Most companies want to stay closely connected to their customers to make sure they’re creating the products and services those customers want. Rarely, though, can customers articulate their requirements accurately or completely—their motivations are more complex and their pathways to purchase more elaborate than they can describe. But you can get to the bottom of it. What they hire—and equally important, what they fire—tells a story. That story is about the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of their desire for progress—and what prevents them from getting there. The challenge is in becoming part sleuth and part documentary filmmaker—piecing together clues and observations—to reveal the jobs customers are trying to get done.
Pleasant Rowland did absolutely no research when she was considering founding what would become the American Girl doll company back in 1985. She endured one—and only one—focus group in the process of starting the company after her first director of marketing insisted that she had to see one. Sitting behind the two-way glass mirror, she watched as a roundtable of mothers of preteens curled up their lips when the interviewer explained the concept—dolls based in historical periods with books and accessories to support their “stories.” “To the person, they said, ‘My daughter would never like anything like that, based in history. And all those accessories would just get caught in the vacuum cleaner,’” Rowland recalls. Luckily, Rowland was more confident in her own sense of the Job to Be Done. The company was so successful that she sold it to Mattel thirteen years later for a staggering $700 million.
Consumers can’t always articulate what they want. And even when they do, their actions may tell a different story. If I asked you if you care about being environmentally friendly, most of us would say yes. We’d talk about how we recycle or walk instead of driving whenever possible. But if I opened your cupboards, would they tell the same story? How many new parents do you know who say they care about climate change, but gratefully stock disposable diapers instead of cloth? Do you happily pop a plastic K-cup into your coffee machine? On the other hand, research has consistently shown that a significant portion of customers are willing to pay more for foods that are labeled “organic,” a word that is so generically used that it’s almost meaningless. What explains the disparity? No one aspires to be environmentally unfriendly, but when the actual decision to pull a product into your life has to be made, you pick the solution that best represents the values and tradeoffs you care about in those particular circumstances.
OK, so if what consumers say is unreliable, can’t you just look at the data instead? Isn’t that objective? Well, data is prone to misinterpretation. Sales and marketing data in the toy industry told Pleasant Rowland that girls between the ages of seven and twelve would never play with dolls. And most data only tracks one of the two important moments in a customer’s decision to hire a product or service. The most commonly tracked is what we call the “Big Hire”—the moment you buy the product. But there’s an equally important moment that doesn’t show up in most sales data: when you actually “consume” it.
The moment a consumer brings a purchase into his or her home or business, that product is still waiting to be hired again—we call this the “Little Hire.” If a product really solves the job, there will be many moments of consumption. It will be hired again and again. But too often the data companies gather reflects only the Big Hire, not whether it meets customers’ Jobs to Be Done in reality. My wife may buy a new dress, but she doesn’t really consume it until she’s actually cut the tag off and worn it. It’s less important to know that she chose blue over green than it is to understand why she made the decision to finally wear it over all other options. How many apps do you have on your phone that seemed like a good idea to download, but you’ve more or less never used them again? If the app vendor simply tracks downloads, it’ll have no idea whether its app is doing a good job solving your desire for progress or not.
Jobs to Be Done have always existed. Innovations have just gotten better and better in the way we can respond to them. So no matter how new or revolutionary your product idea may be, the circumstances of struggle already exist. Consequently, in order to hire your new solution, by definition customers must fire some current compensating behavior or suboptimal solution—including firing the solution of doing nothing at all. Wristwatches were fired in droves as soon as people began carrying mobile phones that not only told them the time, but could sync with calendars and provide alarms and reminders. I fired my weekly Sports Illustrated when I could suddenly flip on ESPN. The people who hired Depend Silhouette incontinence products fired staying at home instead of risking going out. Companies don’t think about this enough. What has to get fired for my product to get hired? They think about making their product more and more appealing, but not what it will be replacing.
A customer’s decision-making process about what to fire and hire has begun long before she enters a store—and it’s complicated. There are always two opposing forces battling for dominance in that moment of choice and they both play a significant role.
Consumers are often stuck in the habits of the present—the thought of switching to a new solution is almost too overwhelming. Sticking with the devil they know, even if imperfect, is bearable. I refused to upgrade my mobile phone for years, in spite of all the whiz-bang things my assistant assured me the new phone could do, because I was comfortable with the one I had. This is largely because—as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has shown—the principal pull of the old is that it requires no deliberation and has some intuitive plausibility as a solution already. Loss aversion—people’s tendency to want to avoid loss—is twice as powerful psychologically as the allure of gains, as demonstrated by Kahneman and Amos Tversky.1
The anxieties that come into play are powerful: anxiety about the cost, anxiety of learning something new, and anxiety of the unknown can be overwhelming. Why do many consumers hang on to their old mobile phones, even when they might get some trade-in value toward a new one? “What if the new one fails at some point?” “What if I find myself in some kind of unanticipated situation where I need a backup phone?” “What if . . . ?” Health clubs have only recently come around to the idea that locking customers into annual contracts creates so much anxiety that it prevents them from joining in the first place. Innovators all too often focus exclusively on the forces pushing for change—making sure that the new solution for resolving a customer’s struggle is sufficiently alluring to cause them to switch. But they completely ignore the powerful forces blocking that change.
ING Direct went to the extraordinary lengths of opening “cafés” in locations across the United States and Canada to relieve customers’ anxiety about a virtual bank. You can drop into one of the cafés, but you can’t actually perform any traditional teller-based cash transactions. You can talk to a staff member or use the ATM, but the café’s primary purpose is to reassure consumers that it’s a “real” bank—and build the brand with its presence. The fact that SNHU is a not-for-profit—with a genuine campus—reduces online students’ anxiety that it’s some kind of fly-by-night focused on fleecing every possible dollar from unwitting students. Overcoming customer anxieties is a very big deal.
Think of it this way: the job has to have sufficient magnitude to cause people to change their behavior—“I’m struggling and I want a better solution than I can currently find”—but the pull of the new has to be much greater than the sum of the inertia of the old and the anxieties about the new. There’s almost always some friction associated with switching from one product to another, but it’s also almost always discounted by innovators who are sure that their product is so fabulous it will erase any such concerns. It’s easy to fire things that simply offer functional solutions to a job. But when the decision involves firing something that has emotional and social dimensions to solving the job, that something is far harder to let go. No matter how frustrated we are with our current situation or how enticing a new product is, if the forces that pull us to hiring something don’t outweigh the hindering forces, we won’t even consider hiring something new.
The progress customers are trying to make has to be understood in context. I can’t think of a clearly defined job in which the emotional and social forces—and the forces compelling and opposing change—are not critically important. Customers are always reluctant to fire something until they are sure they have something better, even if they’re firing simply living with an imperfect solution. This is true even in the B2B arena, where you might think the constraints of a procurement process would leave little room for emotional and social factors—and anxieties and habits of the present. But think about the plant manager making a decision to purchase parts or supplies. It’s critically important to her that she can count on having the supplies she needs, when she needs them. Worrying about that will cause sleepless nights, and possibly even career anxiety. Or think about the first-time project manager charged with managing an outside consulting firm. He’s going to want to look good to his peers and managers. He wants to be seen to manage the project on budget, on time, and to have developed a strong problem-solving relationship with the consulting firm.
One company that has taken this to heart is Mercer, which my coauthor David Duncan worked with as it sought to create new businesses to drive growth. When Jacques Goulet became global president of the retirement business for Mercer in 2013, the future looked challenging. For decades, Mercer, a global human-resources and financial-services consulting firm, has helped its client companies design retirement plans for their employees and it had grown into a significant portion of their business. But with companies increasingly shifting from defined-benefit plans (in which the company guarantees a company-funded pension for eligible employees) to plans in which the employee makes the majority of investment in his or her own retirement plan (such as a 401(k)), Mercer’s primary source of profit in that division looked to be fading away. The company had to start innovating—fast—or face an uncertain future.
For Mercer, simply asking new questions about client jobs triggered a series of important and fresh perspectives on innovation opportunities with its clients. One insight was that Mercer had traditionally thought narrowly about what it was providing for its corporate customers in the past: good advice to its thirty thousand corporate customers that offer retirement plans to their employees. This framing, while narrow, had enabled Mercer to build a large business in the retirement space. But that wasn’t going to help Mercer grow now.
What job were clients really hiring Mercer to do? Did those pension plans actually solve the full set of customer jobs? On the surface, the heads of corporate finance or human resources were focused on finding a plan to offer employees retirement benefits. But there was more to their job than that. What obstacles were getting in their way?
Goulet’s team identified an opportunity for innovation in many organizations’ desire to shift from the traditional defined-benefits pension plan to an employee-contribution plan—or get rid of the pension plan altogether by selling it to an insurance company that would take over running it. Leading such an enormous shift, efficiently and with an array of appealing new investment opportunities and benefits for employees, could be overwhelming for human resources or finance professionals. These professionals wanted to be seen to be careful, thoughtful, and navigating an appropriate amount of risk—but also competent enough to make recommendations. And whatever they eventually picked, they didn’t want to end up fielding an endless stream of complaints and maintenance for their company.
Historically, the process of identifying new opportunities for what could be hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pension liabilities had traditionally been time consuming and labor intensive for the HR team or CFO, and not terribly transparent—it was a process that would have increased anxiety for the professionals trying to lead the decision making for their companies. Mercer might approach a handful of insurers on behalf of those clients, provide them some specifics of the client’s situation, and then wait for a quote on how much they would charge to take over responsibility for the pension plan. After some back-and-forth, Mercer would present the company with a shortlist of choices and expect it to pick one and carry out the changeover. The process of deciding who to go with and then executing the pension fund buyout could take up to six months, during which time the market, and value of the existing pension fund, might have fluctuated enormously. It was a high-stress process for the HR or finance professional to work through—and their personal reputation could hang on the path they’d recommend.
“That individual has to answer to his boss, who has to answer to the board of directors, who will ask very specific questions about the direction of the pension plan and options,” explains Goulet. “The CFO wants to be seen to be very prepared—to have left no stone unturned. If he gets a call from the CEO or the board, he wants to be ready. The emotions very much play into that.”
So Mercer’s solution reflected that.
With a jobs lens, Mercer’s Pension Risk Exchange was born, something akin to a stock exchange where buyers and sellers come to meet and execute and trade in real time. No more long lag times. No more lack of transparency with Mercer in the middle. The process was designed not only to be more productive for clients, but also to include critical elements to help overcome some of the forces that would naturally impede change given the magnitude of the decision involved.
Among the other solutions Mercer baked into its offering: a module that allowed clients to track and model what various buyout options would mean for the company long before they formally engaged in the buyout process. A monitoring function allowed them to model various options and see how they would play out in reality before making a final commitment—a kind of anxiety-reducing practice run.
That has paid off for Mercer. The Pension Risk Exchange has to date launched successfully in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—a tremendous accomplishment for both Mercer and Goulet—and it’s a key part of Mercer’s ongoing growth strategy. As Goulet puts it: “When we focused on Jobs to Be Done, we realized there was a better mousetrap to be invented.”
Jobs Theory helps innovators identify the full picture of the progress a customer is trying to make in particular circumstances, including the complex set of competing needs and relative priorities. You have to understand not only what customers want to hire, but what they’ll need to fire to make room for the new solution. All that context matters profoundly. “When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough?’ we’re left with opinions and never-ending arguments,” explains Chris Spiek, Bob Moesta’s partner in the Re-Wired Group. “It’s nearly impossible to distinguish between bad, good, good-enough, excellent without the Job to Be Done. When we try to answer: ‘Is it good enough to help a consumer make this kind of progress in this kind of situation?’ the answers come easily. The circumstance of the progress they are trying to make is critical to understanding causality.”
So how can you begin to map out these competing forces to get to the crux of your customers’ jobs? Your customers may not be able to tell you what they want, but they can tell you about their struggles.
What are they really trying to accomplish and why isn’t what they’re doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new? One simple way to think about these questions is through storyboarding. Talk to consumers as if you’re capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later. Pixar has this down to a science: as you piece together your customers’ struggle, you can literally sketch out their story:
You’re building their story, because through that you can begin to understand how the competing forces and context of the job play out for them.
Airbnb’s founders clearly understood this. Before launching, the company meticulously identified and then storyboarded forty-five different emotional moments for Airbnb hosts (people willing to rent out their spare room or entire home) and guests. Together, those storyboards almost make up a minidocumentary of the jobs people are hiring Airbnb to do. “When you storyboard something, the more realistic it is, the more decisions you have to make,” CEO Brian Chesky told Fast Company. “Are these hosts men or women? Are they young, are they old? Where do they live? The city or the countryside? Why are they hosting? Are they nervous? It’s not that they [the guests] show up to the house. They show up to the house, how many bags do they have? How are they feeling? Are they tired? At that point you start designing for stuff for a very particular use case.”
One of the critical storyboard moments, for example, is the first Little Hire moment for guests—when they first turn up at the home in which they’ll stay. How are they greeted? If they’re expecting a place that has been described as relaxing, is that evident? Maybe there should be soft music playing or a scented candle, says Airbnb’s Chip Conley. Has the host made them feel at ease with their decision? Has the host made clear how they will solve any issues or problems that arise during the stay? And so on. The experience must match the customers’ vision of what they hired Airbnb to do. The Airbnb storyboards—which have been constantly tweaked and improved since its founding—reflect the importance of the combination of pushes and pulls that drive their customers’ Big Hires and Little Hires.
The moments of struggle, nagging tradeoffs, imperfect experiences, and frustrations in peoples’ lives—those are the what you’re looking for. You’re looking for recurring episodes in which consumers seek progress but are thwarted by the limitations of available solutions. You’re looking for surprises, unexpected behaviors, compensating habits, and unusual product uses. The how—and this is a place where many marketers trip up—are ground-level, granular, extended narratives with a sample size of one. Remember, the insights that lead to successful new products look more like a story than a statistic. They’re rich and complex. Ultimately, you want to cluster together stories to see if there are similar patterns, rather than break down individual interviews into categories.
We’d like to share here a real example of how successful practitioners explore for insights and piece together useful narratives that uncover consumers’ jobs. So we asked my colleague Bob Moesta to pick a product everyone would be familiar with. We didn’t want to focus on hot new technology or a flashy, hip brand. We wanted vanilla—and he gave us the mattress. Perfect. How could the decision to purchase a mattress be complicated?
The transcript below captures a Jobs to Be Done interview,2 by Moesta and his colleagues at the Re-Wired Group, of Chicago-based entrepreneur Brian Walker who had just purchased a new mattress. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity, but otherwise unfolds just as the conversation happened live. Its ambling and painstaking deficit-gathering is intentional but it’s not a prototype for all customer-research interviews. Our intention in showing it here is to make clear that uncovering the circumstances of a struggle and identifying a Job to Be Done does not require a magical algorithm. There is no one special method of uncovering Jobs to Be Done and that is precisely the point: there is no black box. You just have to have a “beginner’s mind” as you walk through a consumer’s decision-making process, looking for clues as to the full picture of the struggle.3
You might expect a typical interview by a mattress retailer to focus on figuring out which details about the mattress itself led to the decision to buy. “Was it soft enough? Hard enough? Did it provide the right support? Do you care about the number of coils? Was the color or the pattern on the mattress appealing? What else did you consider buying? How important was price in your decision to buy?”
But this interview focuses on none of that. Moesta, instead, tries to build a robust picture of the circumstances of the customer’s struggle—how he came to think about buying a new mattress. The original goal involves establishing a timeline of all the triggers that actually led to the eventual decision. Walker might appear to be an impulse purchaser. But the backstory that is established, through what might seem to be irrelevant questions, reveals something far more complex. And it is precisely the complexity and the surprising twists and turns that we are seeking.
What is the role that the mattress plays in his life? Why is it important or is it? When is the mattress important and why? Who else is involved in purchase and use of a mattress? What are the barriers and points of friction in buying a new mattress? Depending on the individual’s present struggles and desired progress, what alternatives exist to buying a new mattress? Are there occasions in which the individual does not use the mattress when we might expect him to? Conversely, are there moments in life when he uses the mattress in unusual ways? These are just some of the questions we might have as we seek to piece together the richest possible narrative of the mattress-buying process, beginning well before the moment of purchase, ideally when the very first thought of mattress shopping occurred.
Interviewer: The best way to think about this is we’re literally filming a documentary. We want all the details around when you first started thinking about buying the mattress, when you made the decision, and then using it and experiencing it for the first time. This is almost investigative: we’re building a timeline. Let’s just start with when did you buy the mattress?
Walker: About forty-five days ago. Mid-September.
Interviewer: OK, did you order online, or did you order it . . .
Walker: I bought it at Costco.
Interviewer: You bought it at Costco, was it weekend, weekday?
Walker: It was a weekend.
Interviewer: Weekend. Saturday or Sunday?
Walker: I believe it was a Saturday.
Interviewer: Did you buy anything else with it, or was it just . . .
Walker: You can never go in Costco and buy just one thing, so yes, I did buy other things.
Interviewer: Did you go with “OK, I’m going to buy this thing today, and oh, I need this and this and this”?
Walker: No.
Interviewer: You didn’t go with the intent to buy it?
Walker: I did not.
Interviewer: Wow, OK.
Interviewer: What else did you leave with? Do you remember what else you bought in that trip?
Walker: Well, I have kids, so baby wipes. A lot of milk.
Interviewer: How much milk?
Walker: You get the thing with the three almond milk thing, and then a couple gallons of something else.
Interviewer: What was the something else?
Walker: Just the organic, my son has the 2% and my daughter has the non-fat.
Interviewer: Got it, OK.
Interviewer: Did you have a push cart that you started with?
Walker: Yeah, started with a push cart to get the weekly, the monthly supplies. Paper towels, the milk. The baby wipes.
Interviewer: Anybody with you, or by yourself?
Walker: We had the whole crew there. My wife and two kids. Family man. This is like “Family Man” inside Costco.
Interviewer: How old are your kids?
Walker: Four and a half and two.
Interviewer: This is a family experience. Where did you come across the mattress? Early on or later?
Walker: Towards the end of the forty-five minutes we were in Costco.
Interviewer: Forty-five minutes in Costco.
Interviewer: Was your cart full at that point?
Walker: Pretty full.
Interviewer: With what else?
Walker: The milk and the boxes and the paper towels and all that will fill up a cart pretty quick, so I think I went through everything. There was some produce and that was about it.
Interviewer: Was the list done? Did you guys check everything off?
Walker: Yeah, and like any Costco trip, there were some things we bought that weren’t on that list too.
Interviewer: Give me an example of that.
Walker: I think some salad and some meat for dinner.
Interviewer: OK, nothing else?
Walker: Surprisingly no. Maybe a box of . . . actually no, there was. There was that box that I insisted on getting because I took something from the “drug dealer” [Costco’s famous free sample “pushers”], which was the forty-five packages of instant, Eggo mini-pancakes, that now have maple syrup infused in them.
Interviewer: OK. You’re getting to the end of this trip.
Walker: And it’s getting stressful. It always gets stressful at the end of Costco, because it’s like trying to merge into the Kennedy Expressway in rush hour traffic. They’ve got a thousand products in the store, but they’ve got four lanes open. It’s getting stressful, we’re getting near the end. I actually go down an aisle unexpectedly, and the lightbulb goes off, and there’s the mattress.
Interviewer: Why did you think you needed a new mattress? First of all, who had the first thought? You? Your wife?
Walker: Definitely me first, because about four years prior, I did a lot of research and bought an overpriced Stearns & Foster that was guaranteed to give me a great night’s sleep, and you’re going to have a mattress for at least ten years, so it’s worth the bigger investment, and we got the cushy pillow top.
I would say for about a year I kept waking up every morning saying, “This bed is awful, I wake up with a headache, a neck ache, and a backache. It’s starting to sink, this was a waste of $2,000, I need to find something different.”
Interviewer: How long did you enjoy the mattress?
Walker: Yeah, right when I got it, it was something that I enjoyed for about two years. Year three kind of “eh,” year four, couldn’t stand it. Had total buyer’s remorse.
Interviewer: When did you start to say it was the mattress?
Walker: Because the backaches and the shoulder and neck aches were always there when waking up that next morning. I tried sleeping without pillows, I tried adjusting my position, all this stuff. As you guys can see I’m not a big, big guy, but I started to notice in the mattress the sinkage.
It felt like I was constantly in this arch, and I woke up every morning thinking, “I don’t just need Red Bull, I need three Advil or something else.”
Interviewer: You suggest you travel a lot?
Walker: Last year I did.
Interviewer: OK, and did you not have these problems when you were on the road?
Walker: I did not. Last year was the first year of my business, and I was gone thirty-seven weeks. I was holed up in the Marriott Renaissance Center three days a week. I would assure you at least that that mattress was not the one that I had at home, but I didn’t have those problems.
Interviewer: What else did you do? Did you change anything about the mattress at home? You said you tried no pillows.
Walker: Yeah, I flipped it, I rotated it, I turned it upside down, I took it off the frame, took it off the box springs.
Interviewer: Was your wife having a problem sleeping?
Walker: It’s funny, because she started, I would say the last six months, to realize too, whether it was guilt by association or legitimate, she would say, “I’m starting to have problems, too. It’s uncomfortable,” and believe me, as I said, I’m not a big guy and she’s probably half of me.
She was saying, “I’m having the same problems, and you can see it’s starting to sink, and this pillow top isn’t what I thought it was going to be.” And by the way, I feel bad because it was my uncle who sold it to me!
Interviewer: Were you complaining to your wife about this? Were you complaining about the condition you were in, or was this something you felt internally?
Walker: Initially, I felt it, and then I started voicing it. Then she started saying, “Why are you so cranky?”
Interviewer: Do you remember when she actually first told you that she was being affected by it? Do you remember that conversation, or when it was approximately?
Walker: I would say it’s probably about six months ago.
Interviewer: You’re on the road all the time, and you’re cranky, you need to come home, you’ve got two kids. When did that argument happen? It had to be something like OK, you come home and you’re cranky but I’m not sleeping, so there had to be some conflict around that discussion at some point in time.
Walker: Yeah, and “Hey, you’ve been gone all week, so you can be a dad for three days.”
Interviewer: Why didn’t you go get a new mattress earlier? It sounded like you knew it for a year. Why did you wait so long to get a mattress?
Walker: I think life gets in the way, between building a company over the last eighteen months and trying to raise two kids in a small condo and sell it, and then move to a different place. Buying a new mattress was not top of my priority list.
Interviewer: When did you move?
Walker: June.
Interviewer: You brought the old mattress with you?
Walker: I had bought my original mattress at Macy’s Home Store. Yeah, well, the other caveat that makes this interesting that you might have heard me say, it was sold to me by my uncle.
Interviewer: Had you done a lot of research before you bought that mattress?
Walker: Yes, I did. I was hoping that my uncle would actually give me a deal, which I found out at checkout he wasn’t going to. When my problems started to occur, I went back to Macy’s Home Store and asked some questions, “Well, you’ve got to rotate your mattress. Well, you’ve got to try this. Well, is it maybe how you’re sleeping? Well, our warranty is good for this, but it covers sinkage, and what you have to do is lay a yardstick across the sink of the mattress.”
Interviewer: Did you do that?
Walker: I did not do that, because they said it had to be at least an inch and a half. Then I thought in my head, and other people suggested, “Why don’t you get some giant bags of cement and set it in where the sinkholes are already, and have the guy come out and measure the holes?”
Interviewer: Who suggested the cement bags?
Walker: As I had said earlier on that although there’s these little sink areas on each side of the bed, it didn’t get an inch and a half. The warranty didn’t matter, so I wasn’t going to get any recourse there.
Interviewer: At some point you’re not sleeping well. You’re all stressed. You’re in the middle of Costco, taking a shortcut to try to ease your way onto the Kennedy a little bit faster, get out of there faster, and you see a mattress. You say, “This is the time.” What made you think you had the time today to get that? Because you had to go all the way back and get a flatbed and reenter the Kennedy to get out.
Walker: As we talked about, this is mid-September. Now let’s rewind about three months. Within that three-month window, I started doing research, saying, “The old mattress has to be replaced.” The idea of going into a mattress store or furniture store just gave me the skeeves. I did a lot of online research, and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to make a commitment to a memory foam mattress of some kind.”
I did a lot of online research, came this close to pulling the trigger on a Groupon for a memory foam mattress, and said after my experience with Macy’s Home Store, the last thing I want to do is order something through Groupon online. In the event that I don’t like it, then what am I going to do?
Then this brings us back to the day of, apparently, the crime and the crime scene. I’m in the aisle, and all of a sudden here are all these different memory foam mattresses. I’m like, OK. I’m in Costco. I’ve done a lot of research. The idea of box springs versus eighteen-inch versus twelve versus coils, none of that stuff had ever even gone through my head.
To me, it was about a good night’s sleep. Waking up, feeling pretty good, so I could be as productive as I could be as a business guy and a dad and a husband the next day. I see this, my kids are talking about how they want to get pizza in the checkout, and I’m like OK. Here it is.
I had to go back for the flatbed because I’m like, I pull it down and realize, this is really heavy. The biggest thing that fascinated me is if anyone has bought one of these is to know actually how to package. Because it’s in a box about this high, about that wide, cube rectangle I guess. I’m like, “Wow.”
As you had asked me, the cart was pretty full. Trying to throw that on top of everything else wasn’t going to work.
Interviewer: What was your wife doing at the time? Was your wife going, “Good idea,” was she going, “Oh, come on”?
Walker: She was a little skeptical. She was probably more content in keeping my kids from hitting each other. There was some franticness. There was some, “Are you sure you want it?” Then I pulled down the little twelve-inch by twelve-inch sample of the foam. “Here, touch it, feel it.”
“Oh, that’s actually not bad. If you want it, get it. It’s not a lot of money, I know you’re not sleeping, get it.” That’s when I went out and got the flatbed.
Interviewer: How much was it? Do you remember what you paid?
Walker: Yeah, it was $699. It’s funny, because the Groupon happens to be available, and the one on Groupon was less, but again I felt very concerned about if I have a bad experience about this, do I want to go the Groupon online route versus getting it at the Costco that’s five minutes from my house?
Interviewer: Was there one kind of mattress or was there a huge assortment?
Walker: Not a huge assortment, but there were two or three different kinds, and then they had them by your different bed sizes.
Interviewer: Did you squeeze all of them, or?
Walker: There were two that we were specifically looking at, and one was a lot higher and seemed a lot softer. That was the one that we went with.
Interviewer: Was it the most expensive one?
Walker: It was.
Interviewer: You had a Groupon, right? What was the store you were going to buy that from? You’re not buying it from Groupon. Groupon’s offering the promotion. Who was the company that was selling the mattress?
Walker: I honestly can’t think of it now.
Interviewer: The other thing we need to dive into is you made the comment that going into a mattress store gave you the heebie-jeebies, something like that. When’s the last time you were in a mattress store, do you remember?
Walker: I walk by them. I just walked by one the other day.
Interviewer: What happens in a mattress store?
Walker: First of all, I’m a germaphobe. I see all these beds lined up everywhere and it’s creepy. Secondly, I never see someone that is working in the mattress store that has asked anywhere near the level of questions that you’ve asked me. It’s usually a “What size bed do you have? How much are you looking to spend?”
I think there’s a lot of people at that mattress world from my previous experiences in them that are the same as the bad notion of the car salesman. I’m not saying they’re all that way, it’s just that’s how some of my experiences have been.
Interviewer: The normal purchase process is impossible for you. You can’t walk into a mattress store and even feel it, because there’s this anxiety around, you’re going to get approached by this salesperson. You never lay on the mattress, I can’t believe it.
End of interview
What we see in this interview are the masses of emotion and anxiety this customer has built up around the decision to buy a new mattress. He might be flagged as an impulse buyer at Costco—and marketing decisions might be made around the idea that people buy mattresses on impulse. But the fact is this guy has been thinking about it for a year. It’s been weighing on his mind for a long time. Costco may seem the least likely place for him to pull the trigger on the Big Hire—he’s in a warehouse store where you can buy socks by the dozen and giant shrimp platters. He’s surrounded by noise, and large shopping carts, and employees pushing free food samples. This was the place and the moment that he finally decided to buy a new mattress after months of struggle?
Whatever was driving him, it wasn’t truly an impulse. And it had nothing to do with the details of the mattress itself. Is he worried about springs? Is he worried about the coils? There’s just not a thought of that. He hasn’t mentioned anything about the mattress itself yet. Not one detail.
The progress he was trying to make was to get a good night’s sleep to be a better husband and father when the rest of his life is taking a toll on him. Something he was desperate to do. Every day that he was forced to make a Little Hire of his old mattress drove him closer and closer to that moment in Costco—in fact, the failed Little Hire moments may have played the most significant role in his decision that day. He wasn’t hiring the new mattress as much as he was desperate to fire the old one. That day, in Costco, it was finally time.
There were barriers preventing him from making a choice until that moment. Depending on the job, sometimes the barriers are most profound for the Big Hire. What gets in the way of someone choosing to make the decision to hire something to solve their job? But in other cases, the barriers are surrounding the Little Hire. Why is this solution difficult for you to use—or not, in reality, solving your problem at all? In both cases, those barriers can be so significant as to cause a consumer to not hire your product in the first place or fire it once they’ve brought it into their lives. Innovators have to have a heat-seeking sensor for the tensions, struggles, stress, and anxiety of both the Big Hire and the Little Hire. When we go out in search of innovation opportunities we are like detectives trying to piece together a complicated story with all its emotional richness, because only by constructing the story can we innovate in ways that change the ending.
The other thing to realize is that this is a minidocumentary with more than one character. His wife is with him in the store and she has to sleep on the bed, too. It might be impossible to make a purchase like that on the spot without your wife because of the anxiety of your spouse criticizing your choice: “You bought this cruddy mattress without consulting me!” Because the consumer and his wife were both in the same place, at the same time, and they could both at least touch it, he was able to alleviate the concern that she’d grumble at the decision he made after the fact. As soon as she said, “OK, I know you’re not sleeping well,” she gave her blessing. One major anxiety has been removed. And then, knowing that Costco will take it back without fuss, that’s the final obstacle. As incredible as it seems, because of the competing forces pushing and pulling his decision, it was easier for him to take that leap, never having lay on it, than it is to walk into the mattress store and lie down.
What should a mattress manufacturer or retailer take away from this interview? Given that it is just a single interview—not too much—uncovering jobs is about clustering insights, not having a single eureka. But we can start to form hypotheses and ask fresh questions, as well as think about what we might probe on subsequent interviews.
There’s clearly tension around the mattress retailer experience. What might the ideal experience be for the shopper? Perhaps our salespeople are largely focused on mattress features and the deal. Should we think about staffing our stores with “sleep” experts rather than mattress experts—and might doing so highlight opportunities to improve hiring, training, and compensation structure? When couples will be using a mattress, so both opinions matter, how do you handle the situation where only one spouse is in the store? Should you engage with couples differently? Could you partner with local movers to offer a deal bundled with their move?
There’s also anxiety about switching: “What if I don’t like the new one? How do I get rid of the old one? To be honest, I really do not want to leave our ten-year-old mattress out by the curb for all the neighbors to view . . . I’m not OK with that.” And the list continues, but you can see how further interviews would lead to additional hypotheses and perhaps the retailer discovers opportunities to include immediate delivery and free mattress removal. Perhaps there’s a ninety-day free trial period, no questions asked.
For a mattress manufacturer, one of the big eye-openers might be how dependent we are on the in-store experience and that, if all we think about is our product performance, we’re likely missing the real issue. How can we make retailers more successful? How can we and our retail partners adjust our advertising to communicate the benefits that actually will drive store visits and sales? Manufacturers would certainly have considered the traditional set of competitors, but had they considered Advil or Red Bull? In the case of this interviewee, some of his behaviors to compensate for poor sleep involved workarounds such as those. If I were a mattress manufacturer, I would want to have a full understanding of these “competitors” and explore ways to decrease the friction associated with adopting my solution with the promise of consistent, high-quality sleep.
As a nonexpert in the world of mattresses, I am struck by the incredible emotional depth associated with making the decision about the mattress purchase. I’d also never thought much about all the pain points and friction associated with switching a mattress—from disposing of the old one to getting the new one home. And then the anxiety of “What if it’s not right or my spouse doesn’t like it?” One of the fundamental mistakes that many marketers make is to collect a handful of data points from a huge sample of respondents when what they really need—and this interview illustrates—is a huge number of data points from a smaller sample size. Great innovation insights have more to do with depth than breadth.
As many of the executives we interviewed have told us, when you hit upon a job, it just makes intuitive sense. It feels true. A genuine insight, as neuromarketing expert Gerald Zaltman, a colleague at Harvard Business School, says, is a thought that is experienced as true on conception. When you have an insight, you don’t have to convince yourself that it’s important or powerful. You just know.
The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.
But as our next chapter will illustrate, uncovering a Job to Be Done is only the first step. You are selling progress, not products. In order to create a solution that customers actually want to hire—and hire repeatedly—you have to see the full context of customers’ Jobs to Be Done and the obstacles that get in their way.
Chapter Takeaways
Questions for Leaders
1. Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47, no. 2, March 1979: 263–92.
2. You can listen to the original, unedited mattress interview on Bob Moesta’s website: Jobstobedone.org.
3. It is worth noting how our Theory of Jobs relates to another popular idea related to customer-centric innovation, that of “design thinking.” This label is commonly applied to a broad set of ideas and practices, but at its heart it refers to a problem-solving methodology that emphasizes deep empathy with the customer, divergent thinking, and rapid iteration of solutions. A central element of design thinking is to prioritize users’ experiences over product attributes, and on this important point we find common ground. Because Jobs Theory provides a causal explanation for why customers will embrace some innovations and not others, as well as a language for understanding deeply the insights about customers that really matter, it is complementary to, and completely compatible with, design thinking. The language and thought process of jobs provides a powerful set of tools for developing the deep customer insights required by design thinking, and for inspiring solutions that customers will actually want to purchase and use.