Understanding Your Customer and Defining Progress - Interview with Bob Moesta
Excerpts:
"One of the basic premises I came up with is that when you ask people what they want, when you try to design a new product, they actually had no clue what they want. They know the outcome they want, or the desired outcome they are looking for. But given the context they are in, things are different. ...So I came up with this framework called "Jobs To Be Done" that people don't buy products or services. They hire them to do a job in their life. So there are different candidates, there is hiring criteria, there is firing criteria. For the last 30 years, I've been crafting and honing it as one of the 25 methods I have. I am literally: "How the market really work?" Clay Christensen and I have been friends for about 25 years and he wrote this book on the method that I have been working on forever and primarily because at some point, he thought it was powerful enough. I am a practitioner and Clay is a theorist. That book is called: " competing against luck". The basic premise is that we try to find what causes people to basically make progress? What is the situations people are in? What are the pathways they seek to be better? What are the hiring and firing criteria that they make for the products and services they choose. that frame enables you to see what's next and allows you not to be biased by what the product is or the services is, but more where are they struggling? My key phrase is always "the struggling moment is the seed for all of the innovation because the moment the consumer or the customer struggles, they care about something, they want something better. The more you find struggling moments, you start to understand the progress they want to make, then I can design better products. But if there is no struggling moment, I've never been successful doing it that way, so it's really using that frame around how I look at the market.