Using jobs-to-be-done in qualitative interviews

This post is targeted to people that are already convinced that jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a good framework and is looking for a way to put it into practice with customer qualitative initerviews. This article does not explain what is jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) or why to use its methodology. If you want to know more about those, I recommend the excellent book Competing Against Luck, from Clayton Christensen.

This post is available in Brazilian Portuguese too.

Who should you interview?

Lots of times we want to speak with clients that did not perform action X. This doesn’t work on JTBD. You need to interview customers who have the job, in other words, people who felt their condition was not satisfactory and did something to improve it.

So, if you want to discover the jobs of customers who analyze email marketing campaigns, you have to speak with people who already sent those campaigns and tried to analyze its results.

Ah, it is also ideal that the person in question have done the desired action recently, not more than 90 days ago.

The documentary method

The main difference between normal qualitative interviews and job-based interviews is that the latter doesn’t have a interview script or questionaire. This might sound disorganized, but that’s not the case, because all jobs-to-be-done interviews have the same “script”: the events timeline.

The timeline might last seconds or years, depending on the product or service

The goal of the qualitative JTBD interview is to create the timeline, like a mini-documentary from the customer’s life from the moment he first felt the pain until the time he hires a solution and evaluates its effectiveness to fulfill the job. You may even tell this explicitly at the beginning of the interview, something like:

This is a super informal interview. I am at the beginning of a research about the language people use when they choose wine at a restaurant. There is really no right or wrong answer, I just want to understand. To achieve this, I will use a technique that looks like I will be filming a documentary of the last time you went to a restaurant and considered ordering wine. I will ask some weird questions, like how was the weather on the day or who was with you and where they were sitting. This will help me understand the context of the scene and will help you to remember more details too. Start by telling me when was the last time you went to a restaurant and considered ordering wine.

This opening has a few interesting things I would like to hightlight:

• “ I am at the beginning of a research”: saying you are at the start helps people relax, because they are not doing something very important that will change the whole company strategy.
• “about the language people use when”: chill out, I am not judging your actions, just how you describe them.
• Weird questions: good to set expectations. It is impressive how many times people remember details they just said they didn’t remember after talking about random details.
• “Start by telling me when was the last time you went to a restaurant and considered ordering wine”: as you want to make a documentary, you need to focus on an specific situation. You can focus on the first time or the last time. Never speak about “in general” or accept ansers like “every time I go to a restaurant I order wine”. If that happens, you can reply something like “and the last time you went, did you order? When was it?” Always bring the customer to an specific situation, because people rarely act as they say (and think) they act.

What the documentary must contain

The documentary should contain the first time the customer thought about the subject (the first moment she felt the pain), until the moment she evaluates the hired solution.

When you are “filming” a documentary where the job is fulfilled by a purchase, such as a new mattress or a bigger bed, this timeline is simple. When we are exploring jobs about software use, like the sending of an email marketing campaign, it is a little more complicated, because the “big hire” was to purchase the software, whereas the “small hires” happen at each use.

A good JTBD documentary will have these outputs:

Every time I finish an interview, I reflect and answer the following questions:

1. What progresses the person desires? Those are the jobs-to-be-done or how the customer wants her life to be different in a certain circumstance. And to that effect she chooses one or more products/services or none at all, leaving the job unfulfilled. Those jobs may be functional (classic jobs), emotional (how the person wants to feel) or social (how the person wants to be perceived).
2. In what circumstances the person desires the progress? When did the job arise for the first time? When it happens? What triggers the pain or the struggle? A nice example of this was a real state business focused on selling new houses. They rarely sold houses during the holidays season, but they found out that the pain of having a different house often appeared during that season. With this knowledge, they started advertising on that period.
3. Which obstacles block the progress? What are the forces that make people hesitant or unable to make the decision? What needs to be solved first? In the above example, many times the issue was what to do with the old furniture, so they started to offer moving packages and storage units.
4. Is the person using an imperfect solution? This is pure gold: if the person is hacking its way in one or more products or imperfect solutions to fulfill the job, the pain is there for you to solve. When speaking what is good or bad about the current solution, you get inputs for the next item:
5. What are the “job specs” or how the person evaluates the “quality” of the solution for the job? Which tradeoffs she is willing to make? Those are the criteria the customer uses to consider the job was totally fulfilled. Here it is good to frame it with phrase with a direction (increase/reduce) and a metric. I.e.: reduce the time I take to analyze an email marketing A/B test.
6. If this was my only data point, what would I do? Reflecting upon the 5 previous items, if this was my only input, which decisions would I make?

Incorrect jobs examples

• Analyze email campaigns to discover the best day and time to send a campaign. The job is not to analyse (because the customer’s goal is not to analyse). Analysing is just the way the customer found to fulfill the actual job of improving email open and click rates. The correct job could be something like “Send email campaigns at the best day and time to increase open and clicks from my leads”. This might look a small distinction, but it makes a huge different: the incorrect version would lead you to build a kick-ass email analysis feature, while the correct job could lead you to build a feature that used machine learning to send the campaign at the day and time the lead would most likely open and click.
• Create a Spotify playlist. It is incorrect for two reasons: because it is not focused on the goal (creating a playlist is the solution hired for a job, not the job itself) and because it already defines the solution (Spotify). Jobs need to be solution agnostic. The job could be something like “create a appropriate mood for a particular situation (like focused work, hanging out with friends, workout…)”

Summarizing several interviews

A good way to sum up all the different interviews is to group the jobs and job specs by frequency. This will help you understand what are the most important ones:

1. Job XYZ (6x)

• Job spec 1 (5x)
• Job spec 2 (4x)

2. Job ASD (5x)

• Job spec 3 (5x)

…

Final words

I hope this article helps Jobs Theory enthusiasts to put into practice the jobs-to-be-done concepts and that it leads to great product and service insights. If you have questions or comments, just ask. If you liked, give me a few claps. :)

PS: Example of a JTBD interview:

PS2: Want to know more? There is another nice post about JTBD interviews by Jason Evanish. Also this other post about job based churn interviews.

PS3: Speak Portuguese? So below I explain about my JTBD course:

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Aqui estão alguns dos reviews do curso Jobs-to-be-Done na prática: