Bob Moesta: belief

Transcript context

…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? 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? 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?…

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