The Mattress Interview – Q&A

This episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio is the question-and-answer session that follows the famous Mattress Interview. Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek sit down to break down what actually happened in that interview: why they asked the questions they asked, who they chose to talk to, and how a Switch Interview reconstructs the real story behind a purchase. It is the analysis layer on top of one of the most-studied interviews in JTBD.

Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript, organized by topic. Along the way Bob and Chris cover the “weird” disconnected questions, the struggling moment, the level of detail to chase, how to recruit, and the hard part: knowing when to stop. If you have not listened to the Mattress Interview yet, listen to that first. This session builds directly on it.

Why the “weird,” disconnected questions matter

Chris: So I think the way we will do this, I’ve got the question that were collected in front of me. I will throw it out there and you can give your response and then we will bat it back and forth. The first thing we hear a lot is why do you always ask disconnected or non-related questions. This is both from, I think it comes a curiosity when people hear us interview, and it also comes from, if you got a hard core search background, it almost comes from you are wasting the participants time, right?

Chris: So we’ll get into the moment where we are getting a lot of detail and you will ask something like, you were shopping online on Amazon, where were you? I was in my home office. Was the door open or closed? And everyone always look at you like that’s such a stupid question to ask. First of all, he is never going to remember. Second of all, what differences does it make? He is on Amazon, ask what he typed in the search bar, something like that. So what is that about?

Bob: So what is so interesting to me is that I just remember the guy who had the book like and it was like that’s where I asked one of those question, was the door open or closed? And he knew it right away and the notion is that you need to get them jump back in their mind and be in that moment again.

Bob: And so asking what we would considered seemingly unrelated or kind of ridiculous kind of detail is that the notion of what we have around how the brain works is that once it’s all kind of locked in there and if you asked enough questions around it, you are going to actually trigger something that will then unleash a whole new level of detail. So it is that whole aspect of being able to and again, they might not able to answer it and then you just got to back off and you try it a different way.

Bob: And so it is the unrelated questions, because ultimately what I am trying to do is break the dam of the detail because it gets back to what they really did versus what they say they did. And like we say constantly it is not until you get 20, 25, 30 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes into an interview and then it is like, “Oh yeah I was going to run a race,” or “Oh yeah, I was thinking about a mattress for eight months,” you know? So there is a whole host of . . . it’s really about getting to the detail and getting them to remember what really happened.

Chris: I think you brought a really important tactical aspect of that too, which is you can’t pry on them because they just have no idea. You just got to let it go and move on to something else.

Comfort, not pressure: reading the struggling moment

Bob: Yeah. Well and this is where we go back and forth around the whole notion of interrogation and there is criminal interrogation and then there is intelligence-based kind of interrogation, right? And the notion here is being able to not build anxiety because they can’t answer the question. It is more about building comfort so that they can relax. So that the details are there to kind of help them and coax some sort of nurturing set of questions that aren’t set like, where were you and what did you do? Who was with you? It’s more like, who were you with? I mean it sounds it is but those subtle little differences of just the tone and the mannerism of how you do it have a huge impact of being able to get them. Because it is actually comfort that makes the wall go down. It is not force.

Chris: So you bring another interesting one. This isn’t on our list but time and time again, people that observe these interview perceive an uncomfortable vibe from the participant. It is really weird because I had corporate clients, I had people that Switch Workshops. I had all kinds of people say the person you were interviewing was so uncomfortable the whole time and you were just grilling them. And I could tell that they were shifting their weight and they were sweating.

Chris: And so my first answer is always like yeah, I want information, right? I am going to kind of hammer them and I am paying them most likely anyway so I can get the information. And I always turn around and talk to the person I interviewed and say, how was that for you? How did you feel? And the answer is 100% like that was great. I never thought so much about the purchase that I made and I wasn’t uncomfortable at all. You really had me thinking about things I hadn’t thought before. But for some reason, the outside observe always perceives it as if we just got the lights on him and the heat cranked up and we were just hammering away at him. It’s an interesting disconnect.

Bob: But I think it is also to me a good example of causality and people kind of the biases that bring to it, because it is like you are asking a question and you can see him pause and you can seem him kind of go and they look up and it kind of like. And the person who is the observer going, “Oh my god, they are sweating.” And the thing is what you really probe people about it, I am trying to find the right words to tell you.

Bob: So I am not actually struggling in a way like I feel uncomfortable. I am struggling in a way because I am actually trying to think about what I actually did and what my answer is. So like you said, it’s not like they feel like it is a lot of pressure. We’ve done things in different areas of cleanings and all these different places, and you find that as much as people think that you are drilling them, it’s like I never thought about that. I never thought about how I prepare this meal, right?

“Because it is actually comfort that makes the wall go down. It is not force.”Bob Moesta

Bob: And then it is like, “Wow when I open my eyes,” and so the things that was to me most interesting is when I did this with high school kids around the jobs that they hire school for, and the kids at the end were literally like I have never thought about so much about how I learned. And I actually learned more in this class about myself and what I need to do to change the way I study, then I think you guys got from me learning about how I do things, and I was like wow. So there was transformational on both sides of the aisle which was kind of cool.

Chris: I think there is some underlined human behavior we are describing here too is that I think there is more natural curiosity that just within people than we necessarily want to believe especially in certain segments. You were interviewing high school kids who had joined gangs and really checked out and it’s like, “I can’t get this person to be engaged,” and it like never fails. It sometimes fails but it almost never fails, right?

Chris: So there is one thing, you either get people to really engage and say this is amazing, or you will get people that probably just have too much going on at the point that you pull them aside and say, hey let me badger you for a hour and most people are just like I just can’t take the time to actually think about it. They are not perceiving stress; they are just like I am checked out.

Bob: Well and it also goes to back to, to be honest, it’s a little bit of our double triple check mechanism of are they telling us the truth, right? Because there are people who come in to just get money, or they are trying to tell you what they think you want to hear and when you start to dig and they can’t fill in some of the details. They have a notion of what this is, literally the story falls apart fast.

Chris: It’s very rare.

Bob: Yeah, but it does happen and you just got to move on.

Why memory beats observation: the level of detail

Chris: So the next question I think is around just the level of detail. So what people typically respond with is people can’t remember that much detail. So why is asking them about the last Snicker bar or Milky Way bar that they actually bought better than something like a shop along and actually saying let’s go into the store. Let’s video tape them as they do their shopping and see what catches their eye and what they pick and have them describe to us what they decided to do?

Chris: So why is this . . . we are relying so much on their memory, why do we believe that their memory has any value, or that they can actually remember why they did these things. Why wouldn’t we just observe them in real time?

Bob: Well, so for me, this is just my experience. I find that when you do shop alongs, or when you do traditional ethnographies where you are there, you become a barrier in the moment, and again, they are not going to show you what they really do. They are going to show you what they think they should be doing, or that they think you want them to be doing.

Bob: So yeah, this is the way I do that or this is how I shop. Oh yeah, I always look for the color and then I look for the name and it is like, it turns out they are trying to rationalize in some cases something that is not rational and all you are trying to get to is what is the irrational behavior that you do consistently. It’s that predictably irrational piece and so to me, it’s making sure that you can get them back to . . . the other thing to me about moving forward is it’s espoused behavior.

Bob: It is not bad to have some of that information. Oh, I really like to have this or that, or every time I buy an app, I go and search for five other apps and do this and this is how I shop for apps whether it is software. But the notion of the last time gets back to how big was the commitment and how big is the emotion tied to it? Because if there is no emotion and there is no commitment, it is I got it for free and it was a mint at the restaurant, it’s hard to get what people why they hired it.

Bob: I mean you can but it takes a lot of subtle, but like buying a house, buy a car, buying a new computer, something that has a lot of emotion and a lot of commitment to it, and again, it doesn’t have to be money commitment. It can be emotional commitment. Getting married, I mean there is a big choice.

Chris: So I think I think I will echo one of the things you bought up is that all those different methods have a lot of value, right? So I think like the shop along in the aisle is the equivalent of watching somebody using the interface you just designed from a Web perspective. It’s like you need, if you are package designer or an interface designer, that sort of feedback because it is ultimately your job to “catch their eye” and deliver a message.

Chris: This is all information that consumer is going to use as their . . . what we call “shaping up the job”, deciding if this is the right way for them to make progress. You can’t just throw a design out there, you need that sort of feedback, but when we are looking for specifically causal information, why do they pick one thing and not another? I feel like it’s impossible to do in a “set up” sort of prompted way. Which one would you buy right now? It’s very difficult because you scrape away all that situational detail you just described.

Bob: Right, we talk about this notion of red line development where it is reactive and you are waiting for things in green line development where it is proactive, and I am actually trying to understand causally what is going on up front. This is really about as I am trying to innovate and I am trying to change people’s behavior or I am trying to take things to the next level, I need to understand that switching.

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

Bob: And so to me, this is really a core method around making sure I got a very solid foundation on which to innovate off of. So to me, I still need some . . . in some cases you can say, this is like a yard stick, but I need these other methods to help me be the micrometer on the details of helping me get to that next level. But I can’t use a micrometer to help me build a whole new thing.

Bob: So there is just different methods and different approaches for different times, so it clearly is not a silver bullet. It is not a place to use it ever but it is one of those things that if you are an entrepreneur, you need to understand the mechanisms, right? If I am trying to come up with a new platform, or I have a new technology, I need to understand the mechanisms of, it might be better than everybody else, but if I don’t understand how people buy, people aren’t going to switch.

Chris: Yeah, and I think to just put a period in the end of this whole thing, I always use, whenever people have a little of doubt, I always use that Snickers and Milky Way example because the outcome is so counter-intuitive, and you never get there by just saying which one of these is better? I mean you can never get to that situational causal sort of level without doing interviews including that situational contact. So I think that story is powerful.

How to decide who to talk to: recruiting for the switch

Chris: So next question we always get, how do you decide who you are going talk to? And I think there is a lot packed into this. One is how do you actually create the questions and decide who to pick out and talk to and the other is just how do you go find people depending on what industry you are in?

Bob: So my first quick answer to that is I always use, I am a big fan of BJ Fogg and kind of what he does and I am working on design degree at Stanford right now I took his persuasion technology class and it is just phenomenal. And the reason I bring it up is it is about simplicity and that’s what he talks about. So there are very sophisticated methods for who do I talk to and that almost can be in its own podcast.

Bob: But at the same it, it is like think of it as rounds. Who are the first ten people I should talk to and who are the next ten I should talk to? If I try to figure out who are . . . if I got to talk to a thousand people, I am not going to figure that out upfront, but my thing is that the place to always start is to get five. If I am going to do ten interviews, the first five to six, maybe seven should be people who recently bought the product or switched to the product.

Bob: Or if it’s product that I am making that nobody else has, it’s like I need to find a direct competition in the consumer mind that they would do this. They would buy ours instead somebody else’s, and tell me about the people who would switch to that product recently. And then I always want to talk to people who switched away. What didn’t it do and did they find the next thing and where was it at?

Bob: So to me, it’s always starting to that basic promise of, let me talk to people who switched in the last 90 days and let me talk to some people who switched away from us in the last 90 days or away from a product in that last 90 days that I can understand kind of the key switching dynamics. And then from there, I can go wider and broader.

Bob: You get into some of these other issues around demographics and age and geography and again, I think that there are differences between some of those things and some categories and some industries, but sometimes will find there is not. There is not a difference between age, or there is not a difference between geography. So I like to always start simple.

Chris: Yeah, so one thing I will throw out is I think we have a pretty sophisticated listening audience. If they are into product development and innovation, but I talk to entrepreneurs and product developers once in a while that will put the stake in the group that there is no competitor to the product that they are developing.

Chris: I try not to laugh, but it’s like you need to step back and say people are getting this job done somehow right now. So Jason with Basecamp, they are using sticky notes. They are all over their desk. They are writing task lists down in their notebook. Your product is definitely obviously the best thing since slide bread, but they are getting it done right now. If you are sitting in that seat saying, man this thing is going to change the world and there is no competitors, just think about how people are behaving today and where you are going to bring those people from and just go interview them. That’s just the easiest way to do it.

Bob: So I look at it is that what’s the most useful framework to come from? So one of the things I always say is there are no new jobs, and people say what do you mean there are new jobs? I think jobs evolve, I think they split. They get more subtle. There is more resolution around them over time but the notion of communication has been around for a long time.

Bob: The notion of getting a note, information from one place to another place started back on horseback or people writing something down and people walking it. Now it is to email. So I think the core jobs is there are no new ones. So the issue is what’s the important dimensions of performance that are causing people to switch to the next level. So if you come that view, that every product like Facebook competes with AT&T, okay, what are the jobs we are going to steal from AT&T in terms of the phone.

Chris: That’s that yardstick you are talking about. So I have to put an asterisk in there. Jason never said that Basecamp had no competitors. I was just using Basecamp as an example. I want to put that out there. He did not have that opinion. Yeah, I just threw him under the bus.

Bob: No you didn’t. I knew what you meant but other people wouldn’t so that’s good. So the other thing is that, so for example, with Basecamp, we just literally gave us a list of people who had recently purchased or recently signed up and actually started actively using it. They gave us a list. In that case, we want to make sure we get different stories. So part of it is we are different industries, different kinds of companies, different kinds of different things and from there, we were able to reach out.

Bob: And I think we ended up using Survey Monkey just to kind to get some basic information. So I think we might get a list of a couple hundred and then from a couple hundred, it went down to, all right we will do a Survey Monkey out to them, and so many people who actually filled out the Survey Monkey, and then from there, we actually set up the interviews.

Start big: screening, surveys, and paying for time

Chris: Yeah, I think we started big. So there is two parts to that. One is we got people who just signed up and second, we got people who had just left, right? So they left six month ago. What did they switch to? I think we started probably at 1600 and started whittling down. So you always have to think, you are going to send out this email saying take our survey. Only a small percentage of that is going actually take the survey and out of that, only a certain percentage are going to “qualify” for people who you are going want to talk to. So you need to start as big as you can. If you have numbers in the thousands on this list, then that’s is a good idea. The other thing I will add is-

Bob: But you don’t have to.

Chris: No, no, no. Yeah, I am sorry. If you don’t have a thousand, don’t do it but starting with numbers does tend to make your life easier. So we are in process of putting together the online course and we did just shoot a video, screen capture sort of video of a B2B what we call screener or survey that we send out through Survey Monkey to try to do recruits. And we did it in some what of a generic . . . I actually used a CRM system as a generic example. So that is going to be in the online course.

Chris: So we are kind of half way there. We are getting there, so the next one is an easy one. How do you get people take time out their day to talk to you? You pay them. It’s not that complicated of a formula. I don’t think we ever done less than $100, but if you are going to interview 10 people, throw $1000 at it, give them an Amex gift card or a Visa gift card, whatever you want to do and pay them for their time.

Bob: Yup, there are some cool things out there like Wantful and other things you can do, say hey, we are going to send you a gift. You get to pick. I mean there is stuff you can do.

Phone, face to face, or web video?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So the next question I think is an important one. Do you prefer phone interviews, face to face, or Web video like a solution like Qualvu.com.

Bob: Yeah, so I think first and foremost, always prefer face to face but they are expensive and they are not . . . they are just to kind of logistically get, but the fact is that face to face is by far the best. Because you get mannerisms. You get body language. You can see the struggling. You can see the emotion. I mean as much as it’s about words, it’s also about what . . .

Bob: I always talk about music. Half the beauty of music is the silence. It’s the space between the notes, so the notion is that when there is no speaking and there is thinking, that’s when you can see what is going on. So to me, I always love face to face, especially even if we are going to do voice, over the phone, or video, I prefer to do it a couple face to face because you got get the feel. So to me, I can only get a feel for the basics of the job with a couple face to face minimum.

“Half the beauty of music is the silence. It’s the space between the notes, so the notion is that when there is no speaking and there is thinking, that’s when you can see what is going on.”Bob Moesta

Chris: So I’ll add. We have never done Web video without doing at least ten, no, five face to face or phone interviews first. I just think it is impossible to write that Web video what you call discussion guide, what you are going to have them do, without getting that face to face time first or over the phone.

Chris: It is interesting you brought up a point that I had never thought about too but I am reflecting on a lot of the phone interviews I’ve done in the past and I do think it might be difficult for people to sit and reflect and think on the phone because it’s like, people are afraid of that dead air. In an interview room when you are face to face, they can lean back and you can reach for your coffee, and I am going to take a couple sips here while you think about this question and we are cool.

Chris: But on the phone it is like they don’t want to just go dead air and make you feel like they hang up on you. I am still a big advocate of phone because it gives you a wide distribution and I can actually, we are doing this radio show at 10:30 a.m. If I had interviews coming up, I can pick up the phone and dial a couple people up here during the day. It is easier to slot in but you are right, you lose a little bit of that intimacy.

Bob: But you could again, if you are thinking about this is a yard stick, you can get 80-90% of what you need on a phone interview too. So again, if I am trying to be practical and trying to just bootstrap the whole thing, it’s like how do I get 10 people on the phone for a hour? And not at the same time obviously but I can have 10 and what I would do is I always would say, hey can I have half a hour and you start the half a hour and as you start the half a hour and as you get closer to the half hour, do you have extra time. Some people might not be willing to spend a hour with you but 45 minutes is enough to get there, but you can do 45 minute, 10 45 minute phone calls in a week and it will change the way you do a lot of things.

Chris: Yeah, and so I think Web video is like setting it up is like calculus. That’s the tough part is that you need to have your initial interview nailed. You need to know what exactly you are going for. It provides a lot of scale so you can do people all around the country. You can get a little bit of that intimacy because you can see their facial expressions but you got know what you are looking for going in.

Chris: So we done quite a bit of it. We are getting better all the time. Also, I did a call with the Qualvu guys earlier this week. They are launching a new product called 24 Tru? T-R-U. So it’s totally just been birthed there. They are working the kinks out but they’re live. It’s a really cool platform and I think we are doing some interview using that. So we will keep everyone updated as to how that goes because that is exiting.

Bob: And just so people know, Qualvu is basically one of the data collectors. They help do the recruiting in some cases but your job studies that we’ll be doing. They’ll actually have the protocol. They have that technological platform to collect all the data and do video capture and do editing and do transcribing and kind of all that stuff. So what we will end up doing is helping build the protocol of the assignments and they will recruit the people, get them to do the assignments, and then we end up just interfacing through our laptops and we can literally see every interview and cut and paste and analyze and do everything. So we never actually have to leave Detroit to do that which is awesome.

Chris: The technology is fantastic. So their interface, we’re getting way into this, but their interface, you can click on a word in a transcription and hit play and it will play from that word. You can cut . . . it’s just very cool. Thee big caveat. If I hear people going right to Web video and not doing face to face, I am going to be pissed. You can’t skip it.

Bob: Well, some people might do it and it is what it is. At the same time, we want to make sure people understand. I’d rather do ten voice to voice phone calls before I go to video is it is not cheap and it is going to be, well let’s put it this way, it’s cheaper than flying all over the world or all the country. At the same time, it’s not as inexpensive as getting in the phone for 45 minutes with 10 people. So again, stay simple, stay practical and when you need some scale, there is scaling tools.

How do you know when to stop the interview?

Chris: All right, so we got three more questions and then we will start to wrap this up. So this is a cool one. This came through the expert user group. This is the question out the last Switch Workshop from the W and how do you know when to stop? So we had people saying I am going 45 minutes and I feel like I got a good story but I want to just keep talking because I don’t know when to end and I just thought it was a great question.

Chris: So the answer that I gave in the expert user group is I want to know why they brought the product that they brought at that exact minute at that exact second and if I can answer that in my head, I can say I understand why you walked into the store, picked this off the shelf. Of all the things you can be doing in that moment, what is motivating you to go get this item either online or in a store or whatever. This is why you did this at this exact moment, not any other product, not any other moment. And if I have that story nailed, shake their hand, let them go. If I can’t, then I have to through another question out there and continue to probe. And you can’t kill them obviously, we talked about this in the past, but keep pushing and keep probing.

Bob: So to me, being the engineer that I am, this is all a bunch of variables, right? How long have we been talking? How articulated are they? How good is the memory coming back? How much emotion was in it? I mean there is all these different things and so at some point, it is kind of like what I would say is the best example that I can come up with is when you and I look at each other and we kind of the question. God, I am not sure I have any more. This has been awesome, right?

Bob: And you always have two or three more and I will have two or three more but the notion is that it’s just like at some point and time, you have to be able to make that call. So my thing is in a lot of cases, I might only have 80% of the story but 10 more minutes and 20 more questions isn’t going to get me that other 20%, and so to me, in some cases it might be two more interviews, the next two interviews will help fill the 20% that person couldn’t articulate, and so to me, I’m . . .

Chris: So it’s like when the conflicts have been resolved. So the other thing that I added in that answer on the expert user group was it’s an easy extension. If I can’t solve the question, it’s easy for me to challenge and have them keep talking. And what I think we typically do is like you just got done telling me how busy your week was and how your day was and you took time out to buy this thing, doesn’t make any sense to me, and let them keep . . . it will usually rejuvenate the conversation and get them back into it but I think you are right. When all . . . it’s like I can understand with high resolution what their energy was and what their emotion was, then that’s when we usually say a couple wrap up questions and let’s call it.

Bob: The other kind of limit test I have is can I play their role in the movie? Not necessarily physically but I could direct somebody or I could literally say, yup, they walked into this. This is what is going on. This is how they felt. This is what is going on. If I feel like I could give directions to somebody who is an actor to play that role, I got the bulk of the story. Part of me is sometimes I don’t have the whole story but I have enough of it that it doesn’t get pieced together until I hear more interviews, and so I am not worried about getting how do you know when the story? Most of the time it stops when I keep getting the same kinds of information, they are tired, or the fact I can play the role.

How many interviews? The rule of ten

Chris: So I think that is a good segue into it. So I am going to switch to the last two questions but I think that is a good segue into the next one. So the next question we got was how do I know when to stop doing interviews? I’ve done ten. Should I keep interviewing people. I got kind of a good feel for the space but it’s one of those nebulous things. Do I just keep hammering away at people?

Bob: I always have this rule of ten, right? So to me, I always like to do ten interviews and take a step back and ten more interviews and take a step back.

Chris: Yeah, and the other things we always say is that if you are kind of the same stories over. So it’s like I’ve heard two of this story, three of that story, four of that. You can start to say I’ve kind of, everything is starting to get repetitive. I almost know what they are going to say.

Bob: Or to the point of you know what, I need to change my recruiting because I want to get different stories, because again, we learn from the contrast, right? We don’t necessarily learn from when everything is the same. We learn when people contrast the two different. Yeah, I use it here but no, I use it that way. Oh wait a second. So they are valuing these things completely differently, and so part of it is to understand where is the value. What’s value?

Impulse and low-commitment purchases

Chris: So next question. I work in a space that involves like an impulse sort of purchase. If I talk to a bunch of people that can’t remember the details of the purchase, what do I do? We have a slide that I will put up on the website along with this radio episode that kind of details the energy or emotion related to a purchase against the perceived risk whether it is time or money.

Bob: Or commitment.

Chris: Yeah, commitment is a better word. If it is a 99 cent candy bar and I am just going to throw it away if I don’t like it, very low risk. How do I get to the stories?

Bob: In a lot of cases, it is . . . When it is low risk and low emotion, to be honest, low emotion is basically it’s almost like no, it’s habitual buying. To me, it’s not necessarily impulse, it’s the habit of I buy a pack of gum every time I go through the checkout line, but it’s the notion of you actually just have to find people who can articulate those things. So to be honest, it’s like I might have to go through 20 or 30 interviews to find that impulse low commitment things where I can do in five interviews. At least ten but I will say ten interviews, when somebody is buying a laptop, buying a house, a car, what I would say are meaningful things. It is hard to get to when people are buying things that are meaningless. When meaningless, it becomes very difficult to actually do this kind of work.

Chris: So I think the two things that we always say is one is a brute force approach, right? So you just need to do more interviews and the other, we always talk about shortening the delay. So if you are talking to somebody about buying a home, you can give them a year, a laptop, you can probably say if you bought it within the last three or four months, I can still get that story. If you are dealing with the candy bar, get them within the week. If you are going to recruit him and say, tell me the story. You were in the airport last week, you bought this. Really shortening it up and you got a better change at getting that recall.

Bob: My favorite right now is sitting in the aisle. I will go to Target and . . .

Chris: Just do interviews.

Bob: Well, the funnest thing is what you do is you just sit there and you stand at the pasta section and you just stand there and looking at it and it is just a sea of craziness. It’s like how do you pick which one and how do you know what brand. And so eventually somebody comes along and says, and it’s not even from the store, it’s actually a shopper, like you will have two in your hands and they go, can I help you? And you are like, yeah, I have no idea what to do here.

Bob: And they will say, I’ll buy this one and then you just say why do you buy that one and have you ever try this one? And you start going back and forth and you realize you can literally do an interview in an aisle and it is just awesome. So that’s kind of the Malcolm Gladwell talk about the 10,000 hours. My 10,000 hours came from hanging out in retail stores in the aisles and literally trying to play dumb about I don’t how to buy this, and what is this? And people just helping me and so it is pretty cool.

Purchase versus consumption: where standards come from

Chris: Very cool, and you had one more topic you want to cover I think?

Bob: Yeah. So I had a question around the notion of why do you always talk about the purchase and not consumption? And I just want to bring up the point because I think it is a really important aspect of I think it is important to talk about why people for example, they picked a Snicker bar and what about the Snicker bar, either deliver or didn’t deliver satisfaction.

Bob: But what happens is that I can’t actually describe what is satisfying to somebody without understanding the context of purchase and the intent of what they are buying it for. And the notion is that my standards of quality and my standards of performance and my standards of satisfaction are all determined by the moment of purchase. So without understanding moment of purchase, I actually over engineer products to hit standards that don’t necessarily, that people don’t necessarily value at the time.

Bob: And so the notion is that I got to understand the job they are hiring to do, to then talk about how well I need to deliver on it because I can actually tell that people would say, yeah, I wanted to be fast but in some cases, it should be faster than others. And so if I over engineered to just do it for everybody and in that one situation, you realize that other people are valuing it and I commoditize it.

Chris: So that’s a complex notion, right? Because as much as they have that expectation of value going in, you still need to be able to deliver on a changing aspect of or a changing level of value as they use the product and that level evolves, right?

Bob: But think about everything. Your expectation for the iPhone changes over time and the notion is when I first bought it, I expected it to do this but now over time, well, why doesn’t it do this and why doesn’t it do that? That’s why you need to understand the situational context of why they bought it in the first place, but then the people who switch out tell you what point they get so frustrated that they switch away. So it gives you the boundaries of where you have to be able to go and the performance criteria and the changing expectations.

Bob: So to me, it is very hard to talk about satisfaction, consumption, and usage without understanding the book ends it. What makes me hire it and what makes me fire it or the situations or the jobs around that, because that now sets my expectation for, because again you and I are both developers. We are both engineers trying to make trade offs to help people do things and this is not about engineering to the Nth degree without making money. So it is all about the trade offs we have to make and without the book ends, it’s hard for me to understand the trade offs.

Chris: Got it. I feel like we could do a whole other show on that and maybe we will because that is a really important concept. I think that is a great way to wrap up. So once again, April 12th, Chicago 37signals should be announced today or next week. Get your tickets. You can follow me on Twitter at @chriscbs and Bob at @bmoesta, and check out jobstobedone.org for all the latest JTBD news. Anything to add?

Bob: No. The one thing I would ask is if anybody can give us some comments back around length. I keep feeling like these should be two 30 minutes as opposed to going the hour but I know Horace is amazing. He can pull those stuff off. Sorry but we are just not that good. So I really like to know some feedback around length because I don’t have a good feel for that.

Chris: And also, if there is anything still unclear around the mattress interview, throw those questions out as well, keep them coming. We can always circle back on the next episode and add some more. We would be happy to do that.

Bob: Or any questions in general. The other thing is people would like another interview up there so if we have any other interviews, having them recorded will help.

Chris: Yup, absolutely.

Bob: Thanks.

Chris: Thanks everyone.

Show notes & links

Items referenced in this episode:

• 5 Insights from the Switch Workshop – Paul Pedrazzi
• Qualvu – Web Video Research and 24tru
• BJ Fogg