609: The proven way to get customers to switch to your product – with Chris Spiek

Practical tips for product managers to conduct Jobs-to-be-Done interviews

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TLDR

I’m welcoming back Chris Spiek, Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of the Rewired Group, to demystify Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) interviews. Chris shares his journey to developing JTBD with Bob Moesta, offers practical tips for switch interviews, and emphasizes the importance of understanding customer struggle to drive innovation.

Introduction

Eleven years ago on this show, Chris Spiek explained why people buy a Snickers bar, which is a completely different reason from why they buy a Milky Way. The framework was called Jobs to be Done (JTBD), and back then many product managers had never heard of it. Today everyone knows the words, but fewer can actually run a JTBD interview. After this episode, that will change for you.

Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks and co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, where he and Bob Moesta spent more than a decade building Jobs to be Done into a complete product development framework. He co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook, his work is featured in Clayton Christensen’s book, Competing Against Luck, and he has helped teams at Basecamp, Facebook, Intercom, Dropbox, and others understand why customers switch to their products. He teaches the switch interview and has built an AI tool that analyzes those interviews.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

JTBD as a Framework to Move Beyond Guesswork

Chris shares how his early career in building custom software exposed the difficulty of predicting which projects would succeed. He was building applications for Bob Moesta, who had a incredible ability to understand customers’ problems. Bob and Chris built the Jobs-to-be-Done framework as a systematic method to understand customers’ needs and focus on solving them rather than on building product features.

Switch Interviews

Jobs-to-be-Done interviews, also known as switch interviews, uncover the reasons customers switch from one product to another. They investigate customers’ struggles, definitions of progress, and the trade-offs they’re willing to make, providing clarity on how to improve products and customer experience.