How to find work you love | Bob Moesta (Jobs-to-be-Done co-creator, author of Job Moves”)

Common JTBD Misconceptions

Bob Moesta: I think one of the biggest misconceptions around Jobs to Be Done is this notion that it’s pain and gain as opposed to context and outcome. When you hear somebody’s story and it seems irrational, like we’ll have people go, “Oh my God, that’s an anomaly. That doesn’t happen.” But what you realize is that the context makes the irrational rational. So the moment you hear a story, you go, “I can’t believe that,” nine times out of 10, it’s because you don’t have the rest of the story. And so part of it’s being able to understand the rest of that context that would drive somebody to say, “Why would somebody cut their arm off?” Well, if they’re in this situation and this and this and this, there’s nobody who would say they want to cut their arm off, but in certain situations you’ll do it. And so that’s what we’re trying to do is find, where will people change behavior?

Introduction to the Podcast

Lenny: Welcome to Lenny’s Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today’s most successful products. Today my guest is Bob Moesta. Bob is the co-creator of the Jobs to Be Done Framework alongside Clay Christensen. And as you’ll hear at the top of our conversation, is maybe the most anticipated guest I’ve had based on the LinkedIn response. Bob has started eight companies and is currently the co-founder and CEO of the Rewired Group, and currently spends his time helping companies of all sizes unlock hidden insights and create successful products and services.

In our conversation, we get deep into all aspects of the Jobs to Be Done framework. What is it, how to apply it to your product, when it’s not a good fit, how to interview customers to get accurate insights into their struggles, plus examples of how Jobs to Be Done works for zero to one products and a ton more. Thank you to everyone who suggested questions and topics for our conversation. Enjoy my chat with Bob Moesta after a short word from our sponsors.

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Bob, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Bob Moesta: Thanks, Lenny. Excited to be here. Big fan.

The Main Interview

Lenny: Ah, I’m a big fan of yours. I wasn’t even super familiar with you before we started organizing this podcast chat.And then as you saw, I posted on LinkedIn what questions people had for you and around Jobs to Be Done in general. And I’ve never seen so many comments and questions and so much passion for guests I had on, I think there was over-

Bob Moesta: Really?

Core Concepts of JTBD

Lenny: Absolutely. There’s, I don’t don’t know, 130 questions and comments and folks like Jason Fried, founder of 37signals and Des from Intercom came out and just like, I’m excited for this episode, so we got some here.

The Milky Way Competitive Landscape

Bob Moesta: I’ve worked with all of them, they’re great people and fun to work with.

Pain Points vs. Needs

Lenny: I just had no idea there’s so much passion for Jobs to Be Done. I have a million questions for you, a lot of them coming from the audience, some from me. So I’m excited to dig into a lot of this stuff.

Bob Moesta: All right, let’s dive in.

Struggling Moments Drive Product Roadmaps

Lenny: Okay, so I thought it’d be useful just to start with the very basics briefly, just what is the simplest way to understand the Jobs to Be Done framework?

Bob Moesta: I think the easiest way to think about it is that I’m an engineer, electrical, basically have been building product for almost 30 years and one of the lies I was told growing up was build it and they will come. And so we always think about it from a technological, how do I build this thing? And all right, who wants this product? And what I realized very early in my career is that really it didn’t work, I couldn’t make it work.

And so Jobs to Be Done is this whole premise that people hire products, they don’t buy them, they hire them to make progress in their life. And if we can take a step back and look at it, we see it in a very different light to realize at some point they’re in some context and there’s some outcome they want. And if we can understand that, we start to realize that different things compete, right?

A simple example is think of Snickers and Milky Way, right? They’re both candy bars, they’re both bought in the checkout aisle, they’re both made almost with the same ingredients, one has peanuts, one doesn’t. And if you start to compare the products and do a competitive benchmark, you start to get to one’s a little softer, one’s a little harder, one’s got a few more calories, one’s got less calories. But when you talk to people about when’s the last time they ate a Snickers, when time’s the last time they ate a Milky Way, you start to realize that Snickers typically is a case where they missed the last meal, they’ve got a lot of work to do, they’re running out of energy and they want to basically get back to the tasks as fast as possible. And so you start to realize that Snickers is about almost like a meal replacement and it’s about the stomach is growling and things like that. And you start to realize that if they didn’t have a Snickers, it competes with a protein drink, it competes with a Red Bull, a coffee.

But a Milky Way typically is eaten after an emotional experience, could be positive, could be negative. It’s usually eaten alone, and it’s taking time to regroup after this emotional thing. And you start to realize that it competes with things like a glass of wine, a brownie, and to be honest, a run. And so when you start to realize that, jobs helps you see the true competitive set from what we call the demand side of the world as opposed to the competitive set from the supply side of the world, which is the technology or the underlying business model by how which we’re making it. And so it allows you to actually see what customers really want as opposed to trying to figure out, how do we sell things to people?

The Four Forces Model

Lenny: To maybe follow up on this example a bit, how often do you find these jobs emerge after they’ve developed a product, in this case I guess Snickers or Milky Way, how often is it just like they see this problem and actually apply this approach even accidentally?

Reducing Friction Over Adding Features

Bob Moesta: What’s interesting is that at least for me, the thing is what I learned was that supply and demand are not as connected as everybody thinks. Most people think they create a product and that creates demand. But the real thing that if you start to study causality is that a struggling moment causes demand. And you start to realize that in some cases that struggling moment exists and can exist for a long time and nobody solved it. So one of the companies I helped was Southern New Hampshire University and Paul Le Blanc. And one of the things in 2010, we found basically these anomalies, these people who were going to school but not actually coming to class and watching everything online. And it was like 50 or 60 of them and the anomalies basically, and they’re paying full price, they didn’t want to come. For Paul, it was kind of like why are they doing this?

And when we went to study them, we realized that they actually had a very different job than a typical 18 to 24 year old because one, they were a little bit older, typically they had either already had a degree or they basically had tried to go to college and it didn’t work. And it was about basically time now that they had responsibility to do something new. And so they didn’t actually build the product at all. And as they started to look and say how many people want to go back to school but can’t? They started to realize it’s not a thousand people, it’s not 10,000 people, they have over 200,000 students. They’re one of the largest universities in the world. And so all of this starts with a struggling moment, not with a product.

And so that’s what we mean when we’re customer-centric is that we’re studying the struggling moments they have and people like Intercom and Basecamp, they look at struggling moments and that becomes their roadmap. Because again, think about a roadmap. I’m literally trying to tell you what I’m going to build in the next 24 months, for example, but none of us saw ChatGPT coming. And so all of a sudden I have to go undo the roadmap. But if I talk about the struggling moments that I’m trying to go after, all of a sudden I realize that the roadmap is now when I get to that struggling moment, there’s multiple ways I can solve it. So instead of just talking about features, it’s typically talking about features for the first 90 to 120 days, but after that we just talk about struggling moments because that’s the seed for real innovation and basically where new products come from.

Demand-Side Sales Book

Lenny: To unpack the framework a little bit more, if you were to come to a founder and tell them, “Hey, you should be paying attention to struggling moments,” I feel like all of them will say, “Yeah, we know that. We do that. We look for pain and we try to solve it,” so what I’m curious there maybe is just what is maybe the right way to do it?

Autobooks Case: Redesigning Sales

Bob Moesta: But it’s not just the pain. See, what we’re taught in business school was pain and gain, but the reality is it’s the context. It’s the fact that I didn’t eat lunch before, the fact that I still have a lot of work to do, the fact that I have this podcast going on. It’s not that I’m in pain, but it’s the context that makes me value this in the moment that much more than something else. And so part of this is it’s not just about pain and gain, it’s about context and outcomes.

And so when you frame it that way, it becomes a vector, a vector of progress or a vector of intention of what they’re trying to do. And once we frame that, then we can actually wrap technology around it. And the crazy part is that I was always told or taught if I build the best product, it will sell better. And what I’ve learned is that actually a kick-ass half is better than a half-ass hole, and that’s what Jason talks about. But the reality is like if you look at QuickBooks, QuickBooks has half the features and double the price. And you start to realize that at some point in time it’s about meeting customers where they are, not trying to wow them and not trying to convince them. They convince themselves to make the progress.

Lenny: I’d like to understand this vector piece more because that feels really important. So you were saying that it’s not just there’s a pain point, solve that, what you’re saying is what’s even more important is this context around that pain point and things that precede it?

The Six Stages of Buying

Bob Moesta: Yeah, so the first thing is we don’t talk to people who just want to.

How to Conduct Customer Interviews

Lenny: For people listening on the podcast, Bob pulled up a drawing, so you should try to check out the YouTube video of this to see what he’s doing.

Extracting Patterns from Stories

Bob Moesta: So there’s some Product A is the old product and there’s some Product B, which is the new product. And ultimately people don’t randomly do anything. And so the real heart of the method of Jobs to Be Done is understanding the causation of what pushes people to say, “Today’s the day I got to do something different.” And the push or the context they’re in has nothing to do with the new product, it’s the only reason why they would leave the old product. And if there’s no push, they can’t even see your product because we’re creatures of habit, right? And so as soon as I have a push, I call that F1, force one, and I have some idea of what’s possible, then I create something called F2, which is basically the pull to a new outcome, a new state, a new thing, right? And so at some point in time it’s like I have to be in this situation and I have to want this outcome, right?

But here’s the other part is that there’s this waterline that there’s these other forces and there’s two other forces. Every time I show somebody something new, it actually creates anxiety, right? Anxiety of the new, and I call this F3, right? And then the other thing is I have to get them to leave old thing. So I call this habit of the present. And what you start to realize, and I call that F4, is if F1 and F2 are not greater than F3 and F4, they’re not going to move, they’re not going to do anything. And so ultimately what we’re doing is we’re framing the market as a system of behavior. And most people say, “If I just add more features, create more pull, people will buy.” It’s not true. More features create actually anxiety, can it do all those things?

And what you start to realize is if I reduce friction, which is the bottom part, I actually don’t have to do anything with a product, I just have to make easier. So for example, one of the things I did is I built houses and one of the frictional points that people had in moving was the fact of moving house was basically packing all their stuff up and going somewhere. And so I would literally sell them a condo, they’d go from a 3000 square foot home to a 1500 square foot condo and they’d cancel six weeks later because they didn’t know how to get rid of all their stuff, which is a frictional point. So what did I do? I actually raised the price of the condo, included moving in two years of storage as part of the deal with the condo because it’s the frictional coefficient and I increased sales over 30%.

Lenny: I love that.

Legacy and Giving Back

Bob Moesta: So what this is it’s really about focusing on the customer. It’s about understanding the causation behind it and then using design thinking to actually start to realize, how do we actually enable people to make progress? We don’t need to sell them, we need to enable them to buy.

And so I wrote a book called Demand Side Sales that basically took the premise of stop trying to sell people and just help them make progress, help them buy. And so the whole book is instead of trying to base the sales process on how we want to sell, we need to actually design the sales process on how they want to buy. And it seems like it’s the same thing, but they’re actually really, really different things.

Lenny: Is there an example that can make this even more real of a company or a product?

Why People Change Jobs

Bob Moesta: So one of the companies I work with a lot lately is a company called Autobooks, they’re based here in Detroit. And basically they help banks basically do invoicing through let’s say Apple Pay. And so instead of having to use Square or PayPal, you literally can use your bank now to do these things. And so there’s two things, they have to sell small business on it, but they also have to sell banks on it. And when we started talking about it, they talked about why do banks want it? And the first thing we did is we found out there’s three really different reasons why banks want them.

But the thing is that where the process looked at is they would talk about the struggling moment, they talk about what was going on and then everything was about getting them to a demo. And once we got them to a demo, we had to close them. Well, it turns out that the buying process literally has different phases in it. There’s the first thought, there’s something called passive looking where they’re problem aware and solution unaware and they have to learn a bunch of things, and then there’s active looking where they’re both problem and solution aware and they’re trying to figure it out and frame a solution, and then there’s deciding which is about making trade-offs.

And so what we end up doing is when I started to talk to the team about it, what they started to realize is I said, “Where is the customer in their timeline of buying?” And they looked at me like, “Huh?” I said, “No, no, you have a timeline of how you want to sell to them and after the demo you try to close, but what if they’re actually in passive looking and want a demo to learn more? It’s very different than if I’m trying to close.” And so what we ended up doing is breaking the demo apart, asking people where they were in their buying process. And by doing that we actually then found out a way in which to give them three different demos, one about telling stories and giving them the background about the problem, another one about showing them all the alternatives, and then the last one is about basically giving them choices between ways to move forward, right?

And you’d think that it would make the sales process longer, it actually made the sales process almost half and at 4x basically conversion because now we meet them where they are as opposed to where we want them to be.

How to Conduct JTBD Interviews

Lenny: And is that something you find generally in the sales process, there’s these three phases that everyone goes through and you got to think about them individually?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, there’s actually, I call them six phases. First thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, first use, and then ongoing use. How do we build the new habit? And so if we don’t actually study that part of how do people transform themselves through a struggling moment, we don’t know what they want. If I talk to people who want to buy a house, they tell me they want granite and hardwood and they’ll make everything these things they want.

But when you actually talk to people who bought a house, they actually made a lot of trade-offs. Although for example, everybody I would survey before buying a house, I had 93% say they wanted an Energy Star compliant house. It cost 30 grand to make an Energy Star compliant at the time. And the reality is nobody bought it, they all bought the finished basement. And so there’s the difference between what they say they want and what they want.

And so the method itself is not based on traditional research or market research, asking people what it is. It’s actually based on criminal and intelligence interrogation about telling me the story about how you decided today’s the day I bought a house or today’s the day I went back to school. It’s not random. And if it’s not random, then we need to actually find it. And that to me is one of the bigger differences, most people build their sales process on probability, “If I get so many leads in, I’ll convert so many to here to so many…” But the ultimate thing is, how many people are really ready for your product? They have to actually be ready for it. And that’s what Jobs to Be Done is really about, is understanding where they are, what’s causing it, and how do they make the trade-offs?

Formal vs. Simplified JTBD Application

Lenny: So let’s follow that thread of interviewing and talking to your potential customers and customers to understand the jobs to be done. What is the actual process you recommend?

Three Energies from Customer Stories

Bob Moesta: The first thing we do is we frame a question. And the way I think about it is most people, so the one thing to know about me is I’ve been building things for over 30 years, I’ve worked on 3,500 different products and services across many, many industries, but I’ve had three close head brain injuries before I was seven years old and I can’t read and I can’t write. And so one of the things for me is that I could not understand the research that I would get from marketing around basically they’d say, “Hey, I need something that’s easy, fast and fun and cheap.” And I’d be like, “Okay, what does any of that mean? What is fast? How fast is fast and what’s not fast?” And you start to undo all those things.

And so the first thing we do is we start to frame, let’s just talk about what causes people to say today’s the day they want to go on vacation or today’s the day they wanted a new set of windows. And you start to frame around that, and then you go find people who recently purchased and say, “What in the world happened that says today’s the day I need new windows?” And you start to realize that there’s pushes and there’s pulls and there’s anxieties and there’s habits. And so the first thing we do is we try to extract the story from the customer. And it doesn’t have to be my product, it could be somebody else’s product if I haven’t built it yet. It’s like, what are people going to fire when they hire me?

And so when we get the stories though, then the stories are going to get us the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties and the habits, the trade-offs and what we call the hire and fire criteria. And then what we do is instead of trying to look for themes across all of them, we actually do something, instead of segmenting them, we cluster them, we find the pathways because what you start to realize is it’s not one reason why people do it, it’s sets of reasons. And those sets actually work together. So the pushes work with the pulls. So when they have these pushes, they want these pulls. And when they don’t have these pushes, they don’t want those pulls.

And so when you start to see the patterns and you start to pull it out, you start to realize that most companies or most products are hired to do 3, 4, 5 different jobs and they’re in conflict with each other. One person wants to go faster and one person wants to be more thorough. And so all of a sudden being more thorough means it’s slower. If I say we’re thorough, the people who want it fast say, “I don’t want this because it’s too slow.” So how do you frame those things out and understand where the conflicts are behind it and think about different products from it?

That’s what Intercom did, right? Intercom realized that people hired it for four very, very different reasons and then instead of building four different products, they literally took their product and turned off the features that were not relevant to the pathway that people wanted to take. So for acquire, they didn’t need a whole bunch of these other features and so they actually framed it around basically, how do we help people convert? And that job actually competed with HubSpot.

There’s another one where it was about helping with support, and that one competed with Zendesk. And so they changed the pricing model to basically match who the competition was and to match the progress that people were trying to make because Zendesk was too much and too hard, and HubSpot felt like it was an overkill for where people were. We basically figured out how to actually position ourselves as a good next step between HubSpot adds nothing or between nothing and HubSpot. And that’s how they’ve grown to be valued over 2 billion.

Lenny: I have a follow-up question, but did you say that you can’t read and write?

Learning from Churned Users

Bob Moesta: Yeah, can’t read and write. So the thing is I cannot read the words that I write and I cannot read… So if somebody reads it to me, I can actually play it back. So I’ll listen to audio. But the fact is the way I was taught to read is so that when I look at a paragraph, I see the spaces between the words first, and then I usually see the left-hand edge of the words, so the last three letters. And so my mom taught me to look at the five largest words on the page by circling the longest words on the page. And then I would study those and translate those and then figure out what those five words would have in common. Because for me, the part that’s broken in my brain is that I can’t look up things fast enough. So by the time I try to look at a word, figure out what it is, get the definition, I’ve literally forgotten every word before it.

Complaints Do Not Equal Switching

Lenny: Damn. How are you writing books?

Bob Moesta: It’s a gift. I’m telling you, it’s a gift. It’s a gift I’d never wish upon my children. But to be honest, it’s given me abilities to see patterns in so many different ways because I can remember the first five words in the first paragraph and the last five words in the last paragraph so I turned through a book three or four times, and I have as good a comprehension as everybody else.

Language Layers and Buying Truths

Lenny: This is insane. How are you writing books?

Bob Moesta: It’s really simple, I have a company called Scribe Media, and what we do is first thing we do is we look for what struggling moments do people have? We then look at what are the competitive books wrapped around it? I then basically outline what progress looks like. We then take each chapter and define it as a system and what we have to do in each chapter to help them make the progress along the way. And then we just talk and we talk, we have ten two hour sessions, they get recorded, and then somebody basically takes… So if you listen or read any of my books, it sounds like me talking because it is.

The Start and End of Value

Lenny: Wow.

Bob Moesta: And so I can get a book out in three and a half, four months.

Popular Questions from LinkedIn

Lenny: That’s incredible.

Different Schools of JTBD Thought

Bob Moesta: And so now I’m a teacher, I’m adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School at Northwestern, and then I guest lecture on the East Coast in kind of different business schools, and then I help Techstars and Y Combinator. So I’m really moving myself into being into, I feel it’s time to pass on. I’ve had some amazing mentors who helped me, and again, I was told to be a baggage handler or a construction worker when I graduated high school, and my mom thought I could do more. And so I met these people who poured their knowledge into me to enable me to do all this stuff so now I’m trying to pay it forward as much as I can. So that’s one of the reasons why I do as many podcasts as I can. So again, I appreciate you having me.

Lenny: Yeah, this is a great opportunity to pass it on and so I’m very happy we’re doing that. I had no idea about any of this about you, so thank you for sharing that.

The True Competition for Candy

Bob Moesta: It’s been fun. I pinched myself. The other part is I don’t know how I got here. One of the things that I’ve been doing is I’ve been studying people for the last 10 years around why they switched from one company to another to literally understand the jobs of jobs because employees actually hire companies more than companies hire employees. And so you start to realize the struggling moment is why don’t we have enough people? And otherwise I want to leave, but I don’t know how to leave. And so I’m in the midst of writing a book around that right now with Michael Horn and Ethan Bernstein.

Lenny: Is there an insight from that work that you can share about why people leave jobs or join jobs?

Different Schools of JTBD Thought

Bob Moesta: So the number one thing that I would say is almost everybody when you ask them about how they got the job they’re in, the number one phrase you get is, “It was so lucky. I was so lucky, just happened to fall in my lap.” And then when you actually unpack the story, luck had nothing to do with it. They were prepped, they were ready, there was pushes, there were pulls, there was anxieties, they were able to do it. And you start to realize, and the funny part is that if I talked to somebody who’s been through three or four kind of switches, they all can say, “Yep, I’ve had that job. Yep, I’ve had that job. Yep, I’ve had that.” And so there’s frames around basically understanding what progress are you really trying to make now? Is it, do I need balance? Am I not challenged enough?

And you start to frame it, and when you frame it, you start to realize, I’m willing to actually take less money to be around smarter people because I want to be a founder later. And so you start to realize that all of these things where we think we have to pay more money, over 50% of the people who got new jobs didn’t get more money. It’s a lie. It’s about progress. It’s about what do they want to learn? What skills do they want to get? At some point it’s about money, but it’s not always about money.

And the other interesting part is when you talk about money, we talk about this notion of unpacking. We’ll say, “Well, why do you need more money?” It’s like, “Well, I have larger obligations,” or, “I want more money because I want more respect.” And so what you realize is in the hiring and firing criteria, they talk about money, but money actually has a bigger effect than just money. It’s about respect or it’s about responsibility or it’s about their metric of progress. There’s a whole bunch of things, but it’s not just money. That’s the interesting part.

Recommended Introductory Books

Lenny: Yeah, I’ve definitely done that myself, there’s a status component to your job.

Limitations of the JTBD Framework

Bob Moesta: Yeah, I want the title, right? Happens all the time.

Frequent Misunderstandings About JTBD

Lenny: I want to come back to the discussion we were just having around interviewing people to understand the jobs to be done. And a bunch of people on LinkedIn were trying to understand just tactically what they need to get right in order to get accurate jobs. So I guess, are there just a couple tactics you’d recommend for how to interview people?

Misconceptions About JTBD

Bob Moesta: Let me give you three tips. The first tip I’d tell you is go read Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss. I started to write a book around basically techniques that I learned back in the eighties and nineties around this, and his book is amazing around it, the whole notion of getting to know. I play things back incorrectly because they’re going to say no, and I’m going to say, “All right, fix it,” and then they’ll talk more. The moment somebody says yes, there’s nothing more to say. And so there’s a bunch of techniques you have to learn to basically get them talking.

The second is I only talk to people who have already tried to make the progress, right? So for example, people talk about like, “Well, you can’t apply this to something that’s new. It doesn’t exist.” So I worked with a company that was, let’s say a fairly large social media company, and at some point in time they found people kind of transacting on their platform, but they didn’t know anything about it and they hadn’t built anything. And what they ended up doing is we ended up going and studying eBay and Etsy and what caused somebody to say, “Today’s the day I’m going to set up an eBay store or sell something on Craigslist.” And out of that, we found all the jobs of what people, both sellers were doing and buyers were doing, and now I think it’s I think almost a $3 billion marketplace that didn’t exist and they learned about it all from the competitors.

Why Choose the JTBD Framework

Lenny: Sounds like Facebook Marketplace, maybe? No comment?

Bob Moesta: I didn’t say that.

Three Core Takeaways

Lenny: How many interviews do you recommend people do to get to a confident?

Bob Moesta: That’s a great controversial question. The interesting part is from a causal mechanism perspective and from a set theory perspective, meaning the sets of pushes, pulls anxieties and habits, it starts to repeat around seven or eight. And I usually do 10, no more than 12. And I would rather do two rounds of 12 interviews than do 24 interviews. I had some really interesting mentors, one of them was Dr. Deming, who’s the father of lean and quality systems and like that. And so he would always push me to basically how to do things faster and smaller. And so that’s where a lot of it came. And you just realize that people will say, “Oh, we have to do something statistically significant.” Well, you do if you’re doing it randomly, but if you actually understand the range of your market and you know that 50% of it is above 30 years old and 50% is below 30 years old, I could actually sample in a way that makes me get a good representation without having to actually do 50 interviews. And so we use something called design experiments to help with that.

Lightning Q&A Session

Lenny: I love the concrete numbers. And so along those lines, when you’re actually asking questions of people, do you have any best practices and ways of phrasing a question to get a response you can trust?

Intercom Success and Enterprise Implementation

Bob Moesta: In a lot of cases, you have to look at it from multiple perspectives. And so the other tip I have is to not have a discussion guide. It drives people crazy because everybody wants to ask the same set of questions, but the problem happens is when you ask the same set of questions, you actually don’t follow the ones that actually have the most meaningful information in it, right? And so what happens is, what I say is I use the framework of pushes, pulls, anxieties and habits and say, “What caused them to do this?” And everything else is just a conversation of trying to understand their story.

And so part of this is being able to ask the questions around why, but you can’t ask “Why, why, why, why why?” It’s like, “Tell me more about that. Give me an example.” And in a lot of cases, I usually get them to what I call the edge of language where they have no more language, and what I do is I literally then bracket it, “So was it more about this or more about that?” And I know it’s neither one of those, and it forces them to talk more, right? It’s always trying to get them to know, because the moment I get to… So when I play it back, “So you did this and this and this and this,” and say, “No, that wasn’t it.” And the people who I’m working with are like, “You know that’s not the right answer,” I’m like, “I know, but they’re going to elaborate on why it’s not that.” And so it’s literally being able to reveal kind of the causal mechanisms of why people do what they do.

The Dinner Table Story

Lenny:

When I think about Jobs to Be Done, I’ve never fully implemented any sort of structured framework, but I find that it’s been really useful in my newsletter work and my podcast work, just thinking about what is the job my newsletter is doing for people? For me, it’s helping people get better at the craft of building and growing products. And I just think of it, there’s these buckets of jobs to be done and then there’s this formal, “Let’s just do it for real.” I guess, one, do you find that to be true? There’s the very simple and there’s the more official?

Bob Moesta: So what I would say is I find a lot of founders, especially really successful founders, like I would say Jason Fried is one of those where he intuitively understood this. He actually thinks this way but didn’t have language wrapped around it, right? So I think that it’s a very useful framework. I think that the danger you run into is that when you look at the customer through the product, so if I look at the customers through the Snickers bar, then I think of Milky Way as a competitor. But if I look at the customer and say, “Why did they pick that thing?” Then I realize that a protein shake and an apple and a sandwich are the competitors not Milky Way.

Mentors on the Wall

Lenny: Got it. So say someone wanted to start going in this direction of Jobs to Be Done, what is the simplest, I don’t know, first version, lightweight approach to starting to think this way?

Bob Moesta: So there’s two things. If I have a product, go find 10 people who recently bought your product, but what I want you do is go talk to them, not about the product, but about why they bought the product, what was going on, what were they hoping for, what were they worried about? What did they have to give up? How did they convince somebody else? Just listen to the story. Start with just getting the story.

Because there’s three levels of information we have to get or three sources of energy that I talk about. So think about it as there’s got to be energy in the system for us to do something. And there’s what I call functional energy, which is usually time, space, effort, knowledge, right? There’s emotional energy, which is how I feel. I want to feel better, I feel frustrated, I feel overlooked. There’s emotional aspects to it. And then there’s social aspects, how I want others to perceive me or how others perceive me, “Oh, my boss is going to fire me because he doesn’t think I’m doing this fast enough and I feel inadequate.” So part of his understanding kind of the emotional, social and functional components that are part of that energy source.

Wrapping Up the Podcast

Lenny: Got it.

Bob Moesta: The second part is if it’s an established product and it’s been there a while, I’d actually go and talk to people who churned. Because in churn, what’s interesting is when somebody leaves your product, they’re still making progress. We think it’s bad for us, which it probably is, but in their mind it’s like, “Yeah, this was too hard and complicated,” or, “You know what? It didn’t do enough for us.” It allows you to actually understand the struggling moment they had because, again, they were using your product and something happened and some context changed and now they struggle with it, and now they got to go find something else.

Nobody wants to change. So that makes this actually the easiest thing to look at is tell me why people change. We just seem to literally not want to go deep enough and we use the lazy word of random and probability as pseudo for knowledge, and it’s not knowledge. It’s literally just if context is the same, if outcomes is the same, then I can do it. But if I listen to football stats, third down in preseason is very different than third down in playoffs, right? And so giving me a stat about how their third down conversion is across the whole season makes no sense to me because the context is different.

Lenny: You brought up this point that people often say they really hate something and it comes across that they’re ready to switch and will use something that you’ve built that’s better, but they don’t because of that friction you mentioned. What do you look for that might tell you that they’re really actually going to use it for real and it’s that serious?

Bob Moesta: The very first thing I would say is I never trust anybody telling me things they’re going to do because they can’t assure it, and it usually never happens. It’s my experience that says that. And so the thing is, I need to talk to people who did something and tried and though they might’ve failed, what made them try? So the phrase I have ‘Bitchin’ ain’t switchin’.” Just because people bitch about something doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything about it. This is where at Basecamp, we learned the fact that everybody said, “Oh, if you had Gantt charts, I’m going to leave you if you don’t put Gantt charts in or resource allocation,” and as much as they all say they want it, they’re not leaving because of it.

And this is the other part, if you follow your best users, they’ll take you up to this world that then actually destroys the lower end of the world of why people are there. And so if Basecamp would’ve added all those things, one of the reasons why people join Basecamp is because it’s so dang simple. And if I start to add all these things that make it more complicated, it doesn’t work.

Lenny: And so in those conversations, is there something you find that just this is a sign they’re actually really serious, or do you just like, “I’m not going to listen to anything they’re saying in this case until we actually build it and they’re using it”?

Bob Moesta: So for example, in the first five minutes of an interview, they’re going to tell you, “I bought a new car because I got a deal on it and it was a car I’ve been dreaming about forever,” and it’s like they have all these things and then when you start to get to, it’s like, no, the old car had 280,000 miles on it. You had three large bills in the last four months. The fact is it’s making a sound and you’ve got a long trip coming up, that’s why you’re getting a car. You’re not getting the car because of the deal. And so there’s these, I call it the layers of language. And the very first layer is called the pablum layer, where people just, “How was your day?” “Oh, it was good,” but nobody knows what that means. And if you ask one further question, “Well, what was good about it?” They’re like, “Ugh.”

And then you get to the next layer, the next layer is usually the fantasy nightmare layer, “Oh, it was so good because of this,” or, “Oh my God, it was so bad because…” They exaggerate to one degree or the next. And then what you want to do is actually then pull it back to what actually happened. This is where you’ve got to be more of an investigator and an interrogator. And the way I would describe it is it’s criminal and intelligence interrogation that feels like therapy because most people don’t actually know why they bought because they only think about the time they wrote the check, swiped the card. But the reality is like I did an interview with somebody who bought a coat rack, $137 coat rack. It took them 18 months to buy it. And in their mind, they say they bought it in a week, but the reality is the debate about getting it and why they couldn’t get it was happening for over 18 months. So this is where you can’t believe what they say, you have to do your investigation to get there.

Lenny: And what does that phrase use again for that vector of progress?

Bob Moesta: The intention, it’s the context that they’re in and the outcome. So here’s the thing is that most people talk about you want to get to this outcome and people value this outcome, but value is not just the outcome. Value also has where you start. So if I start here and I end here, I’m going to value it this much. But if I start down here… Wait, I’ve got to get there, start down here, and I go up here, I value it that much more. And so part of it is value is actually part of where they’re starting from and where they want to go. And most people say, “If I just get them up here, they’re really going to love it,” but some people say, “I just want to get here.” And so you’re overshooting it and they actually want a price discount because you’re giving them more than they want.

Lenny: So I’m going to go in a different direction. The most liked comment on LinkedIn asking people what question to ask you was by Sharam Krishnan, who’s actually on this podcast in the past.

Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember seeing it, I remember hearing it. By the way, I think it’s one of the reasons why I reached out because I’m like, “Okay, we need to clarify this a little.”

Lenny: Okay, great. So you saw the brand, he’s not what you’d say a fan of Jobs to Be Done.

Bob Moesta: No, no.

Lenny: And so here’s the question he wanted to ask, “Is there a case of a startup or a modern technology company or any company that was using Jobs to Be Done to launch a product from zero to one that has had broad adoption?” That’s his challenge.

Bob Moesta: Inside the company or broad adoption that the product that we’ve developed had broad adoption?

Lenny: The latter, yeah, the product has done really well.

Bob Moesta: I already told you an example. I can’t say it, but you can. The thing is, for example, Autobooks is another one that did this, right? They start to realize that the fact is you need to study the struggling moments and it helps you determine what not to build, right? Too many times we just keep adding more and more things to the product. And so in larger organizations it’s very difficult because at some point the dominant market research is about hypothesis testing, “I’m going to go build a hypothesis and go basically then go build a research project to prove or disprove that hypothesis.”

But the reality is, Jobs to Be Done research is hypothesis building research. I don’t know, that’s part of the point is we really don’t know. We think we know, but Dr. Taguchi would always tell me there’s way more unknown than there is known and never forget it. And so again, what causes people to buy windows is not what we think it is. And so you start to realize that. I think Drucker said it best, he goes, “What businesses think they’re selling is not what customers are buying.” And to be honest, he said that in 1953, and it’s still true today. I just did interviews today where they’re like, “Oh, people are buying for this reason,” and we did 12 interviews and you started to realize, nope, that’s not why they’re buying. And they’re shocked.

Lenny: Awesome. Okay, so you didn’t say it, but maybe Facebook Marketplace?

Bob Moesta: So Autobooks would be one, you’re trying from zero to one from nothing, right?

Lenny: Yeah, brand new product is kind of the question there.

Bob Moesta: Yeah, so at Techstars we basically make sure that everybody, they come in, they usually don’t have a product to start with, at least in the Chicago and San Francisco offices. We basically have do jobs in the very, very beginning of that. And we have companies like Nutrisense and Havoc Shield, and there’s a whole bunch of them that are out there that are growing and going down that pathway. And so to me, it’s very, very useful, especially in the zero to one space.

But the notion is the way that I frame it is, what will people stop using when your product comes out? And that’s who you want to go interview. So for the Marketplace thing, it was like, “Hey, I want them to stop using Craigslist. I want them to stop using eBay. I want them to stop using Etsy.” If that’s the case, what are they doing and how do I do it better than that so I can understand? There are really no new jobs, it’s just the fact is we get better at them. And so the hire and fire criteria get better, but the context and outcome, most jobs, I can look back 10 years in the job existed and I can look ahead 20 years and the job’s going to exist. It’s just the nature of how the technology delivers on it is what gets better.

Lenny: Awesome. And it sounds like Intercom and Basecamp also are very early Jobs to Be Done adopters?

Bob Moesta: Very early, yeah.

Lenny: So I think with Sherom, something that I read between the lines is he worked at Twitter for many years and I think Twitter attempted at Jobs to Be Done framework, and I don’t know if it went well and I think it just caused a lot of people to think this is a terrible framework.

Bob Moesta: This is where I think there’s different flavors of it. And what I would say is that one flavor is really what I call very supply side driven, where it takes the underlying technology and then looks at it and says, “All right, what else can we do? Where can we be better? Where are things that are important but we’re not satisfying on them?” And being able to prioritize. And so there’s a very systematic approach that’s hundreds of steps and very, very prescriptive in nature.

The method that I have and that I’ve been using mostly because I’ve been in the startup world and doing new to the world type stuff is it’s very, very qualitative, organic, and it’s a combination of a process, practice and skills. So every company actually has its own innovation process based on who they have, who they’re serving, the underlying technology. And so, in my opinion, to have a very predictive one process that fits across everybody, I think there are principles, but I don’t think there’s one process. And so I think that’s what they used at Twitter.

The other thing is that I think Jack was actually a big fan and he worked with Clay on a couple of things, but I don’t think they worked on the method part of it, they worked on the thinking part of it. And so it was more about, so one of the most dangerous things you can do is sit in a room and hypothesize what the jobs are because I will guarantee you you’re 100% wrong. And so this is what happens, by the way, this is the gift of dyslexia is I’m not an A student and so most A students don’t start until they know the answer, most D students start because they don’t know the answer. And so you start to realize we’re wired very differently to do that. And so I always say that the A students have a disadvantage against the D students and entrepreneurship because we just go start and we learn right that in there. We don’t have to hypothesize everything first because we actually don’t know how to do that.

Lenny: So your advice there is essentially people often get Jobs to Be Done wrong because they just sit around and think about the Jobs to Be Done and aren’t actually doing the work to interview and understand?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. They think more about the outcomes and they think about what’s the best outcomes we can get for people. And what you start to realize is that there are trade-offs people make. And ultimately there’s some irrational piece, some irrational component that makes everything twist around. The irrational component is like, why in the world do people eat Snickers when they’re hungry? It’s a candy bar. Well, it turns out when you bite it, it masticates into a ball and it sits in your stomach and it absorbs the acid that’s causing you to say, “Hey, I got to eat something.” And so part of it is the roll of the peanuts and the roll of the nougat is actually to masticate it together. The caramel should be sticking it together versus in a Milky Way, the melting temperature of the caramel is so light that you take a bite, it’s liquid, you drink it down, you swallow it like it’s a drink, it has nothing to do with food.

And so you start to realize that it’s connecting the experiences to the context and outcome. It’s connecting the supply side with the demand side, but it starts with the demand side first. Struggling moments and opportunities all exist before there’s a product.

Lenny: You’re making me hungry.

Bob Moesta: I bought a couple, but I didn’t use them, but I bought a couple. And I mean, you go deep into it, you start to realize that this is the crazy part, everybody thinks they compete, but if you literally go back to a moment when you picked up a Snickers bar, you were not thinking about a Milky Way. You weren’t thinking of half the candy aisle, you were thinking of like, “Do I want a sandwich, or do I want a Snickers?” Half the reason why they picked Snickers is it’s 300 calories, I can eat it in three bites, it’s done, it’s not messy, and I can keep working. It’s mainlining food.

Lenny: I don’t know if I’ve ever had a Milky Way to be honest.

Bob Moesta: That’s right.

Lenny: So I don’t need that comfort.

Bob Moesta: That’s the funny part is you go to all the big tech hubs in San Francisco and the Snickers are all empty and the Milky Ways are all full.

Lenny: Yeah, I get that. You mentioned that there’s two different approaches or many different approaches to the Jobs to Be Done framework, and this is a question someone actually asked that there’s maybe a framework by someone named Tony Ulwick, and then there’s your approach, and then maybe Clay Christensen maybe has an approach. So can you just help clarify?

Bob Moesta: So Clay and I collaborated on it. So I was lucky enough to have Clay as a mentor for 27 years, I met with him once a quarter for 27 years, and at some point I shared with him the hack of how I was thinking about this and what I was doing, and at some point he said, “We need to turn it into a theory.” To me, it was more like my work around because I couldn’t read and write, “Let me go talk to some people, I’ll figure it out.” And ultimately we turned it into a method. So if you look at Competing Against Luck, it was written with Tady Hall and Karen Dillon, Dave Duncan, but I helped on that book for 16 months. Some of the clients in there are my clients. I think Intercom is in that one. So Clay and I are aligned in that. Clay was more about turning it to a theory and I would say I’m more about having it be a method. So his is like a thinking framework and a philosophy and a strategic kind of frame where mine is very tactical about how do we get it and then what do we do with it.

Ulwick’s comes from a very different perspective, and again, I think it’s very valuable, but it comes from the notion of functions and it’s more like, what can our product do? What jobs can our product do? As opposed to the way I look at it is basically only people have jobs, products don’t have jobs, people have jobs, organizations don’t have jobs, people in organizations have jobs because that’s the irrational part. And so fundamentally there’s that two different views of how do we look at it, but ultimately I would say Clay’s approach and my approach are derived from the same dataset where Ulwick’s is derived from a different dataset and a different set of experiences.

Lenny: That’s super interesting, I had no idea about this. And your sense is in the case of Twitter, for example, maybe it’s closer to Clay’s just think about it approach.

Bob Moesta: Yep, I think that’s right, I think that’s right. And again, I think Ulwick’s is very valuable, especially in some companies where there’s lots of risk, there’s regulation, there’s lots of moving parts, very complicated systems, but at the same time it’s so many steps. You have to have a very disciplined organization to follow it.

Lenny: If someone wanted to start actually following through on this, which book would you recommend they start with to help them understand how to apply your approach?

Bob Moesta: I would have them read Demand Side Sales, and it basically is starting from the theory of why do people buy and how do we actually understand how to flip the lens from trying to sell people things to help them buy? And ultimately it has the entire method around it kind of frame for product and for founders.

Lenny: Awesome. Is Jobs to Be Done ever not the right framework for people to figure out what to build?

Bob Moesta: Oh yeah. So couple places, one is when there’s no choice or there’s no real choice. So what’s interesting is think about is why do you know more about your car insurance than your health insurance, right? And most of it is because your health insurance is given to you by your employer and you only utilize it when you’re sick. But the car insurance, you have to pay for it so you have to sit down and decide what are the different trade-offs you’re going to make where when you do it for the employer, it’s good, better, best. And it literally is like, where am I my life? Have I been sick? There’s some basic things, but there’s no real choice there.

And so you start to realize where there’s no real choice or where people want to make the choice obvious, it doesn’t work. You have to be able to accept how people see you as opposed to how you want to be seen. So when companies will come to us and say, “All right, I want you to find these jobs for us,” like, “Nope, I can’t do it because it doesn’t work. I can tell you what the demand side is asking for and then we can see how your product fits to it and what you have to modify to it, but if I try to help you build the case to make the jobs what you think they are, it doesn’t work.”

Lenny: In those cases, is there a different framework you recommend or is it just like you don’t really have a lot of options?

Bob Moesta: In a lot of cases to me, I’d do some ethnography, I’d literally figure out kind of where there’s frictional points in the system. I might do some prototyping around kind of different alternatives, but typically it’s more about what I would call the little hire or how do they use, for example, the health insurance as opposed to why do they buy the health insurance.

The other example I could use is chewing gum. If I talk to people about buying a pack of chewing gum, most people can’t remember at all when they bought a pack of chewing gum, even if it was in the last week like, “Uh, I think so.” But if I asked them when they chewed gum, they can tell me about when they chewed gum. And ultimately that will then imply when they buy gum. If you go to something that it doesn’t register, it’s so deep of a habit that they don’t really know what they’re doing, you’ll never going to be able to get that information out of them. Again, the habitual stuff is very hard to see the job. It’s only when people change do you see, it’s like you can reveal the entire iceberg but if I’ve been using Tide for 20 years and I ask you why do you hire Tide, you just make it up. You have no idea why you Tide. But if you switch from Tide to Gain or Gain to Tide, you can tell me that story very detailed.

Lenny: There’s a reader who has the really interesting question, Maria Delano is her name. She’s wondering, with a framework this well known, you’re bound to get people misinterpreting it and repeating inaccurate information about the framework, and she’s curious what misconceptions most frustrate you that you just hear again and again about Jobs to Be Done?

Bob Moesta: The first thing I want to say is actually, in doing it, I’ve explicitly made it very accessible because the moment you make it too copywritten, too patented, too whatever, people just move by it. So part of it was being able to make it in the public domain so people could have conversation and try it and do different things with it.

What I would say is there’s enough people that have used it and have worked with it and have had great success with it that at some point in time, most of the people who are trying it and not using it well, it’s obvious. And so it’d be lik, how do you double down into it? I think one of the biggest misconceptions around Jobs to Be Done is this notion that it’s pain and gain as opposed to context and outcome. And that I think one of the other ones is it’s purely about the outcome and not just about the context and outcome together.

And again, I think the biggest mistakes I’ve seen made is because they do it in a conference room and they don’t go talk to people. They don’t actually find the contradictions, they don’t find the irrational parts. What’s really interesting is when you hear somebody’s story and it seems irrational, like we’ll have people go, “Oh my God, that’s an anomaly. That doesn’t happen.” But what you realize is that the context makes the irrational rational. So the moment you hear a story and you go, “I can’t believe that,” nine times out of 10 it’s because you don’t have the rest of the story. And so part of it’s being able to understand the rest of that context that would drive somebody say, “Why would somebody cut their arm off?” Well, if they’re in this situation and this and this and this, there’s nobody who would say they want to cut their arm off, but in certain situations you’ll do it.

And so that’s what we’re trying to do is find where will people change behavior? Most people are studying the momentum of where people are and what’s the momentum of their direction, but the reality is what we’re trying to do is study what causes people to change their direction. And that’s where innovation happens. Innovation happens when people change.

Lenny: What convinced you to spend your time and life working on Jobs to Be Done and helping people implement this framework and what keeps pulling you back?

Bob Moesta: That’s a great question. So I think I started out as I just love to build things. My mom would take me, basically we have something around here called Big Trash Day is where they throw out the dishwasher and they throw out the old mini bike and all these different things. And my mom would basically say anything that we could fit in the trunk, we could bring home. And so I’ve been building things my whole life because I’ve been just always fascinated with how things work. So that’s the first thing.

The second part is I love to help people. One of the things I realized is I can’t build products for myself, and I’ve done seven startups, but I realized that I have to build for others. And so to me, building for others was where I started product. And then I realized that I’m a method builder and that I really help people innovate. And so I exist to help make the abstract concrete. So that phrase has helped lead me to becoming now a teacher and a professor and writing books is something I never wanted to do because I hated books. Clay convinced me that I had to learn how to speak and I had to write books.

So here’s a really good one is that this is in 1990, so one of the things that happened was when my youngest kid moved out and basically moved out of the house, I had my notebooks from almost 30 years of every project on everything I worked on any company, and this is from one of my mentors, Dr. Taguchi, he said this in 1990 when I was living in Cologne, Germany. He said, “Write a book.” So I opened this 30 years later, I’m like, “Oh, dang it. I got to write a book because he told me to.” So it’s just one of those things where I realized I really like helping people, I like creating methods. I’m very curious, sometimes annoyingly curious, but that’s kind of the triad of things that I love to do.

Lenny: Amazing. Bob, is there anything else you wanted to share or touch on or make sure we cover before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Bob Moesta: There’s three big things to take away. One is struggling moments is the key and it’s struggling moments that people take action on. And what I would say is they’re everywhere. They are freaking everywhere in our lives and there’s only certain contexts when all of a sudden we realize we have to do something about it. So study struggling moments because at some point that’s where we need the innovation the most. The second thing is think about the progress people are trying to make. What is their standard, not your standard? What is that context? What is that outcome? And the last thing, the way I phrase it is choose what to suck at and figure out the trade-offs that you need to make and make sure that your trade-offs map the trade-offs of the customer. Because nine times out of 10, most products that fail is because they made a trade-off that the customer didn’t agree with.

Lenny: Awesome. Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got six questions for you. Are you ready?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, I’m ready. Always ready for these.

Lenny: Perfect. What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Bob Moesta: Shape Up by Ryan Singer, it’s phenomenal. The other book I would say is End of Average by Todd Rose. I listen to it every single year. I get something on it every single year. I’ve been listening to it for probably eight or 10 years. I literally called Todd, I’ve become friends with Todd. We interact on a regular basis. It’s an amazing book.

Lenny: What is a favorite recent movie or TV show?

Bob Moesta: I love Big Bang. I watch it every… People would say that I’m Sheldon, I think I’m more Leonard, but I can see there’s days that I come across as Sheldon, I don’t mean to be Sheldon. But I like Oppenheimer. I think any of the science type, I’m not really a science fiction person, but it’s more about, I’ll say historic documentaries, I love them all because they help me understand the science.

Lenny: What is a favorite interview question you like to ask when you’re interviewing people?

Bob Moesta: What are the top three things you struggle with in your business today that if you could solve would fundamentally change the business?

Lenny: Love it. What is a favorite product you recently discovered that you just really like?

Bob Moesta: I recently purchased a massage chair, and it’s one of those things where I’ve been getting massages for a while, and as I get older and I’m working out more, I’ve lost almost 100 pounds. And so I’m to the point where I’m working out more and God, nobody told me I’m going to be cold all the time, I’m sore all the time and I’m hungry all the time. And so it’s like, “Okay, I need a way in which this…” So I would get a massage every two weeks or so, and now I can get a massage in 20 minutes on demand. And it’s pretty freaking amazing.

Lenny: Man, my wife has wanted one of these and this might be good for her.

Bob Moesta: Oh, I will tell you, it’s a life changer. It is one of those things where we’ll do interviews and I can go do an interview and a debrief, pop in and do it. And I’m brush as I can be. It’s better than an app.

Lenny: Is there a brand you want to throw out that you found to be your favorite?

Bob Moesta: Kyoto is the one that I have.

Lenny: Kyoto.

Bob Moesta: I got it from Costco. It’s fabulous.

Lenny: Okay, we’ll be looking into that. What is something relatively minor you’ve changed in how a company has implemented Jobs to Be Done that has had a big impact on their ability to do it well?

Bob Moesta: There’s two. One is Intercom. So the way that Intercom really took off and why it did so well is actually, it was Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe who were the two founders, they actually studied, they came to one of my workshops in the beginning, but they studied it and they tried to do it, and then we talked about it. But then they brought Matt Hodges and Paul Adams and Sean Townson and the executive team, and they did the interviews. And when they did the interviews, they understood what to do and it literally all went downhill from there. And they knew how to ask the questions.

Lenny: Downhill in a good way?

Bob Moesta: They knew how to do the interviews way. It was kind of amazing. And Paul Adams and Matt Hodge’s first day at Intercom was in my office in Detroit. So that to me is one of the key.

The other is to find a place in a very large organization where a group is struggling, they can’t deliver product, they can’t move fast enough, they keep getting the wrong insights, they say it’s going to be this big, and literally focusing on a very small area and giving them a little space to demonstrate the use of it, and then it will spread with a case study or two. And so most companies, if they start small case studies and sharing it with people both when it works and not works, or starting with the top.

Lenny: Two more questions, one is, someone asked me to ask you the dining room table story. Does that ring any sort of bell?

Bob Moesta: Yeah. So one of the things I did is I built houses. So before I built houses, I was running a venture capital, private equity firm. We had about 100 million. I was doing 25 transactions and just traveling too much, I had four children. And so my wife and I kind of had the conversation that I wound it down and I said, “What am I going to do?” I wanted to try and find a business I could work in and be part of and own part of so I joined a building company here in Detroit, and we ended up building a thousand homes here in Detroit and had 14 sites. And one of the things we did is we built for downsizers like your parents. And one of the things they constantly told us was, “Look, we’re downsizing. We’re not having the holidays. We’re done with that. I don’t want a dining room table, so we can’t even have people over. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to go somewhere else. I don’t want the dining room table.”

And so we made, it’s a two bedroom, two and a half bath, first floor laundry, gourmet kitchen, kind of amazing condo. But what we realized is people, if they didn’t know where the dining room table was going to go, they weren’t going to move. And so it turns out that the dining table was the emotional bank account for their entire life. And so if you weren’t going to take it or your sister wasn’t going to take it or your brother wasn’t going to take it, the reality is they weren’t going to give it the Goodwill, it was not going to go in the basement. It might go into the storage unit, but for the most part, people would literally stay where they are until they knew where the dining table’s going to go.

So I did the opposite of what they told me to do, which is I built a place to put the dining room table. You could never eat at it, it was never big enough to actually pull the chairs out of it, but it was still a symbolic of what it was and they would use it for puzzles and that kind of stuff. But I sacrificed the second bedroom suite to basically add that, and it increased sales 22%. So this is a case where you learn, again, that irrational contradiction that says, “They’ve said this, but you did that. That doesn’t make any sense.” That’s what jobs helps you with, those kinds of really important, small but subtle and important insights.

Lenny: Last question, you showed me this very cool camera setup you have in one of the views was your heroes on the wall?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lenny: Can you show that and share who those folks are?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, so at the end of the night, I have this philosophy that I have the energy in your body and your brain literally you need to use every ounce of it every day because you wake up the next day with a full bank account and you can’t really save it. So every night I paint. And so these are paintings of my mentors and they’re above me, but Dr. Deming, Clay, Dr. Taguchi, and Dr. Willie Moore, I wrote about him in a book called Learning to Build, and the five skills that they taught me to enable me to kind of work on so many different things in different areas.

And so Deming I met when I was 18, he took me to Japan. I worked for Ford and I was responsible on the front lines to help reduce product development cycle time at Ford from 72 months to 36 months. So that’s where I learned a lot of tools and methods and things like that from Toyota. And then I learned Dr. Taguchi’s method, which is amazing around designed experiments. Dr. Willie Moore was my first boss at Ford, and she was a PhD in particle physics and she taught me empathetic perspective of how to see things and frame things and really amazing, amazing individual.

And then the last one was Clay Christensen, which is I just walked in his office and he had a sign outside his office basically saying anomalies wanted, and I walked in and I said, “Look, I’m an anomaly. I don’t really know if you want anomalies, but I am.” And we sat down and started talking, and ultimately I asked him, “What’s your research and how can I help?” He had been there maybe about a year, and it was one of those things where he got kind of somber and it was almost like he had a tear, and I was like, “What’s going on?” He goes, “I’ve been here a year and everybody’s asked me for things, but nobody’s ever asked to help me, and you’re the first person.” And so that was the beginning of the relationship, and I had four hours a quarter for 27 years with Clay with no agenda, which is kind of amazing.

Lenny: That’s incredible. What a beautiful way to wrap up our chat, Bob. My job to be done for this interview was to help people understand Jobs to Be Done. I think we accomplished our goal as much as we can in one hour. Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask you a question?

Bob Moesta: Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place, and I post most of the stuff there. And then I have several different companies, but one is called The Rewired Group, and I’ve had that for about 14 years, and that’s a design consultancy agency around helping people build and launch products. And we do everything from Fortune 100 to not-for-profits, to startups and different ways. And then I have something called Laser Ventures where we actually work for equity and we also put money into investments as well. And that’s called Laser Ventures with Andrew Glazer. And we have a podcast called The Circuit Breaker, which it’s more or less all these different concepts in 20 minute format of me and my partner just riffing around what is the empathetic perspective or what are the forces of progress? Or just small little things that basically help people learn along the way, and it’s just long enough for a commute or a walk or something like that.

Lenny: Last question, how can listeners be useful to you?

Bob Moesta: To be honest, I was so excited for this podcast. I was excited, one, because I’m a fan, but two is to see your post and then get all those responses. I think I said, “Boy, I think we need more than an hour. This is amazing.” And so to be honest, posting questions, asking questions, letting the community kind of interact. And what was so interesting is it was people who had questions, but then there were people like Des and Jason who reached out and said, “Oh, this will be awesome. You’ll love this.” All those kind things.

So to me, just keep being a community. And what I would say is, as this is posted, just put more questions up there. The hard part for me is actually answering questions in a written form. My request would be is that if we can figure out a format so I can answer them more in a conversation where we almost like a list of things where there might be a follow-up of some sort, but if your listeners could literally help me by being more articulate, that would be great.

Lenny: Okay. Let’s figure out if we can do some way of doing that, that would be amazing.

Bob Moesta: That would be great.

Lenny: Bob, again, thank you so much for being here.

Bob Moesta: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Lenny: Bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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