the commute interesting one hand had to be on the wheel but somebody had given him another hand and there wasn't anything in it and they just needed something to do while they drove they weren't hungry yet but they knew they'd be hungry by 10 o'clock so they also wanted something that would just pull down there and stay for their morning good question what am I hire when I do this job you know I've never framed the question that way before but last Friday I heard a banana to do the job take my word for it never hire bananas they're gone in three minutes you're hungry by 7:30 if you promise not to tell my wife I'd probably hire donuts twice a week but they don't do it well either they're gone fast they crumb all over my clothes they get my fingers gooey sometimes I hire bagels but as you know there so dry and tasteless then I have to steer the car with my knees while I'm putting Jam on them and then if the phone rings we got that crisis I remember I hired a Snickers bar once but ah I felt so guilty I've never hired Snickers again let me tell you when I come here and hire this milkshake it is so viscous that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up that thin little straw who cares what the ingredients are I don't all I know is I'm full all morning and it fits right here in my cup holder well it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors which in the customers minds are not burger king milkshakes but it's bananas Donuts bagels Snickers bars coffee and so on but I hope you can see how if you understand the job how to improve the product becomes just obvious great so I think that just summarizes the whole technique better than anything else so I'm glad you were able to see that video and just to show you how the technique also inspired some other products out of the same batch of research they also found that many of the people that were coming in and buying milkshakes were doing so as a they were buying a special treat for small kids but because they understood that that was also a job they were able to design a second different type of milkshake that was smaller and thinner and for the kids because if they just redesigned all the milkshakes to be like never-ending ly kind of goopy and thick then the parents would have been sitting around for ages waiting for their kids to finish their milkshakes so so I hope that helps you understand how understanding the core job can really help you and design better products so one of the things that's happened when I've talked about jobs to be done before is that people always ask me about personas and are these techniques even compatible with personas what do I think of as owners so I just want to say a few words on that so I'm sure you've all used personas or are familiar with them as PMS and designers and you know that very often they are going to contain some demographic information and in fact roohorse loads sorry and you're even encouraged in many of these techniques to include informations like a name a real name like Greg or Madeline not a made-up name and to use people's age personal info and so forth and and this has kind of led over time since you know the very beginning of personas to this sort of situation where there's been a love-hate relationship for sure and where now it seems in this period where people do like to hate on personas and I think actually for good reason in some cases I can see that they can be incredibly good tools at building empathy when you have a team that really it's so disconnected from their users that they're designing for but in terms of a tool that helps you actually design for the specific needs of a user I'm not so social so let's take an example so let's talk about why Peter borders Snickers bar so if you're going to use personas you you wouldn't tend to use them alone you'd use them with user stories and the user story would of course be constructed like this so let's try this out as a 35 year old man called Peter I want to eat something tasty when I'm hungry so that I don't feel hungry anymore and too many people you know that just feels like way too many assumptions especially in those first two components and I actually feel like the first part is irrelevant like the person that doesn't bring anything in fact it seems kind of distracting now one of the things that we've been working on an intercom is to develop this idea of job stories and this is the format that we've been using and we've found really effective so we construct it like this when I want to so I can so you've got situation motivation and expected outcome and you'll notice that the person is irrelevant it does not matter who the person is all that matters is that we really understand what they're trying to do and what the motivation is so if you then apply that a job story to the same person you could say when I've only got two minutes to stave off hunger between meetings I want to grab something that will be quick easy to eat and boost my blood sugar fast so that so I can stave off hunger until dinner time now that's quite an elaborate example but you start to get the picture of how even just reframing things in this way helps you get right to the crux of why Peter actually hired the Snickers bar you know he was starving and he only had a few minutes and you know as per the milkshake story if you've only got a few minutes and you know you can't eat something messy or hot then that also narrows down your options and really explains his motivations so Clayton Christensen has said that personas are collection of attributes and they don't explain causality which i think is spot-on and this quote has been very helpful for me as I've tried to figure out how to apply jobs to be done so Alan Clement is that also someone in our industry who's been trying out jobs to be done he's been writing about this on our blog inside intercom and he said I like to think of actors instead of personas each actor can have different roles and this was really helpful to us because a lot of our customers are people at startups that literally wear different hats from moment to moment you know one moment they're the CEO the next minute they're doing support for their customers the next minute they're doing marketing and that's really helped us all get our heads around and like the role of the person in all of this so okay so let's let's play out a simple example bring this to life so let's say we wanted to design a better calendar app now typically in research we'd probably start by looking at how is it being used today so it could go out we could collect all these examples of calendar apps and we probably start with these questions so we'd be looking to understand well what's the problem today and how are people currently using these tools and then it's very easy from there as PMS designers researchers to start just moving towards solutions and thinking about can we solve this by design and by software and then before you know it you're already thinking about whether people will switch to your new calendar app which is so much better than everybody else's but what if you actually take a step back and you really think about what the job is here like why are people hiring these calendar apps like maybe the real job is help me protect my time or maybe it's let me measure how I spend my time or make sure I never forget important meetings and when you start to think about the real job that someone is trying to do then you can start to really seriously think about innovating on a problem instead of just slightly moving the needle on where you already are with the with a product like the calendar app so what I want to do now is take you through two examples of how we've used this intercom and the first is really simple because you know we've been using this technique in kind of baby steps because you know we were there was a lot of skepticism to start with and we've kind of built up confidence so this is an example of like how you can just use the lens of jobs to be done to look at how your existing products are being used and then we'll talk about how you can actually design a new feature from scratch using the technique so we had this feature which is a map feature and intercom so I can tell you that these online businesses using to come to feed in their customer data and then they can kind of get to know their customers by using this thing called the the user list on the slide here so you can filter using the user list you can find out how many customers do we have in South America right now and then you can produce this nice map to show like to visualize where they are and the thing is is this map was getting a really surprising amount of usage and we would think it's a bit strange because actually the user list would give you a more precise figure like why would you go create a map just to figure out then you'd have to go and count up all the red dots of you know how many people there are in a certain area so no matter what we tried to think the use case was we just couldn't quite figure out why the map was proving more popular than searching on the list and then when we looked around at how the map was actually being used in the industry we realized that people were using this map at conferences to try and like impress people they were using it in their booths to say like hey look you know we're a small company but look we've got customers in 57 countries and they were using it a lot on Twitter and they were using it to impress investors at pitches so when I okay people actually aren't buying what we thought we were selling here is not actually a map at all it's a showpiece that's its function and this was key because once we understood that it was a showpiece and it didn't have to be the world's most amazing map then we knew how to make it better and if we thought that we were trying to design a better map we would have been you know rat holing on making the country borders like much more precise maybe we'll get some mountains in there and but once we understood that it was a showpiece then we could figure out well let's just hide all the sensitive data so nobody has any nasty surprises when they share this on Twitter and let's make it just really simple and beautiful and let's make it super easy to share because we could see that customers wanted to do that so this is what we came up with really stripped down much simpler all the sensitive data is hidden and really easy to share in the bottom and this feature just went off like people just used it even more so and that was a really kind of simple example but very productive for us so second case study is about how we used the technique to build something from scratch so we collect feature requests from all our customers like on a rolling basis and we have a process for acting on those and first let me just give you a bit of context of what this this product actually is so this is a shared team inbox so imagine you're working in a start-up of 20 people 50 people and you want to receive messages from your customers and then you want to reply to their requests or helping them with their issues it all comes in here on the left hand side and then the team can have a conversation there in the middle and the number one feature request by far some time ago was this thing called inbox stats people just kept asking us for stat stat stats on the inbox so it was on our roadmap but honestly we had no idea what it actually was we didn't know what we were going to build we just knew that it was really important so we thought ah okay we have this technique jobs to be done let's see if it can actually help us figure out what to build so we started talking to customers and they start telling us things about how they want to see some information about average response time for people in the in bar knocks I need counts of how many conversations my team has had and we started to notice a pattern that a lot of the requests were coming from people who were running small teams of support staff so over time as we were interviewed more of these customers using this technique we were able to boil these down to job stories and suddenly these really like four very clear stories came out so people wanted to understand how big is our support workload and you can see this expressed as a job story here so the goal really was they wanted to understand well I want to understand the workload now so I know how many people to hire and when to start hiring it was a really important thing for the for these support managers the second job story when are we busiest when I'm managing the support team I want to know the time of day Dave week that we received the highest volume of support requests so I can schedule my team to respond during our busiest times how good or bad are we responding to customers when I'm managing the support team I want to know how long our customers are waiting for a response on average so I can set targets to improve on and when is my who on my team is busiest so by boiling these down to job stories we suddenly had this clear picture of like how we were actually going to build this mysterious inbox stats feature and the way that we kick off every project is with something that we call in intermission and we start every intermission with a clear problem statement and now we've done this research we actually understood what our problem statement was is that our current product doesn't surface quantifiable information and inbox activity and people who manage support teams have no way of seeing how many conversations they're having with their users or how busy their team are so that's what we focused on in the project but of course getting from that original intermission through to the actual features you know kind of also a an interesting process it's not smooth so this is how we started out based on the job stories we start sketching out ideas of how we might address those needs and then we probably skipped a little bit too quickly towards kind of mocking things are making things look good but then this was the critical thing we did we then went to those marks and we overlaid the actual questions the job stories on them to check whether these marks would actually answer the questions that people really needed to answer so this was key and once we've done that we decided okay we've got customers of really different sizes some are very small some are very large some have very erratic patterns in their support behavior so let's kick the tires with some real data so that's what we did we started poking around with them real data just seeing like is this going to work is this going to answer the question and slowly things started to come together and eventually through a series of more design reviews where we're constantly reviewing against these job stories we get to the final product so we end up with this really simple insights page for support managers they can visualize their workload they can view the response times and then they can track performance of the individual team members so it answers all their top priority questions and there's no superfluous data so hopefully by this point you're thinking okay maybe this is like an interesting technique maybe I want to try it out myself so this is a simple six step guide to using jobs to be done that Allen Clement I mentioned earlier and shared in a blog post you can find all this on the inside in saqqaq blog so he recommends step 1 start with the high level job and then you want to so that might be the inbox stats for example and like tell me what's up in the inbox and then the sub that identify smaller jobs so then you start to go into identifying the job stories for these inbox stats that we just ran through then you want to observe how people are actually solving their problems today and then you want to move on to the interview and the interview is really key and there's a particular type of way that you should structure the interview which I'll mention in a moment and it's these interviews that help you come up with the job stories and finally you can move towards a solution so since the interviews are so key I wanted to give you a few tips on what we've learnt over the last two years now of conducting these interviews ourselves so we conduct a lot of different research and especially to understand people's purchasing decisions so like why they hired intercom to do a certain job and so we'll be looking at these kinds of questions and what we're really trying to do here is to understand people's purchasing decisions so we're looking for the motivation what why did they buy the product why do they buy intercom for support versus a different product situations understanding why customers have switched from a different product is really insightful and then we want to understand their anxieties so what they're struggling with today and one of the techniques that the rewired group and advocate is to think of the interview with the customer in the form of a timeline and so what you're looking for is to understand chronologically what was their decision-making process and the really key thing here is to understand this thing called the first thought so that is often like that moment when you just think oh I just can't take this thing anymore like it's just not cutting it I need to find some other solution the second a really useful thing that the rewired group advocate for psa's of progress model so this helps you understand all the things that are pushing someone away from that current solution they're using and then all the things that are keeping them in inertia with your product and it's also useful to point out at this point that most of the writing on this topic because this technique came from marketing it focuses on physical products so you get all these stories around milk shapes like what's pushing someone away from the milkshake or keeping them in the current milkshake or the other one is mattresses and that was kind of really really hard for us to start with because kind of alienating inexpert well we're working on software you know how does this apply to software and so I'll talk about that in a moment and the rewired group also have this really useful note-taking tee sheet you can download that from their site at jobs to be done or they have some awesome podcasts and this has been very helpful to us we've kind of created our own version now over time and the goal of these interviews like talking to people about their whole decision making process and the different forces that are pushing them towards something new and then the things that are keeping them with the existing solution will enable you to get to this point where you can start to define your job stories so in these interviews the really important thing as I mentioned is to try and capture this first thought the moment when someone decided that this just isn't cutting it anymore and the first thought is really hard to extract for these software products we found because it's so much easier you know when you let's use a mattress example if you think these are high ticket items you don't buy them that frequently you also have more of an emotional connection you've actually got a physical connection with a mattress you know if it's uncomfortable then you know about it and you're going to have a lot to say and and you might even be able to remember this story of like why you bought that product and maybe the discussion you had with your spouse about you know how much you wanted to spend why you wanted to buy this but you can't really do that with software because companies buy new software all the time and turns out you know they're not really that emotionally attached to it especially if someone's using software that they didn't pay for themselves and there are all sorts of other dimensions to the software purchase that makes it much more complex so sometimes the first thought that drives buying new software in a company is related to kind of budget maybe there's a change in management and then the first thoughts also complicated by the fact that companies use multiple tools sometimes overlapping tools to do the same job and and so we found that these these techniques that were being advocated to understand say mattress purchases we're just not cutting it when it came to software because it's not like you know you can sort of say you know was it raining on the day that you signed up for that calendar app you know that's not going to really get people emotional in the way that it might with these physical purchases so what we did is just tweak the technique somewhat for software and what we've done is focus on the functional aspects of a company not just on these emotional triggers and so here's some examples of the way that you could rework those questions so you can ask questions about what it was like working for in the department back then is you're just looking to jog someone's memory of like why things had gotten so bad at that time in the team that they decided that they needed to get a new solution you can ask about what tools they were using beforehand and you really want to understand who made the decision to switch that's really key so those are some of the ways that we've like tweaked the interview technique second challenge was the technique advocates that you talk to the decision maker and we found that that's can be really really hard it's hard to just find out who that person is and we kept hearing this like I wasn't at the company when it happened so that was kind of frustrating and that's rather like you know in the mattress example that's rather like you talking to you know you want to talk to the parent who bought the mattress it is interesting to talk to the kid because the kid sleeps on the mattress they have a different perspective but ideally you want to talk to to all of them so this is how we dealt with that so we talk about well what year did the company move to that tool and who was it who decided to make that move we try and understand what the dynamics were within the company that caused them to move and then we find out if they're still at the company now in which case we try and interview them later as well so that was our other insight really is that for purchasing decisions the full picture is key and trying to talk to the many people that have been involved in the choice to switch to a new product is really important so quick recap so from what we've learned trying out the interview technique ourselves for software purchasing decisions for software and multi-dimensional and they're often really complex and you can use the functional aspects of the business along with emotional triggers ensure you talk to the main decision-maker and do kind of laddering in your interviews to try and get to that main decision-maker and then ask the right questions early on in the interview to reveal the multiple decisions that led up to that purchase so final word on what we've learnt about applying this to marketing because as we've started to use this for research and product and design we've also got the whole marketing team using jobs to be done but the whole company is now organized around these four jobs that we identify but one insight we've had is that in the process of turning this tangle into something simple and boiling things down into these four jobs which are now the four products that we sell we found that you can distill everything to one word like this but that's not necessarily going to resonate with your customers like one word it they may be doing the support job but just calling your product support isn't enough to necessarily connect with someone who's looking for a new support product ironically so so the really critical thing is you have to diverge out with the marketing and make sure that you're actually explaining that support helps customers inside your web or mobile app and by email for example so so that's why we spend a lot of time on our marketing kind of really explaining the jobs the things that you can do with each product so those are some of the insights that we've had from using this technique and I hope that's kind of gotten you interested and it's something that you want to go try out you can check out a free book that we just published last week and your jobs to be done on our blog and I just wanted to say thank you to a lot of people at intercom who contributed to this talk so Dez poor Michelle and Emma and I don't think that's it thank you very much

Channel: Front

Views: 24,696

Rating: 4.9204545 out of 5

Keywords: ux, product management, product design

Id: VNTW_9mFM7k

Length: 36min 46sec (2206 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2016