Jobs To Be Done Interview for Product Managers

Today we focus on the topic of customer interviews and how they can help to develop better products by providing a deep understanding of customers' needs and goals. Customer interviews are one of the best ways to find out what really matters to customers. They help you to better understand their needs and improve the quality of your products or services accordingly.

What is Jobs-to-be-Done and why are interviews important in this method?

"Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a theory and method that aims to understand customers' deeper motivations and goals. In other words, it helps you understand what "job" customers want to do when they decide to buy or use a particular product or service.

By focusing on the perspective and needs of users, the JTBD method promotes customer centricity and helps to align the business model with the requirements of digital customers.

Interviews are a central element of this method - for several reasons:

• Deeper understanding:
• Interviews help you gain a deeper, richer understanding of your customers' needs and desires. This allows you to find out what their real goals and challenges are and why they make certain decisions.
• Contextuality:
• In interviews, you get to know the specific contexts and circumstances that lead to customers wanting to do a "job". This starting point helps you to find innovative solutions that really fit the customer's needs.
• Honest insights:
• In contrast to surveys or other quantitative methods, interviews often provide more honest, unvarnished opinions. Since customers can speak freely about their experiences and feelings, you can gain valuable insights.
• Unexpected discoveries:
• Interviews regularly result in insights that you would not have expected or that you could not discover through other research methods. You may find new "jobs" that your clients want to do, or unexpected obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
• Improvement of product development:
• You can incorporate your findings from the interviews directly into product development. They will help you to set priorities, define functions and design the user experience in such a way that it really fits the "job" that your customers want to do.
• First step towards sale:
• At the end of the day, you have to go to the customer and sell the product anyway. It is therefore only logical to involve them in product development right from the start. If you have difficulty finding people for an interview, ask yourself how you want to sell your product later on. If no one wants to talk about the problem and the challenge, it will certainly be difficult to find customers for your product.

These six points make it clear that interviews are an indispensable tool of the jobs-to-be-done method. They allow you, your team or company to understand your customers on a deeper, more human level. This allows you to develop solutions that really add value.

Our structure for job-to-be-done interviews

We find that the best interviews are like a casual conversation. The interviewee and interviewer speak casually without the interview being stiff and "staged".

The aim should be to obtain unadulterated answers. The atmosphere is essential for this. You can structure the interview with a filter question, an introductory question and five aspects of the journey from the idea to the solution:

1. do you know the situation that [...situation...]?

This is a filter question. It ensures that you are talking to customers and not experts.

2. tell me about the last time you [...situation...]?

This is the actual introductory question to a long conversation. In the next point, you then go into various aspects of it.

3. talking about the journey from the initial idea to finding solutions, choosing and using the current solution and being satisfied with it

a) The first idea

Explore the initial idea of a solution from the user's perspective. This is a critical point to penetrate your customers' motivation and concerns. Find out what event or situation brought users to the point where they were looking for a solution to their problem. This trigger, whether situational or emotional, is fundamental to the purchase decision.

The following exemplary questions could be helpful here:

• Can you remember the moment when you first realized that you needed a solution to this problem? Tell me more about it...
• Can you identify the specific moment when you realized you needed a solution?
• Why did you start looking for a solution on this particular day?
• What made this day or this moment so special that you started looking for a solution?

With these questions, you can dive deeper into your client's experiences and feelings to get a full picture of their motivation and need for a solution.

b) The search for a solution

If customers actually have an important task - a job - to do, they have probably already searched for solutions in the past. If this search cannot be described, the problem, task or challenge is not relevant enough. Otherwise, by talking about this search, you can ensure that you are working on a relevant problem and gain valuable insights into how, where and with what intensity the search took place. This will help you recognize the urgency of the problem. You will also get to know the information channels of potential customers, which you can later use for your marketing and communication strategies.

Effective questions to explore this phase could be:

• How did you start your search process? Did you carry out an online search?
• What specific search terms did you use?
• What websites or resources do you remember using? Have you turned to friends or acquaintances?
• What options did your friend suggest to you? Tell me more about this conversation...
• How long did it take from when you first noticed the problem to the actual purchase?

c) Weighing up the alternatives/ evaluating the value proposition

Now focus on the features and functions that are crucial to the purchasing decision process. Evaluating the pros and cons of different options provides you with valuable information about which aspects of a product are essential and what the customer's goals are. You can then take these insights into the strengths and weaknesses (Pains & Gains) of existing solutions and visualize them in the value proposition canvas. This gives you a precise customer profile.

To understand past usage decisions, you could ask the following questions:

• Why did you choose the current solution? Which specific features were particularly important to you?
• Are there any features that your current solution is missing? Why would you like to have this feature? (This gives you insights into the actual goals of the customer).
• What other factors played a role in your decision-making process?
• What do you particularly like about your current solution?
• What are the aspects that bother you about your current solution?
• Have you used other products or services in the past?

d) Current solution

Now find out what the current solution to the task or problem is and how it works. How customers use their current solution provides you with valuable information about the pain points or weaknesses and the benefits of the existing solution. You can use this to design a better solution and thus create significant added value for your customers.

The following questions could be helpful for deeper insights in this phase:

• How do you do that today? What do you use today?
• What do you value most about your current product or service?
• Are there any aspects that bother or frustrate you?
• Why don't you show me how you use your existing solution?
• How does the solution work for you in everyday life?
• Could you show me the specific process of how you do it? (It is important to get specific information here)
• How much time or money are you investing in using the current solution?

e) Review / Reflection

In interviews, we often tend to focus on factual information and interpret the customer's descriptions as indicators of their satisfaction. However, we always consider it advisable to ask interviewees about their personal feelings and opinions towards the end of the interview. These reflective questions get the interviewees to think about the problem and the solution on a meta-level.

To delve deeper into the customer's personal perspective, you could ask these questions:

• How do you rate your current solution?
• Are you generally satisfied with...?
• It seems that you are largely satisfied with the current solution. Is there anything you would change?
• How do you feel about using this solution?
• Have you ever told anyone about this product? What did you say?
• If we were able to improve the product for you, what would you want?
• How would you feel if you lost your current product?
• Imagine if we could build you every conceivable solution. What do you want most?

From interview to value proposition: transferring your findings

You have now conducted an interview and gathered insights. To use these effectively, you should then transfer them to a value proposition canvas. This is an effective tool for analyzing and summarizing your interview data in depth. We suggest these five guiding principles:

1. the customer's situation and goal shape the segment.

While customers are often segmented with personas, we have found that this is less effective in product management than in marketing. In product management, the specific situation in which customers use a product is of central importance. The situation and the goal - the job - thus define a customer segment in product management.

2. the customer's idea provides deep insights into their goal(job).

What exactly is the job to be done? What motivates customers and why are they looking for a solution? The answers to these questions can often be found in the customer's initial idea. The question "When did you first think about changing something in your life?" often reveals the client's true needs and goals.

3. the phases of comparison and use provide important information about the customer's gains and pains.

In other words, the advantages and disadvantages of existing products and solutions give you a deep insight into the needs and challenges of customers.

4. the customer's search reveals the relevance of thetarget.

If customers are actively looking for a solution, this shows that the problem is important enough for them to justify this effort. If this is not the case, the problem is probably not urgent enough and the goal might be irrelevant.

5 Reflection enables the review and weighting of gainsand pains.

At the end of the interview, you reflect together on the current solution. What works well and what works less well? These reflections will help you to better understand and prioritize the customer's needs.

We have already mentioned the Value Proposition Canvas in several articles. You can find a detailed video here !

Conclusion

Jobs-to-be-done interviews are a simple yet effective strategy: there is no better way to understand your customers' true needs than to ask them directly. This allows you to look at customer needs and market opportunities through a new lens. This reminds us that the key to true innovation often lies in a deep, empathetic understanding of our customers.

Further resources:

For more information and detailed examples, Thomas recommends the following books:

About JTBD interviews:

• The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook

• by Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek - A short but good book that explains the structure of the JTBD interview. Key ideas in this article come from this book.

Interviews in general:

• The Mom Test

• by Rob Fitzpatrick - A short and snappy book that will help you with interview questions. An absolute must-read.

About JTBD in general:

• Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen - THE book when it comes to JTBD. Here Clayton Christensen describes Jobs to be Done.
• When Coffee and Kale Compete by Alan Klement - Very good book. Application-oriented and with many examples. Available to buy from Amazon or as a free download.
• Intercom on Jobs to be Done by Intercom(Download) - Very good free reading on the topic of Intercom.

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