Streema Co-Founder Martin Siniawski on JTBD Radio

In this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, hosts Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta, and Ervin Fowlkes sit down with Streema co-founder Martin Siniawski and JTBD expert Amrita Chandra of Shape and Sound. Martin runs product for Streema, an internet radio service with more than 60,000 AM and FM stations, and he came to learn how Jobs-to-be-Done can help him define the problem space, prioritize features, and understand why people hire radio in the first place.

The conversation covers how Jobs-to-be-Done complements Lean Startup, why money is not the only measure of value when users pay with their time, and a detailed, practical look at the Switch Interview: how to start a conversation, when silence matters, and why being interviewed yourself is the fastest way to learn the craft. Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript.

How Martin found Jobs-to-be-Done and what Streema does

Announcer: Welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, where we discuss how to apply the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to understand why consumers switch from one product to another and ultimately how to get more customers to switch to your product. Here are your hosts.

Chris: All right, welcome to another edition of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio. I’m Chris Spiek and, as always, I’m joined by Bob Moesta and Ervin Fowlkes. What’s up guys?

Bob: Hey Chris.

Ervin: Hey Chris.

Chris: So, today we’ve got a couple very special guests. We’ve got Martin Siniawski from Streema.

Martin: Hey guys.

Chris: What’s up Martin?

Bob: Hey, Martin, man.

Chris: So, traveling all the way from Argentina to learn about Jobs-To-Be-Done. And we’re going to talk a little bit about his experience up to date and what he’s thinking about applying in his internet radio business.

Chris: And we’re also joined by Amrita Chandra, just because we love Amrita and we get her on as often as we can. And she has some experience in the streaming audio and internet radio space as well, so we thought, “Let’s get both you guys on here together and have a little conversation about Jobs. So welcome, Amrita.

Amrita: Thank you. Nice to be back.

Chris: Martin, give us a little background. I always like to start, just, how did you come to find Jobs-to-be-Done and what brought you, I guess, up to this point?

Martin: So, I’m pretty sure it all started watching, or reading, something by the guys at 37signals. And then eventually discovering the milkshake, famous video, which really sparked my attention, got me interested.

Martin: That led me on a treasure hunt for as much Jobs-to-be-Done material that I could find online. I think it pretty much started maybe four or five months ago. I started digging up all the articles, listening to all the podcasts, so it feels kind of surreal to be here now.

Chris: Yes, that’s fantastic. So, why were you looking? Tell us a little bit about Streema and what got you to actually start hunting for something like Jobs.

Martin: I’m one of the founders of Streema and I’m currently spearheading all our product efforts. Streema is a service that allows you to listen to all your favorite stations, AM and FM, on air from all over the world. We have over 60,000 stations and currently working on improving our product, both on our desktop and mobile offerings.

Martin: We’ve done a lot of Lean Startup over the past few, past year and a half. It’s helped us a lot, but we felt, I still felt personally that we had something missing. Something missing to better understand, which were the problems that are users were having. And it’s like a big problem, right?

Martin: We have a lot of users right now, but we were missing a framework to understand them and to start prioritizing all the experiments we could be doing. Lean Startup gave us a great way to prototype, to measure, to iterate, but we were missing the right tool to start framing the problem and start creating possible solutions and testing them out.

Jobs-to-be-Done and Lean Startup: defining the problem space

Chris: So you have a testing methodology, but now it’s like, “What do we test? How do we even start to get the insights around the users to figure out what to setup and what to test?”

Martin: Exactly. It’s like the solution space is infinite. There are so many possible solutions and things we could try out, right? And we needed some way to make sense of it all and start prioritizing them and generating hypotheses, basically, to use with the Lean Startup methodologies that we already know to test them out.

Chris: Yes. The brings back, always, that quote that I love from Clay about, “A problem creates the space in the brain for a solution to fall into.” You don’t have a problem, you can look at a bunch of solutions, you’re not going to figure it out. But you’ve got to be able to really well define the problem space to figure out what the right solutions are. So, that’s awesome.

Martin: We’ve gotten to a point where we have a product that has a really nice amount of different stations from all over the world that you can listen to, a really diverse offering. And that works pretty well, when you want to listen to a station, it generally works.

Martin: We support a lot of different platforms. So we’ve gotten to that point where those basic needs are satisfied and we try to understand what’s the next step for us, right

Martin: There’s a lot of ideas that we have, but we need a good framework to start understanding our users, and that’s where Jobs-to-be-Done really sparked my attention because that was the big problem that I had on my mind.

Chris: You’ve actually met Amrita before. How did you two connect? Through Twitter or something?

Martin: I listened to her podcast here with you guys. It was crazy because I had been, I think I had started listening to the podcasts the past few weeks before that episode and then that episode came and I was, it said something like, “Spotify, music, internet radio.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not alone.”

Amrita: Yes, you guys were the matchmakers. You’re the ones that introduced us and so we’ve had a conversation since then. I told Martin that he should really come up and get the training himself because I think I’ve obviously gotten a lot out of it myself. So, yes, you guys should get the credit for actually putting us together.

Chris: And we met your partner.

Martin: Richard.

Chris: Richard, over at Business of Software. He was there and he actually took the Jobs-to-be-Done, kind of, mini-session over there and he was very excited and he was like, “I wish he could have stayed, but he had to go back.” And so, it’s good to have you here so you both are going to now have that as a core to help you, kind of, figure this out. That’s awesome.

Martin: Yes. We’re evangelizing and hopefully with Richard we’ll lead the process.

Chris: Yes. So, it’s interesting to hear this story because it’s like I hear it over and over again, but there’s this sweet spot of people that come to the workshop and it resonates because it’s always like, “We had some success, we nailed the basics. We have this functional need that we’re obviously meeting. Millions of people are using it.

Chris: “Now, it’s like I’m in a position as a founder or CEO where I have a limited number of resources, I’ve got a wheel that’s kind of turning, but where the hell do I go next? And how do I figure out if I’m going to invest in something and really go down a path? How do I make sure that that’s the right path and kind of check all of that?”

Chris: It sounds like you’ve been successful at applying some of the Lean methodologies. How do you, can you give any advice on how you think this is going to link up and kind of fuel the Lean methods?

Martin: We think Lean and Lean Startup and all that, it’s like a great methodology for a, basically, validating hypotheses and minimizing waste, right? It’s a great framework for that. And we’ve got, we’ve developed tools and we got tools into place that help us try ideas, measure them, and go through the whole learning loop pretty fast.

Martin: Where we were needing was a way to generate, the reason with some, to start narrowing it down, the ideas that seem to make more sense to test out and to try out, that naturally makes sense because of the problem s that our users have, right?

Martin: I think it’s going to link up really well in defining, in better defining the problem. And, after having the problem define, or different problems, that’s outward thinking, right? There are probably different problems because listening to radio AM and FM means different things for different people, right? Depending on the content you listen to.

Martin: Maybe we can get more into detail after that. But, so basically I think Jobs-to-be-Done would really help us to understand which are the problems, different problems our users have.

Martin: We’ll use our existing Lean Startup tools to test solutions for those problems, or even to test if those problems exist, as well. Right?

Chris: That’s right, that’s right. I mean, Lean is all about doing efficiently and minimizing waste and all those kinds of things, so to me Jobs is kind of at that core of helping to define what value is and being able to say, “Here’s what’s important and not important.” So you can really, kind of, strip back all those other things. And without it, you end up, to me it gets you down to the core.

“It’s like the solution space is infinite. There are so many possible solutions and things we could try out, right? And we needed some way to make sense of it all and start prioritizing them and generating hypotheses, basically, to use with the Lean Startup methodologies that we already know to test them out.”Martin Siniawski

When users pay with time: defining value for media and consumer products

Martin: Exactly. And also, the Lean Startup movement, they also get into detailing in regards to defining the problem and making sure you understand it. But it’s, I mean, at least we’ve found it really hard to adapt that, which is, most of the case studies you see are for SaaS, for maybe B2B.

Martin: So it’s hard to find Lean examples for consumer sides, like ours which already provide value even if you don’t sign up for the service, right?

Chris: I guess that’s another interesting aspect of this is that I think it’s going to be a great case study for Jobs going forward because you’re applying and there are lots of situations where it’s been applied to retail consumer goods and even business to business sales.

Chris: But now you’re entering into a space where you need to start by defining consumption in some meaningful way.

Chris: It’s not the completion of a checkout where there’s actually money transferred, it’s, “How do I get people who are in a situation and need some type of content to consume in a repeat fashion over time so that we can actually call them, a user, and say, ‘We’ve delivered on this job and we can find ways to do it better, we can find other jobs,’ that sort of thing.”

Chris: It feels a bit more nebulous, but it doesn’t make the framework any less powerful. I think it’s just a great new area to apply them.

Martin: Right. Well, and again, I kind of look at back as when money’s not transacting, it’s really back to the main essence of value, it’s back to time. When you look at the students or when we did the stuff in the education market, kids don’t buy lessons, but it’s base on the time that they actually invest in it and the intensity of that.

Martin: So to me it’s going to allow you to now look at your data in a really different way by not looking at averages, but trying to build patterns in that data to say, “Oh, these people listen this way and this pattern and this frequency.”

Martin: They’re doing a job maybe differently than somebody else, and so it gets back to almost, I’ve been doing a lot of pattern recognition stuff lately and it’s about, almost like music. They have different songs that literally you can see those patterns of how it plays out. It’s pretty cool.

Amrita: I think, also, that there are a lot of parallels between what Martin is sort of addressing with Streema and what publishers are dealing with now where, again, they’ve got their users who are their readers who are not necessarily paying for the service, but they’re paying with their time.

Amrita: And then they’re supporting the business through advertisers or sponsorships and so I think it’ll be a good case study for other industries as well, but have more of an ad supported model.

Chris: Yes, yes. I’m excited to dig into it.

Martin: Yes, yes. I’m excited too. I mean, and I personally struggled and we at Streema as a company I think we’ve struggles a lot using Lean and trying to adapt it to our company. And it was kind of frustrating sometimes in defining the problem space.

Martin: One of the famous cries from Lean is get out of the building, right? Talk to your users. And we tried to do that, but it was hard to understand what exactly we were looking for, right? And how to do it and what’s the exact outputs that you’re needing to find.

Why radio means different things: context and the struggling moment

Chris: So, what did you try? Can you tell us about those conversations? Because it s sounds like you had some talks. Like, how did you go down that path?

Martin: So, what we tried to do was understanding how were they using Streema, what were they using it for, kind of how it fit into their lives. But I’m not sure we looked hard enough.

Chris: What does that mean? “Looked hard enough?”

Martin: So, we understood , I think we kind of understood what they used Streema for, but we didn’t understand that radio at that point was many different things for the people, right? Maybe it was music, maybe it was listening to a program that you like in particular, maybe it’s listening to a sports event, like a soccer match or whatever.

Martin: So, and those are really different things that fit into lives of people in a really different way, right? So, maybe would understand that they were using it in some context or in another context, but we didn’t quite understand, for example, how they listened to music, right?

Martin: In which context do they listen to music? And understand that we are competing with other things in that space, right? And not only with radio stations, for example, or other radio station listening services. And at the same time we would also do usability tests.

Martin: So it was kind of a weird interview, in some sense, in which we were getting interesting outputs out of them, but it was like mixing this course, I guess. So I think know we have a much more structured approach into what to ask, what to look for, and what’s the expected outcome of the interviews.

The emotion inside ordinary purchases

Chris: So we did interviews here yesterday kind of as you were going through and learning the framework around the beard trimmer, the sprinkler system, and the motorcycle helmet, which I guess all very different stories.

Chris: What was your, give me kind of the most eye opening moment or biggest takeaway of yesterday. What was the one thing that you were like, “Wow, I can’t believe that happened?”

Man: You learned all that stuff before, but it’s like what got cemented for you?

Martin: The amount of emotion that’s present in buying seemingly mundane things, it’s pretty impressive. And I include myself, right? I was the beard trimmer guy, guilty as charged. And it was really impressive to see my emotions, the emotions of other people when they were buying other things. And I think it’s something that even if you listen to it, and I have listened to other interviews on the podcasts, but when you see it in person and when you see all the body movements and facial expressions, right? And not only the voice. It really hits home. And also, being interviewed, it’s also pretty impressive just understanding helps the process, right? Of being on the other side, of having to remember things and recall things and trying to relive the experiences. So that was pretty impressive. And finally, trying to do an interview myself and seeing how complicated it is, right? I guess it’s a matter of practice, but you get to appreciate the, I mean, you make it look easy, right? But when I was doing it.

Amrita: They do.

Martin: Yes. It’s amazing. But when I was doing it, the amount of information that you need to be processing, taking into account, and understanding where to dig deeper, what’s important, what’s not important. It’s impressive.

“The amount of emotion that’s present in buying seemingly mundane things, it’s pretty impressive.”Martin Siniawski

The Switch Interview: getting comfortable and the three-foot rule

Chris: Amrita, you’re one of the case studies that we always throw out, so I’m going to throw it over to you. How many interviews did you have to do before you were like, “All right, I got this down or at least I’m totally comfortable and I know what to expect?”

Amrita: I think probably, I don’t even feel like I’m there, especially when I watch you guys. I’m like, “Man, I still have so much more to learn.” But I would say it was really when I started doing sort of the “real ones.” I did about ten practice ones with just friends and it’s always different because you’re with your friends and so you’re feeling a bit more relaxed.

Amrita: I would say I probably had to do, it wasn’t that many, but I would say after the next eight or ten sort of real ones I did with real customers, then I started to at least become more comfortable. I was doing mine over the phone, which I know is kind of a substitute for, it’s sort of a best case substitute for having to just do it in person, which I always prefer. But, yes, I would say it probably took me about eight or ten.

Amrita: Again, it just, it’s one of these things I think you have to keep doing them. It’s like any other muscle, just keep doing them to stay comfortable.

Ervin: Amrita, when we were in Business of Software, I think Kathy Sierra [SP] said that, “In order to have great practice, you need to start with one tiny thing.” So, what’s the one tiny thing you think you think the person should start with? And just do that over and over and over again so that becomes routine and then start to build your other skills on top of it.

Amrita: That’s a really hard question.

Chris: We’ll come back to that, We’ll come back to that.

Amrita: I don’t know if it’s, I think part of it is actually learning to listen and then sort of think of your, there’s a few questions you can start asking to prompt people to start talking and I think kind of figuring out that technique that there are certain sort of two or three kinds of questions that you can ask that will just get people talking.

Amrita: I think once you get people talking, then it’s usually easy to kind of keep them talking, but kind of the first five minutes of your conversation, it can be a little tricky to figure out where you start from. And so, once you get those two or three questions down, I think it makes things easier.

Ervin: I’ve been mentioning this for a long time, but people, there aren’t many people who’ve picked up on it so I’m going to just get on the soap box for a second. There’s this ting I have called the ‘three-foot rule’ and it drives everybody who works with me crazy.

Ervin: With the three-foot rule, it means if you come within three feet of me, I’m allowed to talk to you. And so this notion of interviewing, the practice that I’ve had is literally, I’ll be standing in line somewhere and I always start with, “Hello,” or, “How’s your day going?”

Ervin: And the next thing you know, it’s like, “Boy, those are nice shoes. How did you get those shoes?” And the next thing I know I can do an interview in line in 15 minutes.

Ervin: So, to me it’s, and it’s this notion that everybody’s like, “Yes, that’s not me, that’s not me.” You have to realize, it’s not necessarily me either, it’ me just practicing the craft. And so this notion of the three-foot rule is just, it’s a slice of time that I can just get better at what I’m doing.

Ervin: To me, trying to figure out that three-foot rule, and it’s the tiniest little thing, but it’s like you said, Amrita. When you talk with your friends. there’s this level of comfort, but talking to somebody standing in line at the checkout line. How do you get an interview in that fast?

Ervin: You just learn all these little things and so it’s like when we go to Walmart, I go to the isles and just look. And it’s like watching somebody like, “I don’t know which one of these to pick.”

Ervin: They tell me about everything they do about why they pick whatever they pick and it’s like I find the opportunity to interview everywhere.

Amrita: Of I see a blog post about that weird guy in Walmart.

Ervin: Yes, sometimes that’s me because it’s like I’m like, and it’s pretty easy to do because you just say, “I don’t know how to choose. How do I choose?” Go to the toothpaste isle and stand there, and you just wait for somebody to say, and finally somebody will say, “Can I help you?”

Ervin: And it’s like, “I don’t know how to pick this.” And they’re like, “What do you mean you don’t know how to pick it?” And I’m like, “I don’t know which one of these to use,” and like, “Which one do you use?” “Oh I use.” “Well, why do you use that one?” And you’re done, you got it.

Ervin: It’s that thing where you just got to be comfortable standing there and waiting. It’s kind of, it’s almost like it could be a little TV show just to say how do you do interviews in the supermarket. It’s kind of fun. So, anyway.

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

Amrita: You said something that actually, I think is actually a really important point for those of us who are still sort of new and kind of getting practice. And you said that you do a 15 minute interview and I think one of the things that felt a bit intimidating and can be intimidating is this idea that all the interviews, to get any value out of them, you have to do an hour long interview.

Amrita: I think that what you’re saying is even getting 15 minutes with somebody is getting you into the practice of asking certain questions and then if you have time, obviously, it’s great to be able to do a longer one. But you can still get a lot out of 15 minutes.

Ervin: Right. And you can start to see little patterns of how to get things through and so it’s, again I won’t deny that it’s, there’s an art to it, but at the same time there’s just these little things that I’m actually not that conscious of but people pick up and say, “Why are you doing that?” I’m like, “Oh, because I’m practicing.”

Ervin: I just think the notion of practice, practice, practice. And it’s like, my kids will come to me and say they want something and then they’ll look at me and, “Okay, I don’t want to be interviewed, dad.” I’m like, “Yes, but I just need to understand how you chose this.” You know? And so, it’s practice. So, I try not to be too annoying.

Chris: I’m actually glad you brought that up, Amrita, because I don’t think that’s ever been said before. And I think we may have inadvertently focused on the idea of like, you need 45 minutes to an hour.

Chris: But take the time that you need. And the other thing is that if you’re doing an interview and the story’s just over, don’t feel like you need to fill the next 45 minutes with kind of nonsense. It’s just like, “All right, that was a great story.” And move on to the next thing you’re doing.

Ervin: The other thing is people have that anxiety of that hour, like, “I can’t talk to anybody for an hour, I have no idea how to fill the hour.” And the best is when you look at the time and like, “Yes, we’ve got one more question.” And you’re like, “Is it up already? Really?”

Ervin: Most people don’t think they can talk that long or that you can ask questions that long and I think we’ve had them go as long as, some people I’ve had two hours. And you’d say there’s fatigue, but to be honest they’re still pulling memories out and they’re still connecting dots and that’s like, “Okay.”

Chris: I think that gets back to Martin’s kind of original point, is that the fact that there’s so much emotion and so much detail involved even in the smallest purchases. It just shows that there, I guess, A. that there is hope for this products, right? If you look at media as a whole, reading newspapers, listening to the radio, there’s just no energy in it. How do you innovate off it?

Chris: But when you start talking to people and say, “Tell me the last time you were really frustrated because you couldn’t find what you wanted to find. Just give me an example of something.” Just start probing on those, you’ll find areas where the media means something to them and that’s just a great area to innovate into, right? There are struggles.

Ervin: What were you most surprised with, Martin?

Martin: Just being in the shoes of the person being interviewed, that was amazing. The way you’re able to pull those memories back, right? By asking the right questions and even asking questions that I wasn’t expecting, even at the moment. It’s like an interesting perspective to have when you’re going to be interviewing people, I think. Being in those shoes, also to understand how it feels, right?

Learning to listen: silence, improv, and getting interviewed yourself

Ervin: Yes, yes. So we’ve modified some of the way we teach it now because we think that actually being interviewed has a lot of value because at some point some people think it’s about the questions and at some point when you sit in that chair and you get interviewed, it’s like, “Okay, I got to remember.”

Ervin: The important thing is to learn to just shut-up and be quiet because they’ll be like, you ask a question, I personally have this problem, and it’s like, “Well, I got to let them think.” But the thing is sometimes I ask them another question while they’re still thinking of the other one.

Ervin: It’s like, “No, I can’t do that.” So, it’s know when silence is okay. It’s not that they don’t have an answer, it’s like they’re just connecting the dots. That’s kind of cool.

Amrita: One of the things, too, is just figuring out where to start. Again, it took me a little practice and you guys I think did cover this in your session, but I probably forgot, is just starting with the purchase, is a great sort of place to start. And then you kind of work backwards and you might move forwards a little bit, but it was, it took me a few tries to remember or sort of figure out where do you start to get that conversation going.

Chris: Yes, and that’s a great, so, for me it’s like if I ask that question, no matter what their answer is, I’ll have 20 more questions. If they tell me they walked into a store, “Did somebody help you? Could you touch the product? Was it behind glass? What time of day was it? Were you coming home from work?” I mean, it’s like, you just, and then it’s like, “No, I actually bought it online.” “Okay, were you at your kitchen table? Were you at your office?”

Chris: You can, no matter what the answer, so I feel like if there’s one trick, if you just get that question out and then start to think in your mind, “All right, can I picture them doing, going through this exercise?” It’s like, no. I have a lot more detail I have to fill in, right?

Ervin: And it’s classic rules of improv, right? Ask the question, don’t think of the next question, listen to the answer, and let the answer drive the next question. So it’s people are trying to cheat by saying, “All right, now I got five questions.” It’s like, “What’s the right one to ask? I’m going to ask this one, okay?”

Ervin: Stop and listen, now form the next question because at some point you have all these questions in your head, but the notion is you want to ask the right question that helps pull the story out.

Ervin: It’s not about asking all the questions. It’s asking, to be honest, the least amount of questions to get the most amount of the story.

Amrita: It makes me think of talk show hosts. You know, talk show, like Oprah.

Ervin: Like Chris, Chris is a great talk show host. He’s the host, the host with the most.

Amrita: You have your cue cards just in case you need them, but you usually you end up just, and again this kind of contradicts what I said maybe 15 minutes ago because I did feel at the beginning that I needed to not just get too lost in listening to what they were saying because I have to remember to find where in the story to get them to kind of talk more.

Amrita: After a while I think it does become a lot more intuitive. You don’t, like I don’t write questions down now, I just kind of listen and it goes from there.

Martin: Getting back to the whole interviewing and getting interviewed, I think that’s an interesting, maybe, takeaway. Like, make sure that the people who are going to be doing interviews for a product, at least they get interviewed themselves on a product they got, right? That’s something interesting to have in their belt as an experience. They probably do their job more effectively if they do.

Ervin: Yes. I think it’s important because a couple things. They’ll say why they bought it and then all the sudden they’ll hear the same story and they go, “Yes, that’s not really why you bought it. To be honest, I’m not sure I bought it. I think my wife bought it. And I just got conned into buying in.”

Ervin: So it’s one of those things where I think it’s really good to be able to help them understand what they’re trying to get to. Great point, great point.

Chris: So it’s one of the things that we’ve, so we’re always changing up the workshop and kind of trying to innovate, right? So one of the things we did in the last few workshops that we held was instead of doing the group practice at the end of the day, we’re doing one on ones and we’re breaking our rules around having two people interview and one person tell the story.

Chris: We’re breaking them into pairs, having one person interview and then having that person get interviewed. And the feedback we’ve gotten is tremendous because as much as people feel like they have to practice the interview technique, what most people come away talking about is like, “Man, getting interviewed is just a crazy experience.”

Ervin: They enjoy it. The thing is they think that they would hate it, but once you do it it’s actually kind of fun.

Martin: Yes, you don’t want it to end.

Chris: Just keep talking about beard trimmers. All day, all day.

Ervin: The best about your interview was the fact is that he bought it and is like, “Okay.” And it has all this things and then the best was the, “So they give me these different blades and they have 12 millimeters, 10 millimeter. What does that mean? What am I supposed to do? How does that translate? I just want the full beard. I don’t, at 12 millimeters, what does that mean?”

Chris: I don’t know what a 12 millimeter whisker looks like.

Ervin: Whether it’s going to make me look the way I want it to do. I I start to low I can’t go back, it’s all this level of confusion and anxiety of you finally say I want it and you get it and then I don’t know how to work it. It was just awesome.

Choosing who to interview and building a continuous practice

Chris: I guess, Martin, you’re a software engineer, you’re running the technology set. What are you going to go do? Because I feel like some people that learn this are like, “This is for other people. Other people need to talk to the consumer. Other people need to bring me the insight.” What’s the next step? What do you envision kind of going and doing?

Martin: I’m going to go home and drive everyone crazy, basically. So, we’ve been talking about Jobs-to-be-Done for a while now, I’m trying to share what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been learning.

Martin: I think after this it’s just time to start interviewing, That’s the next step and that’s the next milestone for us. So, get on the phone or if we can do it in person even better, but it might be hard, with at least ten of our users and start talking to them and see what happens.

Martin: I think that’s the next milestone and we’ll probably get some enlightening things out of that and I think we’ll take it from there.

Chris: I know you can’t share the output, Amrita, or the confidential stuff, but do you have any tips for him on the media side of things that we haven’t already touched on?

Amrita: I think probably one of the hardest things is figuring out, if you have millions of users, is how do you choose the right ones to talk to? And so one of the things that we learned sort of, again, the hard way I think, I went to do a bunch of interviews, maybe 10 or 12.

Amrita: We didn’t really segment, we just took a slice of our customer database and went and talked to those people and very quickly we realized that there were two distinct groups. And so we went back and kind of dove deeper into each of those groups.

Amrita: I would say given your product, you have lots of users. Doing some planning ahead of time to think about who are the right ones or who are the right groups? And maybe if you can’t figure that out, you might be able to through usage statistics or other criteria.

Amrita: I found that really helpful, is, again, looking backwards thinking, “Oh yes, I probably, we probably couldn’t have done that.” We didn’t get that far before we figured that out.

Ervin: I’m going to be the counter-point to that because I think the fact of just taking the ten people and not knowing, but just getting the stories and interviews out, you learn enough to kind of say, “All right, Now there’s at least two groups here.”

Ervin: I mean, I think is sometimes pre-thinking it too much, you end up skewing it a little bit and so you can do it either way. But for me I always liked to at least have two or three practice, or four, practice interviews with just anybody about the topic.

Bob: Do you think, Amrita, do you think that there would have been an actual way you could have gotten to those segments before you did the ten interviews? Like, if you put yourself back in time before you did the first recruit, was there something that you could have done, or is it only in hindsight that those groups break apart?

Amrita: We did have different plans. So that would have been the most natural place for us to start. I love that Bob is actually telling me I wasn’t wrong, so I’m going to go back and say, “Okay, maybe I did it right the first time.” We didn’t assume that people were going to different based on price plan. We just went and interviewed 10 or 12 people.

Amrita: We did find out later that there were some differences. And even within one plan we found there were a couple of different segments. But I guess it just comes back to, do you find that out through your first set of interviews or do you hone in on a particular group ahead of time.

Bob: Yes, that’s why I’m a big fan of, “Let’s do four, five, ten interviews, take a step back, take some learning, figure out what we do. And all right, who’s the next five or ten?”

Bob: My thing is most people don’t realize in the end you’re going to have to constantly be interviewing people, there’s not like, “Okay, I’m going to stop.” And most people say they think of them as big projects, “All right, I’m going to interview 50 people, and then I’m going to look.”

Bob: My thing is in interview ten people a time, learn some stuff, go prototype, do another ten interviews, and just continuously design it into the way you learn. When we were at the Home Builder, we interviewed three people every week who moved into one of our houses.

Bob: It was either me, or Greg, and it would be one other person from the company, and we’d just go. And by the end of the year we had 150 interviews of all this data to be able to look at and cut, it helped us innovate so much better and I think the biggest advantage is it helped us understand how the market changed from when we started doing it to the end of the business.

Bob: It was very different value systems because the economy had tanked and people were doing a lot of different things and it kept us so up to speed on what was going on.

Bob: I think doing some and taking back, the Lean thing, right? Doing small things, getting them efficient, doing the next thing. Just keep them small as opposed to trying to do a lot of interviews at once.

Martin: That’s really great advice from all of you for our next steps.

Building the JTBD community: meetups and next steps

Chris: Awesome. Amrita, give us just like two minutes on what you’re up to. I know you’re launching the Toronto Meetup Group and you’ve got some other new stuff going on. What’s new in Toronto?

Amrita: Yes, so I’m really, we found out through Twitter that there was a bunch of us here who follow Jobs-to-be-Done, a bunch of us have gone to the Switch Workshops and it just felt, it was just kind of this organic thing that happened. I think you introduced me, actually, to the guy in New York, Dave, who runs the New York Jobs-to-be-Done Group and works at Meet-ups.

Amrita: We’re having our first meet-up on November 20th and you can go to meetup.com and find us through the Toronto Jobs-to-be-Done Meet-up Group. So, looking forward to that because some of us, there are some people who are looking for more ways to do practice interviews.

Amrita: There are a couple of us that have projects coming up where we’re happy to kind of be guinea pig and sort of lift the covers a bit to show people what we’re doing from start to finish. We’re going to use ourselves as a case study with the group.

Amrita: Otherwise I’m helping start-ups with two big things, getting more customers and keeping their customers, and they’re obviously interrelated. I’m excited to be working with some great companies, both in Toronto as well as in the States.

Bob: What’s the name of the new company? Your company?

Amrita: I’m a one-woman shop, it’s called Shape and Sound, so shape and sound.com. I’m also starting like a monthly Google Hangout, there are a lot of start-up marketers who I think just need a little bit of advice, they need a peer group to talk to.

Amrita: I was getting so many similar questions, I said, “Why don’t we all just do a call together once a month.” So, I’m going to put that together shortly, trying to do one before the holidays.

Chris: Fantastic. So, I guess a couple of things. If you’re listening to this and you’re in Toronto, if you miss the November meetup, get to the next one, overcome your anxiety. There’s no excuse not to go and do some practice interviews because that’s the key to everything. And then also one of our, kind of, tasks going forward is to try to get some of these meetup groups started in other major cities.

Chris: Martin, we’re sending back to Buenos Aires with a task of talking to other people that have an interest in Jobs-to-be-Done and Lean and that sort of thing, to try to get the meetup started down there. If you’re in another city and you’re thinking about getting a group together, send us a tweet or reach out and we’ll do everything we can to kind of help you fuel that and send people your way.

Bob: I can see us kind of morphing how we do the Switch Workshops, where we’ll go to Toronto and they’ll either have a meetup and then we’ll do the workshop or we’ll do the workshop and then do the meetup and so we can kind of do a traveling roadshow to kind of support the different meetups that are going on. I think it’ll make it, I think, easier for us and also build that support network locally for people. So I think it’s a really great thing.

Amrita: Yes, we’re excited.

Chris: Yes, cool.

Martin: Yes, I’m really looking forward to getting the ball rolling in Buenos Aires. I think this is really useful material and, at least for example in the consumer space, I felt that this was like the missing piece of the puzzle for us.

Martin: I’ve been sharing it with people that I know, other start-ups, and just because I’m excited about it and I found it really useful. So, I’m pretty excited to see if we can get some people in BA talking about it.

Chris: What we’d like to do is basically as you do some interviews, maybe have you come back on and tell us kind of what you’re learning and then do some stuff and some more interviews and maybe we can just kind of have almost a case study of you and kind of the progression of, “Hey, I kind of knew about it. I got trained.” We can see your progression.

Martin: That’d be great.

Chris: Fantastic. So, thanks for being on. You can follow both of these guys on Twitter. Martin is msinia and Amrita Chandra, @amaritachandra, A-M-R-I-T-A-C-H-A-N-D-R-A. Follow the #JTBD for more information and we’ll talk to you soon.