Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators
609: The proven way to get customers to switch to your product – with Chris Spiek
Practical tips for product managers to conduct Jobs-to-be-Done interviews Watch on YouTube TLDR I’m welcoming back Chris Spiek, Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of the Rewired Group, to demystify Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) interviews. Chris shares his journey to developing JTBD with Bob Moesta, offers practical tips for switch interviews, and emphasizes the importance of understanding customer struggle to drive innovation. Introduction Eleven years ago on this show , Chris Spiek explained why people buy a Snickers bar, which is a completely different reason from why they buy a Milky Way. The framework was called Jobs to be Done (JTBD), and back then many product managers had never heard of it. Today everyone knows the words, but fewer can actually run a JTBD interview. After this episode, that will change for you. Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, where he and Bob Moesta spent more than a decade building Jobs to be Done into a complete product development framework. He co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook, his work is featured in Clayton Christensen’s book, Competing Against Luck, and he has helped teams at Basecamp, Facebook, Intercom, Dropbox, and others understand why customers switch to their products. He teaches the switch interview and has built an AI tool that analyzes those interviews. Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers JTBD as a Framework to Move Beyond GuessworkChris shares how his early career in building custom software exposed the difficulty of predicting which projects would succeed. He was building applications for Bob Moesta, who had a incredible ability to understand customers’ problems. Bob and Chris built the Jobs-to-be-Done framework as a systematic method to understand customers’ needs and focus on solving them rather than on building product features. Switch InterviewsJobs-to-be-Done interviews, also known as switch interviews, uncover the reasons customers switch from one product to another. They investigate customers’ struggles, definitions of progress, and the trade-offs they’re willing to make, providing clarity on how to improve products and customer experience. Real-World Examples of Switch InterviewsChris describes how he used switch interviews at AutoBooks, a company that sells accounting software for small businesses. He interviewed current users and asked them why they decided to use AutoBooks software. Surprisingly, they found that many customers weren’t using the software primarily for its automated bookkeeping capability; instead, they had switched to AutoBooks because they wanted to be able to accept credit card payments via invoice without using a third party. This insight allowed the product team to better align their marketing with the jobs the customers were using the software for. Practical Tips for Customer InterviewsChris recommends that product managers practice their interview skills by interviewing a colleague or friend about a recent decision to make a big purchase. Get into the details about what they bought, when they bought it, and the trade-offs that went into their decision-making process. With some practice, product managers can learn to resist the urge to get into talking about technical details of their product and just listen to the customer’s story instead. Chris tells his teams that they can be in either supply or demand mode but don’t mix them. During customer interviews, they’re focused on demand and they aren’t talking about their solution. Chris recommends asking customers for details about their story — take them back to the moment and the place where they decided to make a purchase. One technique that is helpful for this is to tell the interviewee that they can imagine you’re producing a documentary about them, so you’ll ask about very specific details like the weather or exact date. Chris suggests about an hour for a customer interview. If you have the opportunity, have another person in the room to take notes and make observations you may have missed. A small number of interviews is often sufficient. Chris’s team sometimes makes product decisions with just 2-4 interviews. If your organization is new to customer interviews, you may need 10-12 interviews to convince yourself and others that you’ve found a pattern. Analyzing Interviews with AITo accelerate actionable insights, Chris is using an AI tool that analyzes interview transcripts, extracts key motivations, and provides feedback on interviewing technique. Useful Links Listen to the original episode with Chris, 057: Applying the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework – with Chris Spiek Listen to 335: JTBD tips from a veteran practitioner – with Bob Moesta Visit the Jobs to be Done website Check out Chris’s AI tool, JTBD Analyzer Watch Chris conducting real JTBD interviews on Substack Innovation Quote “The struggling moment is the seed of innovation!” – Bob Moesta Application Questions How does your current approach to customer interviews differ from the switch interviews described by Chris? What’s an example of a time when your solution did not fully address your customer’s real struggle? How could practicing JTBD interviews on products outside your industry help your team dig deeper with actual customers? Can you describe a time when you focused on your solution more than the customer’s problem? How do you ensure your team remains focused on solving customer problems rather than just building more features? Bio Chris Spiek started his career as a software developer before turning his attention to what it takes to build great products. In 2005, he co-founded the Re-Wired Group with Bob Moesta, where they developed Jobs to be Done from a footnote in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma into a complete product development framework. His product development work spans nearly every industry, and his passion for software has led him to work with product teams at Basecamp, Intercom, and Facebook. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Autobooks, a fintech company serving small businesses. Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. 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