It's more than just Milkshakes. Get the latest on Jobs-to-be-Done here.

Jason Fried on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio

Chris Spiek

*This post has been updated to an article format.  See the update here at: Jason Fried on using JTBD at Basecamp

 

Jason, Bob, and Chris at the first Switch Workshop

This week Jason Fried, the founder of 37signals and author of Rework, joins us on Jobs-to-be-Done Radio to discuss how he came to discover the JTBD framework and apply it to Basecamp and how he does things at 37signals.

Jason was first introduced to the Jobs-to-be-Done concept by another 37signals team member, Ryan Singer.  As the story goes, Ryan saw Clay Christensen describe how he and a colleague uncovered the jobs that a milkshake does in a web video. After watching the video, Ryan went on a search to find out who the “milkshake man” was, and found Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek from the Re-Wired Group.  Bob and Chris (being fans of Basecamp and Rework) quickly agreed to help Jason and Ryan dig deeper into the jobs that their software does for its users.

Tune in to hear Jason’s perspective on Jobs-to-be-Done, as well as a recap of the first Switch Workshop (held on October 1st at 37signals in Chicago), and some new thoughts on the upcoming Switch Workshop (#2 – on November 2nd at 37signals.
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Episode Transcript

Chris: Welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio. I’m Chris
Spiek, as always I’m joined by my partner, Bob Moesta. Hey, Bob.

Bob: Hey, Chris. How are you?

Chris: Good. Today we have a very special guest, the author of the book
“Rework”, the founder of 37signals and the creator of Basecamp, Jason
Fried, is joining us. Welcome, Jason.

Jason: Thanks, guys. How are you?

Bob: Good.

Chris: Good, good. So we did a pretty cool event a couple weeks ago at
the 37signals office in Chicago. We called it the Switch Workshop, it was
the first of hopefully many to come, so we want to get Jason’s feedback
about how that event went. We’ve got an upcoming event on November 2nd so
we’ll talk about that a little bit, and then we’ll dive into how Jason uses
the framework at 37signals and how he came to implement it and learn about
it. Where would you guys like to start. Bob?

Bob: I think I want to start with Jason. How did you learn about jobs and
how did you come to use it within 37signals?

Jason: The whole concept came to us through Ryan who works here at
37signals. He had seen the Milkshake video, the famous Milkshake video that
Clay did, and he was sort of curious who this colleague was that Clay was
talking about. I think Clay said, “A colleague of mine did this study.” So
somehow, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but Ryan found out that it
was you, Bob. I guess you guys had dinner at one point and he was really
impressed with the ideas and the thinking. I’d heard some stuff about it
but not really that much, but then Ryan came to me and told me about this
guy he met and some really interesting ideas.

Like I said, I’d heard some of these ideas but not really, but then hearing
them from Ryan again really made me think there was something to this, so
that’s how it all started. As you guys know but listeners don’t, we hired
you guys at Re-Work Group to help us figure out why people hire Basecamp,
and that was a really interesting project. Part of the reason why we’re
doing the Switch Workshop is because of the insights that we thought were
so valuable from the project that we did that we wanted to share some of
these insights with other people so they can do the same type of things
with their own products.

Bob: What was so different about it in terms of talking to customers?

Jason: Well, we’d talk to customers before. Hopefully, every business has
talked to their customers, but talking is not enough. You’ve got to ask the
right kind of questions and you’ve got to get to the right kind of answers.
What I think is so different about the lessons that you guys teach and the
techniques that you guys teach is that we’re actually looking for the root.
We’re looking for the real causes of purchasing or canceling or quitting.

In the past, we’d talk to customers about what they liked about our
product, what they didn’t like, things like that, and you get a very
service-level understanding of what they like but that doesn’t really tell
you a whole lot. What you really want to get down to are the causes and the
reasons why someone switched to your product or switched away from it
because that’s where the emotional stories are, that’s where the deep
insight is into what actually finally pushed them into making this
purchasing decision.

One of the things that I learned from you guys — and it seems obvious but
it wasn’t at first — was that people don’t just decide to buy something.
No one ever just decides to buy something. Something has to happen to you
first. You’ve got a lot of things going on in your life and you don’t just
wake up saying, “I’m going to buy this new thing today.” You might think
that but really what happens is your purchases are sort of an answer to a
question you’ve been asking to yourself, and getting to that question and
getting to those situations is really valuable.

Bob: Yeah, it’s digging down deep to the causality, right? It’s like,
“Well, it was easy.” Well, why was easy important? We just check the box
“easy” and move on, but for us, we want to dig down and say, “Other things
are easy, why is this easier than something else? Why is easy important at
this point in time?”

When you think about any kind of switch you make, when you unpack it, when
you pull it apart, you realize that there’s a lot that goes into it.
There’s a lot that goes into trying to figure out which software do I want
to buy? Can I get the other people on it? All the anxiety around it and
everything else that’s there. As much as we think it’s simple on the
surface, it really is a complicated thing. Once you find the right emotions
you realize that other people have the same emotional drivers with them and
so it simplifies a lot of the depth.

Jason: The thing I liked about what you just said, by the way, is “Why is
easy important?” Because it’s so easy for us to just see someone going, “I
love Basecamp because it’s easy,” and then we could just move on to the
next question, but you can’t just move on to the next question. That’s what
I learned from you guys is that every answer is a deeper question to that
same answer.

So when someone says why is something easy, or when I ask someone why is
easy good, it seems like well of course easy is good. Isn’t easy good? But
what you can find out is that easy is good for them because everything else
in their life is really complicated, everything else in their life causes
stress. Sometimes easy can just be an oasis, it can be a moment for
somebody to breathe and to smile a little bit during their day.

So it’s not just that it’s easy, it’s that it actually brings a sense of
well-being and pleasure in many cases. That’s just really interesting when
you can get that deep into why people answer a specific question a certain
way and find out it’s almost always an emotional response. Once you
understand these emotional responses, you can change the way you explain
your product or change the way you marked your product or the messaging
around it to play on those emotional responses a lot more than just fact or
features, which are ultimately boring things to most people.

Chris: One thing that the people who came to the first workshop really
figured out was sometimes it’s hard to get at those insights, but often
times we find that it doesn’t take a whole lot of questions or polling when
you’re doing these interviews for that emotion to come out. If they say
it’s easy, just say, “Help me understand that, I really don’t get it. What
was going on during that day and why was easy so important?”

It’s unbelievable how these stories pour out and you get that whole
situation, you get all the context that really can help you refine the
product or take it in the right direction. It always kind of astonishes me
how much people are willing to tell you in these interviews.

Jason: The other thing is you don’t get rehearsed answers, which is cool.
Because people haven’t been asked these questions before in that same way,
so they don’t have their standard talking points or anything. They actually
have to think about these things, and sometimes they’ve never thought about
them at all before. Subconsciously they have, but they’ve never explained
to someone else. What we saw, people see it as an interesting challenge to
understand what they are thinking themselves, and that’s a fun thing to do.

Chris: To build on the method, that’s one thing I’ve learned from
watching Bob do these interviews for a long time, and I think everybody
picked up at the workshop is it’s hard to do these interviews and let
people think. When you see somebody struggling with an answer, you always
want to jump in and help them out. You can get so much from just saying why
is easy important? And just sitting back and letting them ruminate and
giving them time then seeing what comes out. That’s just one of the little
nuance methods that we always try to make sure people understand.

Bob: It’s like easy to install, I was thinking it’s easy for somebody
else to do, right? Then it takes a completely different path. The other
thing is definitions. The first time they say something, I was doing an
interview the other day where they were talking about walking into Best Buy
with their mother to buy a computer and the notion was it was comfortable.
I’m like okay, hold on a second. Let me make sure I got this right, you’re
walking in with your 85-year old mom to buy a new computer and she feels
comfortable? Going into Best Buy? He’s like no, comfortable is not the
right word. It’s more like [inaudible 08:17] it’s familiar. So all of a
sudden, it’s like they might pick a word and you need to dig at it to make
sure that’s what they mean or that’s really what it is.

And you need to call them out sometimes when it’s like that makes no sense
to me. What were finding, especially when talking to some people after the
first workshop and them now talking to customers, is they’re worried about
challenging the customer on some of their definitions. It’s really trying
to get them to realize to make sure they’re clear. You’re not catching them
in a lie. It’s like you said comfortable but all of a sudden we got to
familiar which meant a whole different thing. Because trying to design a
comfortable store is not easy, but a familiar store, that’s easier. So it’s
back to how you end up unpacking these things.

Jason: I love words, so for me that’s one of the reasons why I think I
like this stuff so much, because individual words matter. We spend so much
time on our copywriting. On a specific sentence we can spend an hour plus,
on just one sentence. I think that each individual word says so many
different things. Like you just said, comfortable versus familiar, very,
very different. They’re about the same length and you feel like they’re
kind of synonyms, but they’re not at all when you really get down to what
they really mean.

Bob: Right.

Jason: I just find that whole process fascinating, to get down to what
people really mean.

Bob: But the thing is, when you translate that word familiar versus
comfortable into what the developer or the designer has to do, they just
lead you completely down different paths. So the reason why you need to get
to such depth and get to such clarity is because without that clarity, you
end up possibly unpacking or adding more features that you don’t need to
add, because what they really meant was familiar and you’re trying to make
it comfortable, and you’re going to realize, I can’t get there.

What they say and what they do is so different, and you need to make sure
that it’s as clear as possible. In a lot of cases, analogies and working in
analogous spaces, and if this wasn’t a computer you were buying but
something in the grocery store, what would it be? It helps them build
better language for you to help give direction. That’s really important.

Chris: It’s one of those things where…that’s one aspect. I was with a
team of researchers all last week, big enterprise people that were skilled
in research, and I think they were astonished or shocked at how much I
pushed the consumer to refine that. It was borderline uncomfortable for
them, the quote was “we’ve been trained to let the consumer talk.” Not that
I was interrupting, but don’t butt in, just let them move on, and I kept
pushing and pushing for that language refinement. It’s a big departure from
what a lot of people are used to.

Jason: Why do you think that they recoil in horror? What was it about
that process that scares them?

Chris: From my understanding, it’s how they’ve been trained. There is
such a fear of leading the consumer. The fear is if you start to interject
too much, it’s like the anthropological approach. Just the fact that you’re
there is already skewing how they’ll behave, but if you start to ask
questions and plant ideas in their mind, then you’re going to lead them to
the answer that you want.

The two comments I got are one, you really ask a lot of questions and two,
somehow you do it in a way that doesn’t lead them. I think the second half
of it is just being comfortable saying like Bob said, I’m really confused.
You said this, and it might be what you meant, but you’ve got to help me
out because it’s just not adding up, it’s not connecting for me.

Jason: Bob says that a lot.

Bob: Yeah. I do say that a lot.

Chris: He’s confused a lot.

Bob: I am very confused most of the time. Out of all the different
interviews we did, which we didn’t do a lot. We did about ten of them. What
are the nuggets that you got out of the interviews that you’d say “wow,”?
What would you say is kind of your biggest moment? The beauty is that you
sat through every one of them and listened to each one and you were active
in it, which is rare for the way we work. Usually people ask us to go off
and do it without them, and we wanted to make sure that we did it with you
so you could have the benefit of all this language.

Jason: For eight years we’ve been talking about Basecamp as a project
management tool. What was interesting to me was that very few customers
that we talked to really talked about project management. They didn’t use
that term or really even think of it in that way. That was eye-opening to
me. Different people said different things and had different reactions, but
for me not hearing the words that we use or not hearing the description
that we use or not even hearing the positioning that we use, that we’ve
spent so much time trying to hone was really eye-opening.

Of course Basecamp is a very successful product so something we’re doing is
working. I always find it really fun to realize that maybe you don’t know
what you’re doing. That was what was most enlightening to me, is that the
customers that we were talking to weren’t even talking about project
management. They were talking about all the other things like issues with
adoption, making sure other people would use it with them. Talking about
things like accountability and responsibility and audit trails and who said
what when.

All those things that are built into the product. Basecamp does a really
good job of handling those things for them, but they never said Basecamp
allows us to manage our projects better or anything like that. It wasn’t
about that so much for them, it was about all the little small things that
add up to make Basecamp a tool that they depend on.

Bob: To me, it’s about the important, subtle moments that add value.
Because as much as we always ask customers about what’s the best project
management software out there, it’s small little things that add up to make
it the best thing. So it’s always trying to find what are those small
things and where’s the things that are adding the most value. You can
clearly see in these interviews when you’re talking to people, I need to
make sure nothing fell through the cracks. I got to make sure that in case
someone comes back at me I know where everything is.

All of a sudden it’s like all the details that I know when things got done,
I know who did it, I know where, when it got shared, and the customer can’t
come back and say “Hey, you didn’t send this,” and it’s like, “No, it got
sent here,” all that record aspect of it is what makes it valuable to them
and that’s what-

Jason: And technically, I mean, that is what project management could be
defined as in some ways but they didn’t think about it that way or they
thought about, like, the CYA side of it or the accountability of it or the
audit trail or history log side of it. It wasn’t management so much as it
was history and proof.

Bob: Right.

Jason: And that was, I mean, and if we really think about what that means
we could, like I said earlier about that could take us in an entirely
different direction. Designers could think about the product entirely
different ways and market it and explain it and show demos in different
ways and talk about different features. I mean, it could change everything
that we do, and I hope it does. We haven’t gotten around to making these
changes yet because the project just ended, but it opened a lot of new
ideas to us.

Bob: Right. Well, and it’s the ultimate thing here is it’s about trying
to find out where the consumer, what the consumer values when they make
that switch, because, again, when they’re making the switch it’s a lot of
work. Whether I’m switching houses or I’m switching software or I’m
switching anything, there’s a lot of effort that goes into it and so the
thing is that we don’t seem to dig enough and this is trying to get it down
that, like you said, the root side.

Clay and I talk about it as the causal side. We’re trying to under . . .
just because I’m 48 and I’m a made and I’m in the Midwest it doesn’t mean
I’m going to buy the Wall Street Journal. We have to understand the causal
mechanisms of why I buy the Wall Street Journal, right? And that’s what
we’re all about.

Jason: It’s fascinating. I mean, that’s the thing. You come away from
every one of these interviews fascinated by what you just found out and
that, to me, is a sign that something’s working, when you come away with
new ideas. And, like, that energy you get when you hear something new for
the first time that you hadn’t heard and you thought you’d heard it all and
you hear something new, that, I love that. That’s what it’s all about for
me. So I get a lot of that out of these types of things and this type of
thinking.

Bob: So, in the middle of doing all that work, you turned over and looked
at me and said “You know, we should do a conference” and I’m like, “Uh,
okay.” and started thinking about it for a little bit and then it’s like
we’ll have 20 people here or 24 people come here and we’ll do a one day and
see what happens and so we pulled that off. First of all, what were you
thinking when you asked that? Because it’s like, I felt you wanted to
share, right? So what was your real intention behind all that?

Jason: It was like there’s . . . I feel like we stumbled, I mean, you
guys have known this for a while but I feel like I’d stumbled onto
something really important by listening to you guys and seeing how you guys
do what you do and whenever I feel that way I always want to share it with
other people. I kind of hate keeping secrets that way.

Bob: Yeah.

Jason: The best way I know how to do, of course you can write a book and
all that stuff and there’s a lot you can blog about it, whatever, but I
thought that the real value is the fact that I was there listening to these
interviews and also learning how to do these interviews. I didn’t read a
report that you guys wrote. I actually was there, and so I’m like “How can
we get more people to have that experience?” And the first thing that pops
into my mind is like an in person conference, small, intimate, 20, 25
people, something like that where we do these interviews and not only do we
interview, or, we actually interview the attendees and then the attendees
ultimately interview themselves by the end of the day after they’ve learned
how to do the techniques.

I was just excited to have more people think this way because at the end of
the day the more people think this way the better products are going to be
out there. I’m a consumer just like everyone else, so I like to see more
products that are appropriate for me and I’d like to find more of these
products too. So, I’m just a fan of getting the word out there any way we
can. This is the best, sort of, this is the highest resolution version of
this type of teaching I can think about which is in-person, small group and
really go into the stuff in depth.

Bob: Yep.

Chris: It was impressive how fast you got to that. So Bob and I have
always been saying it’s not a science, it’s an art and it’s so hard. People
say “How do you do interviews?” and it’s like, I can’t think of the
PowerPoint deck that I could put together and give to you and have you read
it and then do an interview. It’s like I need to show you, you need to see
the emotion in the whole thing before you can hand it off to somebody and
say “Okay. Go talk to your consumers and see what you get out of it.”

Jason: Well, I find that a-ha moments are always hard to get to in print
and that’s just me personally.

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: But I think in person they’re really easy to see and I was
watching around the room as people, as we were doing these interviews and
you could see people nodding their heads in a way that if they had read
that question and read their answer they wouldn’t have nodded their head,
they just would have kept going in a book. But there’s something about
hearing something and then the slight awkwardness that comes from someone
realizing that there’s actually a deeper story than they were even aware of
themselves.

Then it turns into some fun. Everyone starts laughing a little bit, and
it’s just a fun atmosphere to be in, and then realize that you’re learning
this new technique that is really insightful and deep and can change the
way you think about everything, including the things that you buy yourself.

So I just kind of noticed that immediately when I was having those feelings
sitting around the table, talking to customers, and I wanted to make sure
other people could have that same feeling.

Chris: Yeah. It’s always interesting how you reflect on your purchases.
So one of the people that we – we won’t give the whole thing away – but we
interviewed one attendee, Hugh, about the suit that he had purchased. I
talked to him a week later and he was laughing about, “I look with such
suspicion at this suit because I think about how I approached it and I can
really boil it down, everything that led up to that purchase. I wasn’t
aware of it until you guys kind of pulled it out of me, and now I think
about every purchase completely differently.”

I think a lot of the people who get interviewed kind of feel that way. But
it adds so much resolution. It’s a cool experience.

Jason: It’s sort of a bit of a disease, I think, because every time I buy
something now or I see someone buying something and I know the person, I’ll
ask them, “Why did you hire that?” They don’t really understand what it
means, and I go into the whole thing. But I’m always thinking about, why am
I hiring this product? Why am I hiring this service? Why am I hiring this
whatever? I feel like, in the long-term, it’ll make me a bigger buyer of
things. Obviously a better salesperson too, but a better buyer, and that’s
a benefit in itself right there.

Bob: Yeah, and on the sales side. So one of the things we’re doing on the
sales side is we’re applying all this to a sales framework, because it
really is salespeople really just help people buy what they already want to
do. So the whole notion is, is that instead of trying to teach manipulative-
type selling, it’s like, how do we actually have job-based selling, which
is how do you teach salespeople to have these kinds of conversations with
people to make them better consumers?

And when there’s a fit you’ve got the product there, and when there’s not,
to know how to walk away? So, we’re working on a whole kind of curriculum
around teaching salespeople how to sell via Jobs-to-be-Done.

Jason: I think if you guys manage to do that, you’re in a good position.
Sales is the one thing I think more people need help with than anything
else in business. Not even business, it’s just it’s everything, design,
writing. I mean, designers have to be good salespeople. Writers have to be
good salespeople. Programmers have to be good salespeople. I don’t think a
lot of people think in those terms, but it’s very, very true.

I mean, there are so many people I know who are really good at what they
do, but they don’t know how to sell and it’s frustrating because they just
can’t see that that’s a skill that they need. I think once more people feel
comfortable with that skill, you can do anything. If you can sell, you can
do anything. So I’m looking forward to that class or that framework,
whatever you guys drop.

Bob: Yep. I’ll say that the most fun I’ve had in the last two, two and a
half weeks is talking to people from the conference and they’ve kind of set
up and done some interviews. That we said, “If you record them and you send
them to us, we’ll talk through them with you.” It’s just amazing. First of
all, what I didn’t anticipate was the anxiety people had of being able to
dial-up the customer and have kind of these deeper conversations with them.

It was amazing how much anxiety was there to begin with. Then, once they
did it, they realized how easy it was, and the one gentleman was like, “Oh,
my.” He goes, “I couldn’t believe how fast everything just poured out, then
where the emotion was and where the value was. At some point I felt like I
was getting stuck, and then I asked one more ‘why’ and all of a sudden it
just all came pouring out.”

So, the interesting thing is just the ability to have different
conversations with your customers. I think that’s the most powerful aspect
of it.

Jason: Yeah. I remember when you guys were interviewing customers, I sort
of kept thinking to myself… First of all, I’m an impatient person, and so
as these interviews are going on, I’m like, “Okay, okay. We got it. We got
it. Let’s move on. That’s when you’re going to annoy this customer because
we’re still asking them questions.” But none of them seemed annoyed to me,
actually, at the end of the day.

A lot more stuff came out as you got deeper and deeper. So, it’s really
enlightening to see… I mean, I felt the anxiety, myself, but I think it’s
just misplaced, and you don’t know it until you try that. Then you realize
that people are really happy to talk to you. First of all, people who use
your product want to see it get better because that’s going to benefit
them.

If maybe your product wasn’t a good fit for them, and they don’t have any
bad feelings towards you, they can help you understand why it wasn’t a good
fit. They probably wanted to do that too, just because they want to help,
and that’s so interesting to see, especially when we got to talk to
Basecamp customers who left Basecamp for one reason or another. They
weren’t mad at us, it just wasn’t the right fit and they helped us
understand why and that was really great to hear.

Chris: Yeah, I think most people find that that line of annoying,
somebody who you’re interviewing is probably way farther away than you
think it is. Like I, we, Bob and I have both pushed really, really hard and
have never, I don’t think, come close to having somebody say, “You’re
pushing too hard” or “Cut it out” or anything like that. People are usually
by the time you’re really asking people questions it like they’re fighting
to kind of remember the details just as much as you’re fighting to help
them tease them out. But yeah, the first couple times you do it it’s like,
“I’m not sure I can ask this.”

Bob: Yeah, there have been cases where people have just been, like, we
feel like they’re annoyed on the other end of the phone and at the end
they’re like, “God this has been the greatest conversation I’ve had in a
long time,” and you’re like, “Wow, I thought I was pissing you off.”

Chris: Yeah.

Jason: You never know. But you don’t, you don’t piss them off. It’s
again, that anxiety, which shows how powerful anxiety is. You make up all
these stories in your head about how difficult something’s going to be and
how much you don’t do something. I mean, it’s just part of the human
condition. We’re always sort of defending ourselves or protecting
ourselves, but it’s cool to break through that and see what you can do when
that’s not in your way

Bob: Yep. We have another one coming up. We have a couple, how many seats
left, five, six?

Jason: Yeah. I think around that many, yeah. So we’re getting-

Bob: Getting close to that. And that one’s going to be Friday, November-

Chris: 2nd?

Bob: 2nd, yep. So then we’re going to do back in Chicago with 37signals,
and I think it’s a mixture of people that came. Last time it was a lot of
software, but I don’t think it’s, I think it’s a mixture of different kinds
of people as opposed to just software people this time around.

Jason: Yeah. I was looking at the attendee list so far and it is a good
mix, much better distribution than the first conference which was, like you
said, mostly software and that’s mostly just because whenever we promote
something, most of the people who [inaudible 27:15] are like that. So I
think we’re getting the word out in a different way this time and I think
people who went to the first one are telling friends in other industries to
check out the second one. We have some nice, new additions on the second
one, new ideas we’re going to try out, so that’s going to make it even
better than the first and hopefully we’ll get better each time.

Bob: Yep. And then probably, well, we won’t do one necessarily in
December, but looking to try to do another one sometime right after the
first of the year there.

Jason: Yeah, maybe every couple months.

Bob: Yeah, perfect. Thank you for coming on, Jason. I really, really
appreciate your time and helping us spread the word and Clay was the one
who’s been pushing Chris and I to make this more consumable and you helping
us do that is very much appreciated.

Jason: Well, thanks. I really feel truly like I’m ever changed, forever
changed by this, this way of thinking is very fresh and very interesting
and very true. It seems very true to me. It doesn’t seem like BS, you know?
And sometimes you hear about these new systems and this and that and you’re
like “Yeah, yeah, yeah” but this thing seems very, very real and I’m a
believer.

In fact, what’s interesting too is Bob came to 37signals about a year or so
ago and spoke to the whole company. We had about 30 people at the time and
since then a lot of people just keep asking why would someone hire this,
why would someone hire that, and they’re using the language and thinking
about the framework, and that to me is also proof that this is the real
deal because anytime you try and get a bunch of people to believe in
something, they’re either going to be, if they believe in it they’re going
to do it naturally and if they don’t they’re going to stop and people are
still talking about hiring products and firing products, so you’ve had a
big impact on this. Thank you.

Bob: Yep. You’re welcome. But it’s Clay’s point is . . . I was humbled
when I said, that’s the reason why I hate you. And it’s because, he goes,
“I see you everywhere because you’ve changed my thinking that, like, why
didn’t I think of hiring that one before?” It’s very, very interesting. So
I think it is changing and the other part of it to me is it’s simple. The
reason why, I think, it’s catching on is because it’s a very simple notion
but it has some really big impact.

Chris: Yeah, well, we need thank you for all your help too. I think the
first Switch workshop it was a lot of software people. I’m still of the
mindset that that was such a great place to start because there are so many
software, technology-based companies that have a successful launch and do
so well for a couple years and then start to look at the platform or
whatever they have and say it’s time to either keep up with the
competition, or take this to the next level and evolve it and how the heck
are we going to choose what direction to go or what features to add.

I think for those 24 people it gave them a pretty good idea of what to do
next. I’ve been surprised at how many people have contacted us and said
“You know, I cranked out my first five interviews. When can we circle back
and talk about how to do the analysis and what to do next?” But I think it
was the perfect kind of jumping off point for the workshop and we do really
appreciate your help in bringing that together.

Jason: Well, let’s keep doing it. There’s more people to help, right?

Chris: Absolutely.

Bob: Thanks, guys.

Chris: Thanks for being on Jason.

Jason: You bet.

Chris: See you around.

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  1. Pingback: BoS 2013 – Switch Workshop | I Jobless

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