Jobs To Be Done Interview

What Causes People To Adopt And Abandon Products

We reduce it down to this idea of progress. People want to make a change and thats what causes them to start buying a new product, Alan explains.

So, how can you apply the theory of Jobs-To-Be-Done to your own product development? According to Alan Klement, it begins by asking yourself a few questions.

Going beyond yourself, he also recommends sending out a questionnaire to your product team, sales team and decision-makers in your company to see if everyone is aligned with your perspective and vision for the new product.

Amex Job Interview Questions

• How do you handle your relationship with clients?
• What can you tell me about your past projects and their challenges?
• When faced with challenges on a project, how do you respond?
• Why did you select this model or methodology over a different one on your project?
• What are the latest trends in our industry and what new approaches would you like to take and why?
• How do you handle collaboration and conflict with stakeholders?
• How do you prioritize your work with multiple deadlines?
• How do you approach providing and receiving feedback?

To add perspective on why hiring managers and others involved in the process ask these questions, Vlad Katsva, director of analytics and Cuis hiring manager, and Mahesh Bharariya, vice president of digital products and CX analytics, shared their insights.

Reduce Assumptions And Increase Confidence

When product teams prioritize their work, they use Hotjar to gather actionable feedback to validate their assumptions and base their prioritization decisions on actual evidence.

You may assume that the layout of certain pages impacts how frequently people use a certain feature, or causes people to leave your product prematurely. When you can validate these assumptions and quantify the impact of these issues, you can be more confident in your prioritization decisions.

For example, Bannersnack used Hotjar Session Recordings to confirm that users often missed their timeline feature. They used this information to make the feature more visible and noticed a 12% increase in product conversion.

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A Treatment For Interview Stage Fright

Jobs interviews can take anywhere between 15 min to an hour. It all depends on factors such as your skill as an interviewer, the amount of emotion involved in the purchase and the type of person youre interviewing.

You cant control the emotion of the purchase or the disposition of the person youre interviewing, but you can improve your interviewing skills.

To help grow your skills, here are a few questions and key moments to focus on:

Elements Of The Jtbd Framework To Ignore

There are three elements in the JTBD framework that are less effective for uncovering copy insights:

1. Notetaking. JTBD interviewers take unique notes. They draw a customer journey map and note each statement in the corresponding slot of the customers journey. They do this during the interview to help direct their line of questioning.

The challenge with notetaking is that it can easily become a distraction. For marketers hoping to improve copy , we should focus on the conversation and take only margin notes.

Remember: Were digging for exact customer language. Yes, information about the journey can be useful, but the goal is the rich VoC language that will resonate in the prospects head.

Theres no way we can note exact language and focus on the conversation. Instead, record the interview , get it transcribed, and then organize the notes, post call.

2. Two-on-one interviews. The JTBD framework also suggests interviewing in pairs, for two reasons:

Silence is often a measure of success it means thinking, searching for the answer. Hes creating new neural pathways, and in doing so literally increasing his potential and capacity.

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Gather Insights And Implement Them

Once youre done with the interviews and youve taken out the key quotes from the transcripts youll start coding your data to classify your findings.

When are you done with interviews? When you stop getting new data from new interviewees. If you get 2-3 interviews where 80% of the information is stuff youve already heard, chances are you dont need any more. Still, you dont want to have fewer than 15-ish calls. And remember the more concrete your interview criteria are, the less interviews youll need to conduct.

Code your interview insights

Now its time for some old-fashioned analysis. You want to filter out each category of quotes , read through, and try to group similar concepts under different key phrases. Heres how that looks:

Then youll take out all the coded key phrases and see how often each one is mentioned:

Remember, this is qualitative research. And as such youre not just crunching the numbers. They are here to give you a relative understanding of the things that matter to most of your customers as opposed to the ones that were mentioned just by one or two people.

Were almost at the end of the line, folks! Weve seen the data and gained valuable insights about our customers jobs and the forces at play when choosing a solution to hire.

Now its time to present all that information to your teammates. You can organize a presentation where you focus on a couple of different things:

Record Document & Analyze All Your Jtbd Interviews

Lets do some back-of-the-napkin math for a second. Youre talking to 10 current and 10 past customers for about 30 minutes each. Thats about 10 hours of conversation, and humans speak about 125 words per minute. If youre only speaking about 20% of the time, then youll be gathering about 60,000 words during your JTBD research!

Now, youll hear a lot of the same themes repeating, so its not as if youre writing a book, Hemingway. But there is a decent amount of information to manage here, so youll need a plan.

Whenever I do JTBD research for a sales team, I record the interviews using Skype and Ecam Recorder, I take notes during the call, and then I review the interview and my notes afterward. I repeat this process for every interview.

Review your notes a few times and themes will emerge. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine, dearest human.

As you go along, categorize your notes into the biggest themes youre hearing. These themes should include verbatim quotes youve gathered from your customers .

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Essential Elements Of The Jtbd Interview Framework

Five elements of the JTBD framework fit perfectly into a customer interview thats focused on uncovering qualitative insights to improve copy and increase conversions:

1. Be human. Use natural languagethis is a conversation. Youre uncovering a story, not an academic thesis. Youre also looking to uncover sensitive information. Your interviewee needs to feel comfortable being vulnerable.

2. Be curious. Curiosity encourages authenticity and storytelling. Curiosity is what allows for discovery. NYU Professor Carol Gilliagan explains:

Students always ask me: So when I do the interview, what should I ask? And I say: Thats the wrong question. I always say: You have to have a question that you are really interested in. Not make it up, but find out what you are really interested in.

3. Be biased. When you agree with your customer, when you egg her on, you make her comfortable. You allow her to trust you and open up to you. Be careful not to ask leading questions, but dont be a completely impartial, detached interviewer.

4. Use context reinstatement. Originally used by detectives to allow witnesses to better remember crime scenes, context reinstatement is a Cognitive Interviewing method that takes the interviewee back to a moment in time.

Questions surrounding the senses of the momentwhat was the weather like, what you were wearing, who were you withallow the interviewee to re-experience the moment and give a more accurate account.

What Are The Things You Need To Do Before Doing The Task In Our Product

Customers will often have a list of things they need to do before tackling something within your product. For example, if you sell email marketing software, theyll need to collect the addresses of their recipients before creating a campaign in your product.

This question is a great practice for creating a job map – practically, a list of steps someone needs to take before they actually get to the job. This helps you define what happens prior to using the product and what triggers the need for a solution.

Defining these steps will help you better understand the motivation that happens behind the very need for solving a job rather than using your specific product.

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Highlights Of The Episode Include Discussing:

• Introducing JTBD: What is Jobs to be done?
• Setting the stage with the product Ryan recently bought
• – When did you first start thinking it was time for a new mattress?
• Who was involved in the purchasing decision?
• How did budget play a role here?
• Where did you go to get ratings and reviews?
• Zooming out: Black Friday & Forcing Functions
• The purchase moment
• How did this purchase differ from other things you buy?
• Did you visit any third party locations when you were in the process?
• Digging into Ryans experience using what he purchased
• Advice for marketers applying JTBD
• Ryans thoughts on this experiment

A Framework Of Questions For Jobs To Be Done Interviews

Enabling Digital Business Transformation at Scale

If youre antsy, heres a direct link to the framework

A lot of folks seem to be interested in how to interview people for Jobs-to-be-Done projects. It doesnt matter if they are UX projects, marketing projects, or market strategy projects, there has to be a distinct purpose behind such an interview. Some market researchers look for ah ha! moments that make it clear what needs to be done. In JTBD, however, we are trying to build a stable model, through interviews, that describes a market, and reflects how that market defines value.

Once weve built such a model around the core jobs people are trying to get done, we can use it to inform the enterprise from end-to-end so they can play their roles more effectively than their competitors. But thats for another day.

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How Do We Define The Market

1. Market = a group of people + the core functional job they are trying to get done.

For example, music enthusiasts who are trying to listen to music constitute a market. Customers are loyal to the job-to-be-done, not to the solutions they use, which means they will always look into listening to music no matter the medium they use, LP, cassette, CD, app etc.

2. Map the market as a process by a) understand the characteristics of a job by creating a job map.

• It identifies where the job begins and where the job ends, revealing gaps in current solutions.
• It identifies the optimal logical flow for processes enabling it. Many processes become inefficient and iterative when an input needed early in the process is not available until later in the process. This optimal flow can often be revealing all by itself.
• It defines the competitive landscape. Understanding the complete job often reveals non-traditional competitors.
• It establishes a long-term roadmap for product/portfolio development. It paves the way to getting the entire job done on a single platform .
• It guides the capture of desired outcome statements associated with the core functional job. This is why it is created before we capture them.

Making Sense Of It All

I always record and transcribe each interview so I can relax and focus on the conversation instead of hurriedly scribbling notes during the session. I use:

• Zoom to host and record the meetings. It usually only takes a few minutes for the recording to convert readily for me to download the audio.
• Dovetail to transcribe my calls and organise my notes. Dovetail has been the best find and the tool Ill focus on.

Dovetail lets me easily spot patterns from the data. I simply read through each transcript, highlight sections, and tag them. You can see a list of all the tags from every transcript, and the number of times theyve been used.

I organise tags into different categories: competitors, other marketing tools, product feedback, situational triggers, and a bunch of other useful stuff. You really start to spot trends across each interview, and the quantitative data means were less likely to fall prey to primacy or recency biases.

Storing interviews in a central place means everyone has access and this has been helpful throughout the business in marketing, sales, customer success, support, design, and engineering, as well as being handy for bringing new hires up to speed.

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Prepare A Jobs To Be Done Interview Script

OK, you have a few interview sessions booked. But what will you talk about? Its time to prepare your script.

Set the scene

Talking to a stranger can be weird. So take a few minutes at the start of the interview to let them know there are no right or wrong answers and you just want to hear what they think.

This is also the moment where you should ask if they have a hard stop and if they are OK with being recorded. So far Ive never had anyone say they dont want to be recorded.

Drafting this opening will help you not think about what to say and focus on seeming friendly and inviting.

Prepare your Jobs to be Done interview questions

In order to get a full picture, make sure your script covers all the steps in the customer journey:

• the First Thought
• the event that gets them to the Actively Looking phase
• their criteria when building and evaluating solutions
• the moment of purchase
• the process of consumption.

I usually start the interview by focusing on the purchase moment. This is a very specific point in time and its a good starter. It will help you get your interviewee in remembering mode the more you ask about the specific details of the situation, the more details they will remember, including their motivation and thoughts.

Then you can take them all the way back to The First Thought and work your way chronologically. You want to pay attention to each step and the underlying forces at play.

Dont stick to the plan

What Is The Jobs

People purchase products to get a job done. Its like ticking a box. A successful product has the ability to solve and extinguish a problem faced by potential customers.

The jobs-to-be-done theory suggests that in order to understand a customers needs, companies must put considerable thought into the value proposition of their product. By focusing on the job-to-be-done, product managers and tech founders are able to identify all of the customers needs and determine which are unmet.

Subconsciously, when customers are executing a job, they have a set of metrics in their mind. These metrics, or desired outcomes, are used to define the successful execution of that job.

At the moment, there is plenty of buzz around the topic of the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, with many people contributing to the theory.

I wanted to learn more about Klements perspective on the theory and how it can be useful to product managers and tech founders outlining their GTM strategy and trying to create growth.

Theres often a lot of confusion and misunderstanding around , said Klement. The theory was developed by people who were not professional theory-makers.

Alan Klement uses the analogy of a bathtub to describe the concept of the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework .

If you want to fill a bathtub, you have to add water to it. You also have to figure out how to prevent water from leaking out. Growth is about increasing the inflows and reducing the outflows.

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The Core Principles Of Doing Jobs To Be Done Research

From project to project things will change and some of the questions you ask may vary. However, when making decisions about the research setup, these are the core principles that can guide you.

How Does American Express Use Analytics Professionals

A lot of times, analytics folks get into a discussion with stakeholders and really want things to work for them and may end up with data telling the story that people want to hear, Bharariya told Built In. But, we are looking for a candidate who can really be authentic with the data and provide objective insights in a way that can help the decision one way or another.

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