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Filling in Lean’s Gaps

Alan Klement

‘Get out of the building!’
‘Talk with customers’!
‘Genchi Genbutsu’

…the above insights, and others like them, are great advice from practitioners of the Lean methodology. They hammer into the entrepreneur’s brain the importance of talking directly with customers before and during product development.

It’s great advice, but there are gaps: How do we go about understanding the customer’s struggle? What are we looking for when we observe customers? When we talk with customers, what do we talk about and what answers are we trying to pull out of them? >>Read More

JTBD at Intercom: Des Traynor on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio

Chris Spiek

Photo by Sam Howzit

Photo by Sam Howzit

“Imagine if a chef is in a restaurant. He comes up with a new French onion soup, and wants to see if it’s tasty.  In the internet world he would wait four weeks and then email everyone who has ever been at his restaurant with a Survey Monkey link, and say, ‘Hey guys. Did you or did you not have the French onion soup? If you did, can you remember if it was nice?'”

This week Des Traynor, co-founder at Intercom joins us on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio to talk about how Intercom is changing the way we launch and test features on the web, and how Jobs-to-be-Done is playing a role in the work they’re doing. >>Read More

Alan Klement on Designing Around Jobs-to-be-Done

Chris Spiek

meetup-logoHow do you go about designing product features around Jobs-to-be-Done?

This week on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio we’re joined by Alan Klement who talks about how he came up with his version of the job story, and shares some great examples of how he has used it with design and engineering teams to design around jobs-to-be-done.
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Streema Co-Founder Martin Siniawski on JTBD Radio

Chris Spiek

streema

This week we continue to explore how Jobs-to-be-Done and the Lean Startup movement are intertwined. We’re joined by Martin Siniawski, the co-founder of Streema as well as one of our beloved jobs-to-be-done experts, Amrita Chandra from Shape and Sound.

Martin talks about the struggles he is encountering as he works to improve the web and mobile experiences for Streema users.  “It’s a big problem.”

He dives into his efforts to prioritize features by looking through the lens of Jobs-to-be-Done: “The solution space is infinite.  There are so many possible solutions and things that we could try out, and we needed some way to make sense of it all and start prioritizing them and generating hypothesis.” >>Read More

Are we talking but not making progress?

Bob Moesta

Every day, all over the world, people spend time doing things that don’t result in any progress for anyone. It seems like people spend a lot of time trying to fix what they thought was clear. At least that’s how it looks to us.
>>Read More

Dave and Brenna from MeetUp on JTBD Radio

Chris Spiek

meetup-logo

During this episode Dave and Brenna talk about how Jobs-to-be-Done is being used at MeetUp alongside their well-established usability testing practice.  They even share some of the Jobs-to-be-Done that people hire Meetup to do and the subtle anxieties that go along with joining a Meetup group and attending a Meetup!

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Jobs-to-be-Done Interview: Buying a Smartphone

Chris Spiek

girl-question-524Jobs-to-be-Done Radio is back this week with another sample interview for you to listen to and learn from.  Tune in to hear us unpack how Becky from Red-Gate software came to decide that it was time to ditch her feature-phone and buy a smartphone.

This interview was conducted at the Switch Workshop that was held in Cambridge, UK in July of 2013, but it was such a good story that we  couldn’t keep it to ourselves (thanks, Becky, for agreeing to let us share it!).
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The Iceberg of Jobs-to-be-Done

Eric Portelance

This article originally appeared on the Teehan+Lax blog, and has been republished here with permission.
iceberg-524
When you’re starting to design a new product, or redesigning an existing one, the most important thing you can do is validate that the problem you are trying to solve is meaningful, important, and shared by a large enough group of people that a solution is likely to succeed in the market.
>>Read More