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

In this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, joins Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek to talk about how Jobs-to-be-Done shapes the way Intercom builds product, talks to customers, and measures whether software is actually doing the job. Des explains why the customer is not the fundamental unit of analysis, why so many web-analytics tools collect data but never deliver answers, and how to spot “zombie revenue” before a customer quits.

Along the way the conversation covers nouns versus verbs, true consumption versus sign-ups, lean and Jobs-to-be-Done, pricing to the job instead of the category, and why focusing on a handful of core jobs beats chasing every edge case. Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript, organized by topic with short explainers of the core concepts.

How Des found Jobs-to-be-Done

Chris: All right. Welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-to-be-Done radio. I’m Chris Spiek. As always I’m joined by Bob Moesta and Irvin Folks [SP].

Host: Hey, Chris. What’s up, man?

Host: Hey, Chris. How are you?

Chris: Today we have a very special guest. We have Des Traynor on, who is the cofounder at Intercom. Hey, Des.

Des Traynor: Hey guys. How’s it going?

Host: Hey Des.

Chris: Good, good, good. So, super excited to have you on. I feel like we go way back, but we haven’t had a whole lot of opportunities to interact and collaborate. So I’m really excited to get a good block of time to talk to you here. So I know you attended a switch workshop back in San Francisco. We got a chance to hang out there. I think we had been introduced or at least emailed or tweeted back and forth even before that a couple of years ago. Then most recently, I think, you gave one of the highlight speeches at Business of Software when we were in Boston back in October of 2013 here. I feel like we have been in the same spaces and places, but it’s good to actually have you on and get to have a serious conversation about this stuff. So, welcome.

Des: Thank you very much. It’s super cool to be here, and as you correctly said, we’ve certainly been dancing in the same areas [inaudible 1:33] for quite a while now, so it’s actually cool to get to sit down and have a chat.

Chris: Des, if I remember right it was almost three years ago. I did a podcast with you on the Intercom podcast after I did the [Horace] to-do one.

Des: That’s right.

Chris: That’s how you reached out to me. That’s how we really got started around the jobs thing, because you’re a big [Horace] fan, aren’t you?

Des: That’s right. So the full background there was I saw Clay Christensen speak [about] business software, I guess three years ago, and he told a milkshake story, basically. Like a lot of people, I was fascinated by pieces of it, and I went on a progressive hunt to try to find, like, you know, where can I get more of this sort of stuff? I was talking to Ryan Singer [SP], and he said that you were definitely a key player in this. I heard you on Horace’s [sP] podcast and that was very cool. Maybe we could do this for the Intercom podcast, so my idea was, at the time, it’s weird to talk about [inaudible 2:34] thing, but at the time [inaudible 2:35] wasn’t really popular in the text startup scene. I was thinking it would great. It could be something that the Intercom blog would share a spotlight on or shine a spotlight on. We did, I think, maybe a one hour talk. It has been across two different blog posts, but it’s still one of our most popular podcasts and interviews that we’ve done to date.

Product strategy after 1.0: keeping the job in focus

Chris: Wow. I didn’t know that. Cool. So how are you using jobs now? I mean, at some point your business and software talk, what do they call it? Lighting round? You get so many slides in so many minutes. What was the rules on that?

Des: Yes. It was kind of interesting. You get seven minutes and 30 seconds. You’re supposed to have, I think, 15 slides and 30 seconds per slide, and I cheated. There’s no other word for it. I basically broke the rules. What I did was, I had 15 slides, technically. But I had, I guess, probably 100 different transitions and in page animations to simulate more and more slides. So my talk there was really about one sort of reoccurring theme I noticed is that people, when they talk about design, obsesses over version 1.0 and how hard it is to get that right. I think at 1.0 you have so much clarity and what it is you want to do, what job your [selling], what [inaudible 3:51] you’re taking, who you are building for. It actually gets really, really hard post 1.0 when you get traction and you start getting pulled in all the different directions. In my opinion, that is the bigger challenge of design. Keeping a product on Horace after it has been successful.

Chris: Yes, and focused. It’s one of those things that people, they put so much energy on just getting the 1.0 out that they don’t realize that the day after 1.0, it’s now pulled in 50 million directions. You get all this feedback and you’re, like, what do we do with this feedback? Without having clarity around the job you end up just doing future creep and solving a bunch of problems that don’t matter. It’s just a mess.

Des: Totally. The title of that talk, I think, was Product Strategy [inaudible 4:39] saying no. I was just recapping different areas where that’s super important.

Intercom: solving the jobs around customer communication

Chris: So what are you doing with Jobs-to-be-Done now at Intercom and other places? I know you talked at, what was it . . . You were in San Francisco talking.

Des: Yes. Lean startup.

Chris: Yes. The lean startup conference. How did that go and how are you using it.

Des: So I’ll start with how we’re using it. So Intercom is a tool. Our goal is to make web business personal, and what we do is we try to connect people who run web businesses with their customers. That would be a really super gauge high level job, but we have very specific instances of it. So, basically, anytime anyone is running a web product, they have regular points in their life when they need to talk to customers. So let’s say, for example, you just ship a feature. Right after you click launch and you publish the blog post and you sit back and you’re, like, “Hey, we did it.” A whole heap of questions just land in your brain. One of them is, “I wonder if anyone is using this.” The second one is, “If they’re using it, is it working for them?” The third one is, “I wonder who is not using it, and why they’re not using it?” The old school pre Intercom, most of these questions would be hit with barriers of difficulty. So you would be, like, “Okay, let me go and ask a developer to pull database dump of everybody who hasn’t used this feature yet. Let me import that into my meal marketing tool and let me compose a message out to those guys so that I can ask them for feedback, and then let me aggregate that feedback and see what I can make sense of.” Because that was so tricky it often just didn’t get done. There were just too many barriers for people to actually do it. So what they would do is they would maybe call a couple of customers, or they would read a few blog comments in a feature. But the complexity, the multitude of steps involved in actually doing what should be a pretty simple thing prevents you from doing it. I always liken it to, imagine if a chef is in a restaurant. He comes up with a new French onion soup, and he wants to see if it was easy. In the internet world what he would do is he would wait four weeks and then he would email everyone who has ever been at his restaurant with a Survey Monkey link, and he would say, “Hey guys. Did you or did you not have the French onion soup? If you did, can you remember if it was nice?”

Chris: That’s awesome.

Des: That’s the world pre Intercom. Post Intercom it’s the chef getting his ass out of the kitchen and going, “Guys, is that soup nice?”

Chris: Nailed it.

Des: So talking to people while they’re doing something is the right time to actually get the feedback about what it is you’re doing. That’s one of the jobs we’ve solved with Intercom. However, like any sort of job, they don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in a work flow in a person’s role in the company. So you get all this feedback. Well, what are you going to do with it? And what if somebody reports a bug? That opens a dialogue. One interesting thing I’ve learned is that only companies divide communications between bugs, issues reports, feature feedback, progressive engagement marketing. For a customer it’s all just talking. Again, imagine you didn’t enjoy the soup or you had a suggestion. Imagine you had to talk to two different chefs depending on whether it was a bug request. That’s the other thing a typical web business does. They say, “Oh, if this is just your opinion, please send it over here,” where if you think it’s a fundamental problem and you can rate in our priority one through four, please go over and talk to the maitre d’

Chris: Right. Or it’s the analogy of, it’s too hot. So it goes to the person cooking the soup, and it might be too spicy hot, not too hot-hot, and then all of a sudden all chaos breaks out.

Des: Exactly, and for some reason the person who is cooking the soup can’t talk to the customer. They have to go through some middle man.

Chris: That’s right.

Des: I’ve talked around a set of problems. Each of those problems maps to a job, and that’s what we do at Intercom. Our job is ultimately communication to connect web businesses with our customers, but there are several sub jobs. Inter feedback is just one of them. Surveys, reaching out, asking people to do things. They’re all different ways, but any time a company is talking to a customer through the web or through online or mobile, that’s where Intercom is relevant.

Host: To me, especially when you’re doing feature feedback, it’s, like, “Are you using the feature the way it was designed? Are you suing the feature as a workaround and saying, ‘Boy, it doesn’t work for this and this and this?’ ” Okay, it wasn’t designed for that, so you’re really giving bad feedback around what it was really not designed for. So everybody takes every comment as it’s relevant, and it’s not. That’s the thing that’s really apparent to me.

The customer is not the fundamental unit of analysis

Chris: I actually want to go back, because this is really interesting to me. Clay has this thing where, and I won’t say it eloquently enough, but an answer needs a spot in the brain to land, or it’s just going to bounce off. Can you go back, do you remember seeing him speak at business of software? You said that you thought his talk was interesting. What were you up against at Intercom in that moment that made you actually think, “Hey, I need to dive into this, learn more about it. Find out if there’s anything really here.” The story you just told is, like, everything is solved. We know what we do. We have a great product and we provide a ton of value. What was it like back then when we actually gave the talk?

Des: Sure. That’s an investing question. Clay’s phrase is, I think, “Questions are places in the mind where answers fit, and until you have a question the answer doesn’t fit.” I think it was three years ago. Business software has always interested me. It’s a way of punctuating the progress of Intercom for me, because the first time I went there I stayed at the crappiest air B and B, like, 25, 30 minutes outside of the conference venue. And next year I’ll be speaking at the conference [and staying at] the speaker’s hotel. So it’s funny to see progress. But way back then Intercom, there were a few things that Clay’s talk made clear to me. One of them was just his basic theory of disruption. I didn’t realize the opportunity personally that Intercom had prior to Clay’s talk. But when he talked about jobs, I guess what it best focused me on was the idea that we are always of the opinion Intercom was for people who run web products or web service, or mobile startups, I guess. That in and of itself isn’t actually actionable information in comparison with Intercom [being a] great way to get feedback on a new feature, or a great way to check up on customers who aren’t performing, or whatever. So the biggest insight I got, like, the biggest eye opening realization was this idea that the customer isn’t the fundamental unit of analysis. We basically spoke to too many different types of web businesses with too many different attitudes towards how they engage with customers. We couldn’t find any useful commonalities amongst the people, but we could find plenty of useful commonalities amongst the tasks. That was, I think, the piece that really clicked. And I was, like, “Right.” So if we actually obsess over doing these tasks rather than understanding these people, we’ll actually make much more progress much quicker.

“So the biggest insight I got, like, the biggest eye opening realization was this idea that the customer isn’t the fundamental unit of analysis.”Des Traynor

Bob: I was talking with Clay right before the Christmas break. He and I get on the phone for an hour. We just riff, if you will. HE had a question for me that was very interesting. He asked me – he said, “Bob, you said that a job is more like a verb than it is a noun. I’ve been thinking about that. Tell me why a job is like a verb,” and to me it goes back to, most marketing talks about people as nouns, products as nouns, but jobs are all about the action you do with nouns, right? So it’s the verbs that are most important. What are you doing and what do you want to do as opposed to what it is? It’s really, to me, it gets back to fundamental language and being able to talk to people about what they’re doing and what they’re trying to do, not what it is and what it’s trying to be.

Nouns are categories, jobs are verbs

Des: Yes. That resonates a lot with me. Often I find any sort of interesting web product, people are so quick to try to pigeonhole it using nouns.

Chris: Yes. That’s right.

Des: They’re, like, “Oh, you’re a help desk. Oh, you’re an analytics tool.” Straight away, when they categorize you like that they’ve moved away from the idea of the jobs you do into the product segment you have to fit into, and therefore all these assumptions you now have to have whether you want them or not. When you let that happen, that’s exactly how you build the [inaudible 13:28] technology, just being pigeonholed by what’s already out there.

Chris: That’s right. Nouns are categories, right? This category or that category. Categories are important for us to filter, but at the end of the day we still have to get things done. It’s the action of being able to turn nouns back into verbs. We don’t need to be working in the noun space. We need to be working in the verb space, if that makes any sense.

Des: Yes. The verb space is where you can actually [map] onto things that are actually happening in reality.

Chris: That’s right, versus what people say. “Oh, it was really cool.” I don’t know what cool is, and it’s not a verb. Right? So, anyway.

Web analytics: in the business of answers, not data

Des: The one product category I find that’s stunningly in need of this type of thinking is actual web analytics. So many web analytics packages are obsessed. They actually think that their job in life is to join dots on fancy, pretty, beautiful looking line charts?

Chris: Oh my gosh, Des, you’re going to open Pandora’s box here.

Des: Yes. Maybe I’ll just leave that.

Chris: It’s one of those things I’ve been waiting for somebody to bring up. So we’ve been working with Jason and Ryan and those guys at 37 Signals and looking at some of their data. What’s so interesting is people aren’t looking at data in the right way as it relates to what people are doing. They will say, “Somebody is on a page for 4.3 seconds.” I don’t know what that is. What are they doing? Where are they going? What’s the flow? They’re going from here to there, and what’s the pattern of behavior through it? And when you start to time slice the data, people aren’t using time slicing the right way. So it’s one of those things when you start to see patterns of how people are behaving on the web, not, like, “Oh, they went here and they backed out, and then they went here and they backed out, and then they went here and here and here.” Okay. Let’s look at the patterns of behavior in it. Let’s not just say, “Oh, they are on this page for 3.2 seconds and they went here and they went there.” You need to look at it as each individual session, and then build the job that they were trying to get done in that session, and then look at the patterns of sessions. It’s very, very different. What you find is I find that web analytics is driven by the math guys who know how to analyze the data, but don’t have a theory of how it works.

Des: Yes. I would even possibly be harsher.

Chris: Please do.

Des: I honestly think what it’s driven by is the data points we can easily collect, and the prettiest looking visuals that we can easily render. That’s what [inaudible 16:14] obsess over. They call it analytics, but when’s the last time a product actually did any analysis for you? Analysis, to me, looks like that new on boarding you launched. [It’s] actually causing you more friction up front, and you’re dropping customers at a rate of five more than you were before. That’s analysis. Programatically, software can do that for you. But what they’ll actually tell you is, they will just show you a lot of numbers and spark lines.

True consumption versus sign-ups

Bob: I remember Chris and I having deep discussions around what does consumption look like. How do you know that somebody is consuming your webpage? What does consumption mean? What are they doing and how do you know it? It’s taking that conversation and then turning it into, all right, how do I look at the data to see if I can see whether they are consuming or not. So it’s not about them coming. Some people will say, “Well, how many people signed up?” My thing is that sign up is not consumption. How many people are putting in tasks? How many people are creating lists? How many people are doing those things? That’s real consumption, versus, “Hey, how many people signed up?” The thing is, people are focused on the money side, which again, I’m not saying it’s wrong, but money is not necessarily the true consumption. It’s where they make the commitment, but that’s not where they create the value.

Des: That’s true, but also, [inaudible 17:37] on sign ups. That’s such an easy number to goose.

Host: Yes.

Des: You could just try within sign in via Facebook. Let’s redefine an active project manager as somebody who has signed in via Facebook. Now it’s one click, and all of a sudden your numbers will go up. You’ve just basically gamed your own system.

Chris: They’re not consuming it any more. They’re just able to sign up easier. So sign up doesn’t mean consumption.

Host: Is anybody doing it well, do you think, Des? I think you’re spot on. It needs to be called, like, web data collection. I can attach page views and I can create events and I can get all these data points, but there isn’t real analysis. The interesting thing is what Bob’s talking about is still incredibly complex math computations and theory building using the data, but I don’t know if there’s anybody out there that’s doing it well, or even getting close to it. Have you heard anybody or talked to anybody that has a hunch?

“The fundamental shift that has to happen in that whole industry is that they need to realize they’re actually in the business of answers, not in the business of analysis or analytics or data collection.”Des Traynor

Des: No. Luckily, no. I could see different ways. The fundamental shift that has to happen in that whole industry is that they need to realize they’re actually in the business of answers, not in the business of analysis or analytics or data collection. They’re in the business of answers. So it’s, like, answer me a question. If I log into Google Analytics, I’m actually going there to answer a question, and that question, really, where you look at where the volume is, the low order bids here are how many hits did we have yesterday? That’s really worth nothing to me. A question I want to answer is, given the rate of growth for the blog, how long before we have a million monthly visitors? Or, more likely, what will our traffic be like in June? There are questions I have that inform decisions we make, and what does a 2% increase in sign-ups look like cash wise to our business? These are things that people want answers to. If everyone just sat down and said, “We’re now in the business of answers for web businesses,” they will realize that spark lines and fancy charts and [data pickers] and all that sort of stuff isn’t actually what people are chasing.

Bob: Yes. The thing is that, what we’ve been able to do is do the jobs. Find out the jobs, for example, of Base Camp. Then go into the data. You can see behavior of people who are behaving that way to say, for example, help me think this through, which is they create lots of lists. They invite a bunch of people. They do all these things. But they don’t check anything off, and that’s okay. What their job is, is to help me think it through. Help me get all the tasks out. Help me get the different buckets out. Help me invite the right people to look at it. Make sure I get comments on it. But it’s not about check, check, check, check. But if you look at somebody else you has the job of cover my ass, which is, I want to make sure that I don’t get sued, it’s, like, “Here’s the task. When did you check it off? What’s the date?” But you can see that behavior in the data. So when you have the jobs you actually now have the theory of what you need to go form the analytics around. That is what true consumption is. That’s the power of this thing, and so to me, no one is working on that, and I can’t find anybody who is willing to work on that. As Chris says, it’s complex math. I know it’s complicated now. We need to make it simpler, but I’ve been working on this for five, six years. It’s just one of my passions. So when I said you open the box – and I apologize for those who are bored by this conversation.

Zombie revenue and the customer who has already fired you

Host: I want to jump in for a second because I believe it goes back to what Clay said. The idea of, analytics built a product. But I don’t believe anyone upstreaming, and this comes from me having years of doing reports and saying, “Hey, here’s the pretty graphic,” and then just getting the cheers. Hey, the numbers went up! Yay! Things are great! No one has any clue at all what’s going on.

Host: Except for when you sit with me and we sit down and talk about that stuff.

Host: I get blasted. But the idea of, until upper management or anybody up there has the question that clears the space in their mind to say, “You know what, we need to think differently.” Because everyone in the company out there is getting ran by the desk trainer. They’re not thinking of it on that level. They’re all just sitting there saying, “You know what? I hired this company to do analytics management for me, do SEO for me, do social for me, whatever the job they hire at this company for, just show me positive numbers. I just want to see green.” I believe [that] until you have management that can see that there’s something deeper here, there are deeper insights we can pull from this information. I don’t think anyone is going to create a product for that until we have that conversation.

Host: So there’s one simple question. How many people are paying for your product and not using it, and just waiting to leave, but they don’t know how? When you ask that they’re going to say, “I don’t know.” All right. Let’s look at the number of people who are paying who haven’t logged in and used your product. When are they going to go? That’s when people go, “Holy crap. Nobody has asked that us question before.”

Host: I think they’re afraid to ask it.

Host: The reality is, they have to ask it. That’s real. That’s fundamentally real. How many people are on the verge of quitting? We see the positive side, but how many people are on the verge of quitting something? It’s like sugar synch, right? I have Sugar synch, I have Amazon, I have Drop Box. I used sugar synch religiously until it got all convoluted, and I’m still paying for it, because I’ve got a bunch of data out there. But I’m not actively synching with it anymore because it literally corrupted all of my computers. I still have it out there, but it’s one of those things that if they looked at me and said, “Well, wait a second. You were using this a whole bunch. Now you’re not using it, but you still have data on it.” I’m on the verge of, if I can just figure to how to transfer, if I get the time to transfer the data from that over to Amazon, I’m done. How many people are on the verge of quitting, but they’re never asking those questions because they don’t understand true consumption?

Des: Two or three, I guess, interesting things on that. It’s funny you brought that up. That’s one of the things interim actually can do, which is show you who is about to quit. We have a segment called slipping away. It’s people that are inactive. We call it zombie revenue.

Chris: Love it.

Des: You’re counting it, but it’s actually dead. [There are] two interesting things we’ve learned from that. Mentally, you have already fired sugar synch, right?

Host: Yes. That’s correct.

Des: They’re gone. I’ll tell you what hasn’t happened. You haven’t been triggered to cancel.

Host: The bill came the other day, and it was one of the things like, “Okay, do I have the time to download the 75 gig of data?” I got on it. I don’t know where to put it. Screw it. I’ll pay [for] it one more year and keep going. I haven’t had the pain to have to get rid of it, but it’s exactly right. I haven’t had to fire it, is really the role there.

Des: We looked at this ages ago. We worked with a few customers. We reached out to lots of people who have recently quit web products. We’re trying to work out what the cause or quit is, and if you take a really naive analysis, and this is one of the points of Intercom. Here’s what’s going to happen with you, Bob. You’re going to quit. I guarantee you there are two ways that’s going to cause you to quit. One of the themes sugar synch is going to send you a reminder email one day when you actually have a bit of time to spare, and you’re going to say, “Right. Then I’m actually go ahead and do it.”

Host: There they are, like, “Hey, you haven’t been back. You should be back.” I’m like, “No, I should fire you.”

Des: That’s exactly what’s happening, right? And then the other thing that’s likely to [happen], and this is really common, they will either say, “Thank you, Bob, for another $2,000 to cover for your yearly payments.” And you’ll go, “Shit, I meant to cancel that ages ago!”

Host: That’s right.

Des: Or your credit card expires, right.

Host: Oh, that’s a good one.

Host: That’s a good one.

Host: It’s automatic.

Des: What I love about the credit card expiring are the…

Host: I wish the credit card would expire sooner sometimes. I have no idea some of the time. Oh my God, Yes, I’m still paying for that. I didn’t know that.

Des: I always ask for a credit card that expires every year, because it actually forces me to reconsider all my purchases every October.

Host: Oh, I love it. Then you don’t have to cancel.

Des: Exactly. The worst damage they can do to me is accept books for the next six months. Then I just know they’re gone. And what’s hilarious is, this is one of the points at Intercom. When you cancel with Sugar synch, right, they’re going to count that as churn. It will be July 2014 or something. We lost Bob. He was a great customer. What went wrong? You’re going to get some email from some dude on the sales team at sugar synch, and he’s going to b alike, “Hey Bob. Notice you’re a big heavy user, but you quit. What can I do to get you back? How’s about a 10% discount?’

Host: You’ll be, like, “Dude, I quit mentally in 2013.”

Host: 2012, really.

Des: 2012, exactly. Whereas Sugar synch, if they had an Intercom solution or something like Intercom, what they would actually realize is they would have spotted it the very second you stopped using it.

Host: That’s right.

Des: It’s debatable whether or not they could have ever reclaimed you as a customer, but at the very least they would have gotten fresh data about why you’re quitting, which is actually this [corruption] issue, you know?

Host: Yes, but in Sugar synch, so we’re talking about one specific instance, but it’s interesting that when you think about all the other backup appliances, devices, services, things that you have signed up for since you mentally fired sugar synch, you are entrenched in a new solution. At the moment that you fire it, I’m still looking. I’ve got to figure this out, and sugar synch is out. And it’s one specific [example]. We’re talking about Bob’s use of one product. I would think that there’s an opportunity for them at this point to say, “Hey, we notice something is going wrong here. Did you know about ‘XYZ’ feature, or this other product we offer?” It’s before you jump. I’m looking around the office. You’ve got time capsules. You’ve got Amazon going. For the sales guy to come in now it’s, like, “Bro, I have spent a thousand dollars since I fired you two years ago. This is a foregone conclusion.” That’s right. So I think it’s very cool. So what Intercom is doing is it’s measuring true consumption at the moment of consumption and giving you signals to say, “Hey, something is wrong. Something is different. Something has changed. You need to reach out.” To me, a product like yours would have told them to say, “Wait a second, he’s deleting computers. They’re not synching up as often.” They should have had enough cues. Let’s be clear. They have enough interaction with me to know that there’s a problem.

Des: Absolutely.

Host: In the manufacturing world we have something called statistical process control to know when is there a special cause to the variation of how things are happening, and at some point in time it’s got to be like, “Hey, this has changed. You need to reach out.” So, to me, you’re the SPC of web, which is awesome.

Des: Right. The high level problem for me is just that, at counting, product engagement, [they] just don’t cross swords enough. What sugar synch [makes] money for and what their product team was building and what their customers are actually using are usually three different things.

Price to the job, not the category

Host: That’s right. And what they value, because at some point somebody would say, “Boy, I’m willing to value this for a lot more.” They end up usually valuing things to the lowest common denominator. That’s the thing that’s most amazing to me. People take the lowest common denominator as opposed to saying, “Hey, I can charge $100 bucks as opposed to $10 bucks and have people have more value for what I do than charging people $10 bucks and thinking they can switch every two months.”

Des: Exactly. I would agree.

Host: So it’s very powerful stuff.

Chris: Wait, I want to go back to that. You said people value things for the lowest command denominator.

Host: So product companies. When they’re looking at it they say, “How do I get the most people?” It’s usually the lowest price. My thing is that if you value one thing, you find the situation where it’s valued the most. Boy, people value this a lot. They’re willing to pay $100 bucks. Think of the alarm clock for the kid that’s two years old or three years old that just learned how to get out of their bed and come into the parents room. We interviewed a guy about that, and he basically said, “I want to pay $100 bucks for this alarm clock so my kid wouldn’t come in a room before 7 a.m. because they would walk in at 3 a.m. .” So at that moment what they’re doing is saying, “Well, what would people pay? Well, all the other alarm clocks are this price. We should be about 30 dollars.” Literally everybody you interviewed came back and said, “To have my kid not come in until seven o’clock?” That’s worth 100 bucks to me.” So they’re taking it to the lowest common denominator of what other clocks are charging as opposed to what’s the value of one clock, which is a clock that kids can read, that they don’t get out of the room until seven.

Host: Excellent. Okay. Got it.

Des: Yes, they’re selling in the clock category rather than selling on the job to be done.

Host: That’s exactly right.

Host: Wow. perfect.

“Yes, they’re selling in the clock category rather than selling on the job to be done.”Des Traynor

Lean and Jobs-to-be-Done

Host: So you touched for a little bit about the lean startup conference that you spoke at in San Francisco. I’ve got this theory that within the lean methodology are the bullet points are, get out of the building, talk to the customers, understand if your product is actually providing value, that sort of thing. My perspective on it is that it’s all great advice, but that’s kind of where it leaves off. At this point, I always view Jobs-to-be-Done as the method. So if you prescribe to lean and you think you need to get out of your building and go talk to customers, use the jobs interview and the jobs conversation to have those conversations. It’s not a pick list or a list of questions, but at least it’s a method to be able to say, “Okay, here’s the general way that I’m going to have a conversation with a prospective customer.” How do you see jobs and lean interacting? Do you see any of that, or do you look at it in a different way? I’m really interested to hear both how the conference went and how you think about it.

Des: The conference was good. I got a few good talks. I’ve read the lean manifesto. I’ve read the book. I’m familiar with a lot of what they preach. I agree with a lot [of it]. A lot of it is standard practice if you are building a startup and you really want to find answers quick. I think whenever people talk about jobs and lean they try to imply that jobs isn’t someway a subset of lean, as in, if you say, “Here’s what you should be really focusing on, things people are trying to do,” of course that’s what we do. That’s not really true. They are not in any way conflicting, but there are two different skillets that need to be applied. Lean is more, for me, about how you build your product, and to some degree how you run your business. Jobs is really about how you understand the place of a product in the world. When it comes to, say, getting out of the office and going to talk to customers, Yes, obviously no one would ever say that that’s a bad idea. So what I find interesting is, lean doesn’t advise people to focus enough on what I would consider to be real paying points. I always tell people, show me a check or a credit card that was swiped to solve a problem.

Host: I love that.

Host: I love that.

Host: That’s an awesome quote.

Host: I don’t know if you know, [but] the history of jobs actually comes from two generations earlier from lean. So lean is actually from six sigma. Sig sigma really is from TQM, and TQM really comes from the Toyota production system. In the mid ’80s when I was a freshman in college I happened to be Dr. Demming’s [SP] gopher boy. I was an intern for him. So I learned all the process control, all the lean principles, all that stuff early on. One of the methodologies that I was responsible for helping to translate was something called quality function deployment, QFD, and it’s about connecting the voice of the customer down to the production floor. The thing that they had no real ability to do was to connect and pull apart the voice of the customer to what they really meant, and as I tried to apply QFD in the US and in Europe, [I] just found that the language and the market research we had was inadequate. So it all is derived from a lot of the lean principles, which is, we need to be able to make tradeoffs. We need to be able to understand what people value. We need to understand what things they are willing to trade off on, and how do we translate that down to what we do. So Jobs, it really does come from a lean perspective from that way. But I think it proceeds lean because it was really about this idea of translating the voice of the customer into what do we do and not do.

Des: Yes. I would agree. I think one of the reasons my talk went down quite well, I guess, at the lean startup conference was that it gave more . . . It was kind of, like, okay, you’re out of the office. Now what? That was almost where my conversation started.

There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.

Watch behavior, not the literal voice of the customer

Chris: That’s awesome. That’s the thing. People would say, “All right. We need to get the voice of the customer.” Okay, what does that mean? How do we talk to them? What you found is people would say things one way, but they would behave differently. To me, what I came to believe is what they say and what they do are totally different. I actually don’t believe half of the things that people say, but when they talk about what they say they do, [the verbs], and you interrogate them the right way through the jobs interview, now you can talk about behavior. But otherwise, when they say, “Oh, I like it,” or, “It’s read enough,” or whatever that is, to be honest, it’s all BS. I have a hard time believing that.

Des: People take the phrase voice of the customer too literally, I guess.

Chris: That’s right.

Des: It’s actual, probably, the behavior of the customer or the action of the cushion is what you want to listen to.

Chris: That’s right. I don’t think you need to listen to them. I think you need to be able to watch them. Sometimes you can get some of the words, but, again, looking for the verbs, not the nouns. I think that’s big.

Des: Exactly.

Focus on the core jobs, not the edge cases

Chris: So where do you see jobs going?

Host: Well, before we dive into that, what are you doing with jobs at Intercom now? We’ve got the on boarding. Do you guys have an ongoing workflow that it fits into? I know we talked to Alan and talked about the user stories, and it sounds like you’re using those. But what’s the day to day? Or is there one?

Des: The day to day at Intercom has a large number of jobs it can do. The typical one would be something, like, get feedback from you from important users. And the day to day is understanding how well we perform on these jobs based on bugs in the software, complaints or feedback from customers about . . . It’s usually, like, what we’re most interested in is, “I wanted to use this feature, but I couldn’t because of X.” It’s understanding the barriers to adoption, or understanding the barriers to frequent usage for any give job, and then working on smoothing the path for people. So we do actually have, internally, documents which list out jobs that we do, jobs that Intercom has hired for. We focus on improving the product for those. You can see our marketing site calls out specific jobs. We don’t literally write them in in some use case format. We certainly call out specific jobs that we know that people enjoy the product for. We also know, we have seen checks written to solve these problems. We have seen people spend money or spend time to get this stuff done, and we pitch Intercom as a tool that does this job. What’s useful there is, one thing I learned through previous products and when we used to consult at software companies, in the early stages a lot of companies, somebody will sign up and they will be using the product in something that’s slightly an edge case. When you are early, you’re flattered by the fact that, “Oh, look, we can even do this as well.” What you tend to do is actually support the edge case, and later on you tend to promote the edge case. You see even big companies do it. People are even using Microsoft service in an operating theater.

Host: Yes.

Des: You’re, like, “Right.” That is edge case use. The problem is, you’re now literally pitching to your weaknesses. Somebody should not be using their product for that. When we talk about where Intercom goes we restrict what we say. People use Intercom for literally, probably thousands of different types of jobs. But we restrict anything that we say to the ones that we know are excellent at that.

Chris: The thing is that, what you find is, when you’re really good there are four or five jobs that you do, and then they will pull it to over things.

Des: Of course. Base Camp is a perfect example of that, right?

Chris: That’s exactly right. Base Camp is a good example. There’s something called Magic Eraser, which I love. It’s another really good example. People aren’t buying it to do all these other things. They’re buying it to get the marker off the wall so they don’t have to repaint. So it competes with repainting, but once they get it in the house they’re using it to clean pots and pans and shoes and floors and all these other things, but they’re not using it to clean those other things. It’s just a real interesting thing.

Host: We leap from software to consumer package goods. Now people are going to be going on magic eraser.com trying to figure out if it’s some kind of software or something. No, it’s an actual eraser.

Des: What I love about that example, though, is that you could imagine. Consumer package goods is great, because these guys have got to get categorized in a supermarket book.

Host: That’s right.

Des: If they wanted to sit beside oven cleaner they would look like a terrible product, right? You’re looking at some sort of heavy duty wire gauze and all this sort of stuff, and then you’ve got this thing that claims it can erase marker off the wall. You’re, like, “What the hell? I’m not going to clean my oven with that.” It’s always important to pitch to your [killer] use case. Base Camp, I’m sure if they tested this they would find . . . Imagine a home page where it was, like, “Use us to plan your wedding.” I know for a fact that people use Base Camp to plan weddings, but it would lose a fight of wedding [anecdotes].

Host: That’s right, but it’s one of those things where if it does one job well people are going to say, “Well, I can use it for this or I can use it for that.” That’s what the whole notion is. If you play to your strength they will actually extend the jobs that you do to other places. If anything, you need to just advertise and say, “Use number 482: wedding planning.” It’s, like, “Wow.” All of a sudden the people are, like, “Wow. I could use [that].” They haven’t thought about it. So how do you actually just change the advertising and the messaging to actually help with the use cases, but at the same time focus on, these are the five core jobs we do, and oh, by the way, people have used it for these other things. So, to me, you don’t have to be the best at wedding planning anymore. It’s because I’m comfortable with it. I use it for all these other things. Oh my gosh. I could use Base Camp to plan my wedding.

Des: Exactly. I think the difference is, is that, like, when somebody is familiar . . . Apologies to the team [inaudible 41:25] for keep using their product, but I know how everything works in Base Camp, for example. I use it and have used it for many, many years. I know the product inside out. So if I came and we’re planning, say, a home renovation project, I’m sure there are tools out there to do that. But I have to do and learn how to use that tool. I don’t really want to do that. My perspective shifts from what’s the best tool for me right now, as opposed to what’s the best holistic tool. Best for me right now is one where I don’t have to do any learning. I can literally start making lists and assigning tasks today, versus signing up for [inaudible 42:03] getting a welcome email, dropping into a tutorial, watching a couple of video guides, reading some documentation. I really feel that if you can capture a few use cases really, really well, you don’t need to market the edge cases. They actually happen anyway. We stopped them. I wish we could, at times. People are going, like, “Hey, I’ve installed Intercom into a Chrome app that works as part of a Chrome plugin, so actually it’s inside of a browser inside of a browser,” and I’m just like, oh God, can we stop this from happening?

Host: Well, to be honest, that’s how Jason and Ryan and David all came up with Base Camp one, which is, how do we have the one-time fee for $25 for one project for one thing where people can say, “Yes, I’m putting this addition on my house. We’re going to run it through Base Camp.” I don’t have to buy it through my corporate account. I’m not going to use it. It’s there. It’s one time. It’s a one-time fee, and you saw enough jobs where people got it done. It was no more change than turning off a couple of features that said you could add projects. It’s one project and it’s one fee, and it’s fixed. So it’s those kinds of things where you can find the extremes, but then you can make it easier for people to do it. So you look for non-consumption there. It’s low hanging fruit.

Des: Absolutely.

Where Jobs-to-be-Done goes next: a book and a shared language

Chris: So what do you see as the future for jobs? Where is it going?

Des: I think you guys need to write a book.

Host: About what?

Des: I’m really only speaking from the software industry perspective. I know there are far wider reaching applications, but a lot of different movements whether it’s Lean Startup, or whether it’s Getting Real, or whatever, there have been seminal books along the way that have basically changed the industry’s way of thinking about things. People used to use Microsoft front space express to build websites, and then a guy called Jeffrey Selden wrote a thing called” Designing Web Standards”, and now literally the entire industry shifts. People used to not think that they could turn a side product into a million dollar business, and then a book called “Getting Real” came along and that changed all that. People used to think that building your company involved massive overheads and massive funding, and then Eric Ries wrote “Lean Startup”. I feel like there’s a gap, and it’s a necessary step if you like the process, or whatever they categorized jobs as, for it to mature as a way that people work. There needs to be a seminal piece of literature. Often times, at the end of my talks, people come up and say, “What should I do? How do I read more?” I’m, like, “Well, you should check out jobs[inaudible 44:47].org, of course. By the way, this great paper called “Marketing Malpractice”, and there’s also this other paper that’s [inaudible 44:55], and there’s also this other paper, and there’s a half a chapter in this book.” You keep going and going. I’m saying so many things because I can’t say one thing.

Chris: Yes. So we’re working on that.

Host: That’s a good piece of advice. I think you’re right, though.

Des: So when I think about where it’s going, the logical trajectory without this change will be that it will progressively become more and more popular as more and more people talk about it. It itself will become less of a useful thing to give a conference talk about. People have heard it. So it itself can’t be the core of the talk. You know how people say, like, of course we’re an agile company. Logical trajectory is to head towards the agile software movement, where everyone agrees, everyone is on board with it. It never really had its defining moment, I guess,[ inaudible 45:48] manifesto for them. What I would really like to see is, there have been books in design “About Face” or [Don Norman] “The Design of Everyday Things.” It has changed entirely how people think about software. I feel that jobs is the opportunity to do that. The future, for me, is getting it to a point where if you’re a product designer and you haven’t read this book, you’re probably not a good product designer.

Host: Wow. I love it.

Host: We’ve got a book. It’s in the last changes. It’s written like the book “The Goal”, which is Shelly [SP], who is a product manager and going through development of a piece of software. How she struggles the whole way through to find out the right things to do for it, and how she finds jobs, and what jobs are, and how they work in software. So we’re using Mike Rhodes [SP]out of Milwaukee. He did the “Rework” book and “Remote”. He did all of the illustrations for that. He’s in the midst of just finishing up those illustrations. So that’s the first book. I’m actually going to see Clay next week. We’re working on an HBS book for jobs.

Des: That’s going to be excellent.

Bob: It’s very case study based, academic. I’m trying to make sure we can build some practicality into it. So we should have some kinds of things out there, but we also have a Udmey course out there that we have been working on. So I don’t know if you have seen that, but I really would appreciate some feedback on that if you had the chance to see that [inaudible 47:38] course. So Chris, anything to add?

Chris: Yes, so definitely check [that] out. We think of the [inaudible 47:50] course as the online version of the Switch workshop. It’s 16 hours of video. You learn to interview. You learn the frameworks. We’ve seen a lot of international consumption of that. People that can’t come to the Switch.

Documenting jobs so a team can use them

Des: That’s great. I guess the interesting [thing] about Switch is that as a workshop it’s really useful for teaching you how to actually ask deep questions, and even just how to think about product consumption. An extra piece that’s missing, and I think everyone is making up their own way of [doing this] right now, is the documentation side of jobs. So let’s say that you guys work with some hot new startup and you help them interview all their customers. They really get amazing insights. The stuff you guys deliver. How do they package that up and bring it back to the team? What does a job look like? Is it written on a whiteboard? Is it a paragraph of text? Are there numbers and mats inside it? Exposing that side of the workflow, I think, is important just to give people a language. I’ve definitely talked to people who have said they practice jobs we don’t look like. It’s chalk and cheese, who they actually talk about it.

Host: Yes, so Chris and I, we’re working on something earlier this week and then we’re trying to fit it into the corporate format of power point. It was just driving us crazy.

Chris: It’s what we’ve done for years.

Host: Right. So we’ve said, screw that. Let’s just start over. What would we do? So we said, “You know, we’re going to create a four foot by four foot piece of paper, and we’re going to foot everything on it. We’re going to end up printing it and creating it as a board to sit in the war room.” Here’s the job. Here’s what it’s about. Here’s what it’s not about. Here’s what the value code is. Here’s what the energy looks like. Here’s the positive energy. Here’s the negative energy. Here’s the insight. Here’s the tradeoffs people are willing to make in this job. So it becomes this icon to help people see the whole that’s not on an eight and a half. I feel [that I’m being] so constrained by that eight and a half piece of paper.

Host: So the thing that we’re trying to get to, [and] it speaks to your answer to our previous question of how are you using jobs at Intercom today, and what we find is that if they’re not living things in the office, if it’s not something that you can actually have and look at and say, “Okay, we’re thinking about building this feature. Let’s look at the five jobs that we serve.” Would it help people with job number one? No. Would it help people with job number two and four? Maybe. But if it’s hidden in a 50 page deck somewhere in some Base Camp project that I’ve got to print out and we’re all going to cram and go through, it makes it too difficult. So one of the things we’re really trying, so Bob, it’s a canvas wrapped big four foot board. All right, this is now the war room and we have a decision to make. Either we trust our research or we don’t, but if we trust it we’re going to go in there and say, “All right, we’re going to talk about this one person who had job number one, and I want to talk about this feature we’re building for Intercom.” Let’s play through how they would interact with it. Would it make things harder, easier? Would it break down barriers? We might need some help, but we’re going to do some writing and maybe some presenting on how to come up with these boards. We feel, so what we have found in the Power Point, we will have 15 slides that describe one job. So one is what it’s about. One is what it’s less about. One is the energy through time. One is the [Pixar]. We have all these methods, but turning page after page, unless I can see it all in front of me I’m trying to remember what was five pages ago. I think you’re spot on. I think that’s the next thing that needs to involve in order for us – we want to be able to go back to it is months from now and say, “Okay, let’s revisit this. Let’s talk about a feature. Let’s take a look at it.”

Host: The other thing that’s next after this is that after we start to see [tests] of jobs you start to see questions you can ask. So it’s almost, like, what are the ten to 15 questions you can ask up front that actually help people understand what job they’re in? There’s a way in which the web, and the way you serve up questions to people, can help them actually shop better. To me, I think that where we’re headed is there are questions and there’s math, and there are starting to be ways in which to take emotion, social and functional requirements, wrap them together and say, “Hey, what are you trying to do?” It’s not that direct, but it’s, like, “Hey, have you done this? Or are you coming from this perspective?” So as you start to see the portfolio of jobs you understand the right set of ten questions that then create the space and the brain for the solution to fall into. So I think the role of the web is to help, again, it’s about answering questions. But I also think it’s about asking questions so people can do the hard work up front to know what they want. As consumers, we need to become better shoppers.

What people really buy: the SONOS story

Des: Yes, that’s the flip side of it. One thing I’m quite good at now is spending money more effectively. I’ll tell you a silly example. I was going to a fancy dress party on New Year’s Eve. I was on 8th street here in San Francisco. I was looking to buy a silly outfit and I was shopping at all these hipster stores, and what I realized very quickly was I was buying irony and they were selling cool.

Host: Awesome.

Des: I was willing to spend maybe $20 bucks for a stupid looking jumper, whereas they were selling what I would consider to be stupid looking jumpers for $150. They were, like, people would come in here and look at that and go, “Shit, that’s cool.”

Host: It’s the alarm clock.

Des: It’s exactly that. I saw a lowly example of this in Target the other day. So SONOS has this whole huge set up in Target. A guy came running in. I was just watching to check SONSO stereos. A guy came running in. He goes straight over to the sales dude. He’s, like, “Hey, I want to get something set up for my apartment. Just moved in. I’m thinking of going 7.1,” and the consumer starts throwing out all these different terms. And the sales person was so polite. He listens to him. He makes all the right facial expressions, as if he cares, and then at the very end of it he goes, “Let’s talk about your sitting room.” He’s like, “Okay.” “Describe it to me.” So he gets the dude to draw out a little map of a sitting room on a piece of paper, and then they talk about that for a while. He goes, “Tell me about your friends. Who has got the best one?” It became so clear to me 30 seconds in the conversation this dude was jealous of Hell over one of his friends. So he wasn’t buying SONOS. He was buying getting even. That was his actual sales pitch.

Host: Who is this Target sales guy, and what does he want for a salary?

Host: And why is he still at Target?

Host: And why is he not the CEO of Best Buy?

Host: That’s amazing.

Des: It was so interesting, because all the stuff that this dude described about his friend’s apartment, very little of it had anything to do with sound. Sound was just the most obvious. What he was describing was this nice view, and he was like, “Right. I can’t sell you a new view.” He was able to map his requirements of how to have a better set up than your friend, which is actually what the guy wanted. [He] realized you also need a new sofa or a new couch. He wants one of those La-Z-Boy sort of things. He walked out of there with a shopping list of stuff, and a wood piece, which he didn’t buy. It was probably $1,000 worth of equipment. [It was also] a stereo. He also realized he needed so many other things. I think he also bought a television in Target that day as well.

Host: Oh my gosh. That’s the best fly on the wall jobs interview you could have.

Des: It was such a great understanding of, this dude wasn’t buying sound. He was buying a solution to jealousy, and that’s what the guy sold him, and that’s why he took a lot more money. Sound systems cost maybe $500, but that wasn’t what he was shopping for.

Host: That’s right. Jobs is also rooted in the sales side. It’s really rooted in the buying side. What do you want to do? So to me, good sales people actually know Jobs-to-be-Done, because all they’re really worried about is not their product, but what the customer is really trying to do.

Host: And the completely blows my mind. We sit with so many entrepreneurs, well, actually when we say entrepreneurs, more of the established players in the industries, that sit down with us and say, “Oh, we can’t get margin anymore. Our competitors are eating our lunch. We can’t find any place to get money anymore.” We will talk to ten customers and we’re, like, “Dude, you left so much money on the table by just missing the simplest steps that you could have just nailed by just listening.” It just kills me.

Host: That’s right.

Building the Jobs-to-be-Done community

Chris: Are you between San Francisco and Ireland now, Des? Where are you at?

Des: I still consider myself living in Ireland, but I spend a lot of time in San Francisco. I’ve grown to like the city. I probably do maybe eight, nine months of the year in Dublin, and the rest in San Francisco. I travel back and forth for things like board meetings and customers. I run a customer facing team, so we necessarily have to cover a lot of time zones. We’ve got people in Italy, people in Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco. I travel around a bit.

Chris: We need your help. One of our big initiatives for 2014 is getting the Jobs-to-be-Done meet ups off the ground. I don’t know if you’re involved in the one that’s taking shape in San Francisco, but it would be great to get you linked up with those guys if you aren’t, and the other one is, I know there is a movement in Ireland going on, or at least we’ve got some questions about it. So Laurence Vail . . .

Host: Laurence Vail, Yes.

Chris: Is out there. He has asked about a switch workshop, possibly on the calendar for 2014 in Ireland. But what we’re interested in and what we’re seeing happen is, the Switch workshop is a big ordeal. Either before or after those switch workshops we have seen little clusters of people, 10, 20 , 30 people get together on a monthly basis just to share job stories, share technique. Do a little learning. That sort of thing.

Host: Do some interviews. Like, in New York last month they did an interview.

Host: On Alan.

Host: On Alan buying a sofa. He goes, “Oh my God. I didn’t really understand all the things that were going into my decision until I actually went through it.” I’m, like, “That’s the power of jobs. Sometimes it’s not at the surface. It’s underneath.” It’s good. I know we just put together the schedule of all the switch conferences we’re going to be doing for 2014. I think we’ve got two in San Francisco that we’re scheduling or trying to schedule. What we’re trying to do is any town where we do a switch conference, we’re trying to build some meet up . . .

Host: Groups.

Host: Groups that support it. I think we’ve picked Argentina and Ireland and possibly Australia as three target countries to try to, if we can go outside the country, to go outside the country. If you can help in any way that would be greatly appreciated.

Des: Yes, I definitely can. I know Laurence Veil [SP] pretty well. He’s a great guy. You should totally thank him on the podcast today. He’s really interesting. He would be a good person also to start a meet up in Dublin, and I would be more than happy to help. There’s a great design scene in Dublin. People would lap this stuff up pretty quick.

Host: Cool.

Des: I think it’s definitely doable. There’s enough large companies as well that would be able to pay to attend the workshop as well, so I think it’s definitely worth doing. Then San Francisco, I think you guys sold out your last workshop here.

Host: Yes. We did.

Des: The story writes itself out here for the most part. Yes. I’m looking forward to this happening. It’s going to be fun.

Host: If you’re ever flying through Detroit you got to let us know. If know if you’re going West Coast or you’re going West Coast back to Ireland, and you’ve got a layover, you’ve got to let us know. If you’re in Detroit you’ve got to stop in, stop at the office. We’ll show you around town. Detroit, I call it the innovation capital of the world, because it has to. Most people don’t see it that way, but it would be really great to see you in Detroit. Otherwise, I’m sure we’ll see you in San Francisco or Ireland.

Des: Absolutely. I look forward to it.

Host: Appreciate you coming on very much.

Host: The Intercom blog, I know, is one place to follow you. What’s your Twitter handle?

Des: Intercom blog is insideIntercom.io, and my twitter handle is just Des Traynor, just my name.

Host: T-R-A-Y-N-O-R.

Des: That’s right. Yes.

Host: Great. Well, thanks for the time. It was good to get a solid hour here to just bat things around.

Host: Yes. Thank you so much.

Host: This was really exciting. So we really appreciate you taking the time, and [we] hope to catch up soon again.

Host: Best of luck.

Des: Cool. Thanks so much, guys.

Host: See you, man.

Host: Thanks Des.

Host: Bye.