Jobs-to-be-Done framework
A user research framework that doesn't lie
Before I started working on emery.to, I was lucky to encounter a great framework for user interviews. It can be extremely useful to founders, product managers and user research professionals. However, surprisingly, many of them are still unfamiliar with it.
When conducting user interviews, I'm a big fan of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.
Unlike many other methods, it gives you an actionable and sound interview plan. With this framework, you don't ask hypothetical questions. Instead, the interview focuses on the customer's history of recent purchases, meaning you get reliable information (remember, "buyers are liars").
In a nutshell, this framework attempts to extract as much information as possible on customers' latest purchases in your domain:
What pushed them to seek a new product? What's changed in their lives? What are the external factors?
What made that product attractive? Which factors contributed the most to this decision?
What pulled them away from that purchase? What were their concerns before the purchase?
Did they need to break certain habits to switch to the new product?
It also gives you an excellent overview of the buying process – what stages they went through in their decision, their emotions and personal circumstances, and where they sought those products.
Equipped with such insights, you know what to bring to your product. Moreover, those insights are precious in marketing and sales – knowing your audience, what's important for them when it comes to purchasing a product and what the job is that they hire your product for.
If you want to learn this framework, I highly recommend two sources:
Theoretical part – "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton M Christensen
Practical course – "Mastering Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews" by Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta and Ervin Fowlkes
The theoretical part from Clayton lays a solid foundation for your deep understanding of the framework and its whys and hows. The practical course applies the theory and provides a proven interview script to start from. Also, I found the four hours of examples fascinating – imagine a customer talking for an hour about ordering a bottle of wine in a restaurant.
You can follow the provided interview plan, or you can shape your interviews, once you know the basics, while still extracting similar information from your customers and prospects. In the case of emery.to, when we switched from user interviews to coaching sessions, we couldn't go with customers through the entire buying process. However, we still asked questions regarding what led them to try our product, what they had tried already, what worked and what didn't. There was always a curious story behind it that helped us better understand our customers.
Links:
"Competing Against Luck: The Story Of Innovation And Customer Choice" by Clayton M Christensen
"Mastering Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews" by Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta & Ervin Fowlkes
A live demo of the JTBD framework by Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta