Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks. Chris co-founded the Product Design Consultancy, the Re-Wired Group in 2010 with jobs-to-be-done expert Bob Moesta, and co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook with Bob Moesta.
Chris Spiek is Chief Product Officer at Autobooks. Chris co-founded the Product Design Consultancy, the Re-Wired Group in 2010 with jobs-to-be-done expert Bob Moesta, and co-authored The Jobs-to-be-Done Handbook with Bob Moesta.
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Chris Spiek is an expert on jobs to be done. An approach to design that focuses on first understanding the problem your customer is trying to solve.
Before designing a product to solve that problem. Now we've adopted the jobs to be done framework here at game thinking as a core part of our system with powerful results. A key idea behind jobs to be done is that to design a great product, you first have to understand your customer's struggle.
Chris: If the product managers and people working on developing the next thing, feel the burden of, I need to sit and focus and stare at this thing until I birth this idea [00:01:00] that is totally new to the world and is going to blow everybody away.
I basically tell people, we're doing it wrong. We need to actually go the other direction and say, it's not about the supernova explosion of like the great idea. It's more like solving a mystery. How do we go back and have conversations with the right people at the right time in the right context? To understand what they're struggling with and then let the path unfold from there.
Amy: Listen in as Chris tells us about his pioneering work with Bob Moesta at the Rewired Group and find out how Chris uses jobs to be done day to day to power design at his current firm, Autobooks.
Welcome everyone. We're here with Chris Spiek, who is an amazing entrepreneur. And Chris is going to share his journey and something about his current work with us today. And if you are into jobs to be done, this is for you. This is [00:02:00] a way to understand. How jobs to be done works in the wild in everyday practice, the theory's great, but we're going to be talking about all the things that people on the front lines of creating products actually use jobs to be done for.
I'd like to find out some about your background. I'm really curious how you first got started in tech and design and your path through the rewired group. To running Autobooks today.
Chris: Yeah. I'm happy to give the backgrounds. My mother introduced me to technology at a very young age. This was like back in the eighties with the tandies and like the initial, you know, sort of home computers.
I kept that excitement going through college and graduated and started work as a software developer out of college. I grew over a couple of years quickly into management and becoming partner at a custom app development shop here in Detroit. And really just had a passion for building products and still have that passion.
[00:03:00] So that was the first decade of my career. The interesting inflection point that I took was I started to gain an understanding pretty quickly of how much variability there was in the success of product launches. So we would get hired to do work for a client and build a digital product or application.
And at the beginning of the project, all the excitement was, peaked, right? This is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. The client's excited. We're excited. Everyone's jazzed. And then we would launch. And I got very bad at predicting what was going to happen because it always felt great up front.
And then at the end, the thing would either take off and get mass adoption or it would tank. And we had done something wrong through that process. So it was, Very satisfying and fun work from a, um, technical perspective. Cause I was building the latest and greatest and using all the fun tools, but it wasn't satisfying from an actual progress perspective, from the perspective of I'm launching things that customers are embracing and customers love, because I couldn't predict it.
[00:04:00] It was just all hit or miss. So I decided to go really deep on trying to learn the methods of, I didn't really honestly know that it was called product development management at the time because I was so deep into the software space. When I went into how do you uncover what consumers are shopping for and what they're looking for.
So I went into all the traditional need state analysis and persona creation and laddering and basically everything that I could find. To solve that question so I could be a better service provider to the people that were hiring me and I could lend them some guidance around what I think that they could build.
And ultimately, the methods that I found that are out there, did not give me the concreteness that I was looking for as a developer or as an engineer, at the time we would do. Personas, and I would come up with a number of groups and I would say our primary audience is a 30-year-old female professional, lives in the city, has 30,000 of disposable income a year, likes [00:05:00] music and likes going out with her friends on the weekends.
And I would take that and I would look at the product that I'm building. And I would say, I need to make very concrete decisions about what I'm building. And I can't understand how this Persona leads me to make better decisions in the product or will lead me to have confidence in what I'm building. At the same time, I got connected to a gentleman named Bob Moesta, who was working with Clayton Christensen out of Harvard Business School.
And Bob actually turned into a client of mine. And through long conversations over a number of years introduced me to what were the early seedlings of jobs to be done. So this is like 2004, 2005, not a lot of language. Clay had launched the innovators dilemma and jobs as a footnote in the book. But aside from that, I couldn't find anything to read.
So I was basically interrogating Bob every chance I get like, how does this stuff work? And what is this way of thinking all about? We got deep enough down the path. And I got convinced enough that jobs was the [00:06:00] framework that I was looking for. That I left the firm that I was at bob and I started the Rewired Group around 2008, 2009 with Clay as a partner, basically under the premise of, let's evolve the jobs-to-be-done framework, formalize it, try to popularize it so that product developers can use it across a wide variety of industries.
We essentially started a product design and consulting organization, worked with basically every industry under the sun from CPG to energy to healthcare to technology is my passion. So it was in Silicon Valley for a long time, helping companies do that. But basically went, went into jobs, spent about a decade of my career doing that.
Anyone who's done consulting knows. You get the itch eventually to go build stuff yourself. So got back into running product and engineering teams recently. And I'm now a chief product officer at a company called Autobooks here in Detroit, which is a FinTech startup.
Amy: Tell me a little bit more about Autobooks, what Autobooks does and why you made the decision to join that [00:07:00] company?
Chris: Yeah. Great question. At its core, Autobooks helps small business owners get paid and keep track of their books. Who's paid me, who owes me money, can I quickly get an invoice out to somebody to get money into my bank account? And we go to market through partnerships with financial institutions, banks and credit unions.
So you can think about it similar to something like a square or a QuickBooks, except to use Autobooks instead of logging into Square, you log into your online account at your bank and you can send invoices and accept payments directly from your bank account. So payments land very fast, very easy to stay organized.
We get massive distribution that way because basically banks are taking us to market for us as opposed to us going to Google and doing things like that. And traditionally, small business owners have been underserved by financial institutions. So if you've got a account at your local bank, a personal account, your bank is probably really good at providing you services.
If you need a loan, things like that. If you own a big [00:08:00] commercial enterprise, You're worth a lot of money to that financial institution, they're probably really good at taking you out to lunch and showing up and providing services. If you're in the middle, you're this weird thing that a bank doesn't know what to do with.
If I take you out to lunch a lot I'm probably losing money on you. If I treat you like a retail account that really doesn't work either because you need to get paid, you need to send invoices. So Autobooks is basically helping the 12,000 or so financial institutions around the country create a small business offering and serve their small businesses.
And you can probably tell by the number of times I said small business in that description that I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I've started a number of businesses. It's what drew me to Autobooks and the mission that we're on here.
Amy: Fantastic. So the banks are actually your clients.
Chris: The banks are our clients.
The small businesses are, is our end user ultimately.
Amy: So B2C.
Chris: So this is small micro startup. Think of your lawn care provider, your plumber, attorneys, things like that. It, they almost act as end consumers at the end of the day, right? One employee, a couple of employees, things like that.
Amy: [00:09:00] So I noticed from the way you described Autobooks, you described the context of the problem.
And I think that's a big punchline for jobs to be done. I also, I got to say, I was almost screaming into a pillow while you were talking about hitting a wall with personas as a product creator, I went through the same journey where I'm a game creator who also does products that are game-like.
Chris: Yeah.
Amy: And I grew up on personas, cut my teeth on personas, and then I saw the limits.
I saw that if I had 50 things with the team on the whiteboard that we wanted to build, and we had to pick the three, the persona wouldn't help us. That's it. So when I found jobs to be done and job stories, the focus on context and verbs as a game designer was fantastic. So I want to dig into the jobs to be done.
You are a world class expert. By the [00:10:00] way, Bob's one of our favorite VIPs. He's been in a number of times to support us and help us and be crazy, Bob, who's so inspiring and wonderful. One of the. Ways that jobs to be done in game design really comes together is the idea of making progress. And if you're a game designer, you want to create long term engagement of any kind, creating a path of progress, understanding what progress means to your customer.
Yeah. Is really critical. So jobs to be done is such a great fit that way. Yet many people really stumble with this. They find it hard to say it's fine for games, but what about products? What about apps? What about my SAS? So how do you think about that? And how do you talk to teams to help them really understand and get their arms around this idea of your customer making progress is the focus of what you're doing.
Chris: I think you nailed it. I [00:11:00] won't introduce jobs to a product organization unless they understand that they're struggling. So the thing that I look for is you got the 50 sticky notes on the wall. How are you choosing and how are you choosing in a way that you have any sort of confidence in the decision that you're making?
The thing that I see time and time again is product managers and people in product development. Start to view their world as a creative world and a creative exercise. And in some ways it is, but if the product managers and people working on developing the next thing, feel the burden of, I need to sit and focus and stare at this thing until I birthed this idea that is totally new to the world. And it's gonna blow everybody away.
I basically tell people we're doing it wrong. We need to actually go the other direction and say it's not about Nova supernova explosion of the great idea. It's more like solving a mystery. How do we go back and have conversations with the right people? At the right time in the right context to understand [00:12:00] what they're struggling with and then let the path unfold from there.
And it's basically a 180 degree orientation shift that I try to get people to go through. The hardest part about it that I find is. Just by nature, we find most people in product are geeky on the technology side, right? So we are infatuated with the latest and greatest and all the technology that our competitors are using and everything that's coming out of the valley.
And we want to find a way to use that as a starting point. And say, how do I pull in AI to what I'm working on? How do I pull in blockchain? How do I pull in all these fancy things and then build off of that? The thing that I'm trying to get people to constantly say is go to your customer, find times that they've switched in the domain or in the context that you're looking for, find where they're struggling or they're underserved with their current offering, where they made trade offs that they're not happy about making.
And then start your journey there because now you've got the [00:13:00] bounds of a problem. You can pull all the fancy technologies in, but the conversations that you have, the causal mechanisms that you uncover will give you the guidance to make those decisions about this thing fits. It will help these people make progress.
I'm looking at the imaginary 50 set of Post it notes right in front of us, right? I can listen to the story of the interview that I just did with a customer and put this Post it note down and say, if this person had this feature or this product, they would make progress faster. They would make less trade offs.
They would struggle less. They'd pay us a lot of money, things like that. All these other Post it notes I can deprioritize. So I'm constantly trying to work with product organizations to make that switch and say, if you're just doing the brainstorming or just viewing this as a purely creative exercise, it's, you got to shift your perspective.
Amy: How do you figure out what progress means to that client? Or that customer, for instance, you serve banks at Autobooks. What does progress mean to the banks? Right?
Chris: It's not complicated. It takes a little bit of practice and it takes time. And [00:14:00] that's the scariest part about it. What we ultimately do is we narrow in on our domain.
So what are we really interested in learning about? Obviously we've got some idea of a problem that we're solving or something we want to build, right? So we use that to frame the space that we're talking about. We go out and find. A number of people who have made that switch, right? I'll use Autobooks as an example.
We send an invoice, you accept the payment. A lot of our users on the small business side use PayPal, you know, monthly fee or anything like that, easy to create an invoice, easy to get paid weird. I don't know what I'd do with that money. I have to link my bank account and transfer it now, but very similar in terms of people using a feature to get a job done today.
So I would talk to square users, PayPal users, QuickBooks users. I figure out the bounds and a group of people that I want to talk to. And then I go talk to people who have switched recently. So small business, I don't want to talk to big enterprise, but up to a million dollars, up to a couple of employees, wide variety of industries.
So I make [00:15:00] sure I get a wide segment and one on one sit them down. And basically the interesting part is I don't talk about the product at all. You've got to start the conversation one way. So you signed up for PayPal and you got paid. You started using it two months ago. I want to know the context. I want to know what's going on in the business or what's going on in your life that caused you to say, I've got a million things on my plate and I'm trying to run this business that's crazy.
I'm going to set aside time in my life to go set up a PayPal account. I'm going to set up time in my life to make sure that it fits and to figure out how to configure an invoice and send that invoice to a customer. All of a sudden that rose to a high priority for you. I want to know all the things that happened in your life that's pushed you to make that decision to spend energy on it.
And then I want to know, how did you go shop? Did you talk to your friends? Did you do a Google search? Where did you find out about the solution? And then through that timeline, what decisions did you make about what was important and what was not [00:16:00] important to you? Cause as we shop, we're basically pulling things.
We call it the consideration set, pulling things into our consideration set and saying, Oh, I can send an invoice with QuickBooks, man. QuickBooks is 50 a month. I don't know if I want to spend that much right away. Ooh, I can send something with PayPal. PayPal doesn't have the accounting features that QuickBooks does, but it's no monthly fee.
I want to hear how the user wrestles with all of those little decisions, and then I need to combine things, right? So I have what they're struggling with, I have the trade offs that they're making and the products that they're looking at, I have the decision that they ultimately made, and then the last piece of the puzzle is I have satisfaction.
And what I'm always looking for is that gap in satisfaction. I was struggling. I made progress. I made a decision. It works. I still have this money in my holding tank. They call it the holding tank. I got paid 10 grand, 10 grand sitting in there. I forgot to transfer it into my bank account. My accountant's mad at me.
My books are all out of whack. I need to go constantly do this thing. It's a trade off they're making. [00:17:00] Right. Why didn't you go use QuickBooks? You get the story around that. What we find is if we get too tied up into what I call the supply side, all the fancy whiz bang technology. It's almost like we view the world as if nobody is making progress today and nothing is happening.
But when you start talking to people who have purchased something similar to what you're thinking about building, you find all the trade offs, and you find all the opportunities where you can go innovate and say, these are the underserved population or underserved situations where I can go put my product into.
There's already demand because people are struggling and it just takes off from there.
Amy: This is an interview that's focused on the purchase experience and switching, which is great and valuable. Yes. A lot of what we do is focus on everything that happens after and long term engagement and how you get at that.
The overlap between the methodology We use in game thinking and what you described is very high. But one of the interesting differences is they basically abut each other in the [00:18:00] way that you get at. Product use. One of the things I love about this that I want to highlight is where you get at the decision making that goes on within a context that happens over time.
A lot of people are very focused on moments in time, and it can be really tricky to get at things that happen over time, but you got it. Something that happened over time.
Chris: The way I always think about it is dominoes falling. I want to find causality. I'm just imagining giant dominoes that are falling over.
If I can't find the one that's causing the next one to fall, I got to dive into that in the interview. And then the other piece that you touched on is I haven't worked in games a lot. So this is really fascinating to me to have this conversation, but it almost, in my mind, it feels like. There's almost three events that happen.
What we just talked about is what Bob and I always call a big hire. H I R E. Big hire. I put my money down. I had expectations for how this product or service was going to help me make progress in my life. And there's [00:19:00] a definitive action. The next thing that we talk about is the little hire. You've bought it, but when do you actually pull that out?
Tear it open, put the things in, put it on the shelf. Same thing in the game industry. I've got to get them to some situations. I've got to get them to purchase. So there's some,
Amy: Right. Well, that's where a core loop comes in. So, um, a little higher as you pull it out, that's a moment where we focus is on the habit, actually.
It's like work backwards from the habit. Yep. Which is what is the sequence of things that you do every day that gets you to do it? And that's where there's a lot of clues.
Chris: I love the working backwards and working forwards, right? So figure out the habit on the little higher. What's the situation that the person is in that's causing them to reach into their pocket, pull out the phone, play the game, sit down on their couch, boot up the council, play the [00:20:00] game.
And I always think in terms of transformations, right? Where am I now? One of my close friends owns the podcast app, Y Combinator, most popular podcast player on the iPhone. Very similar. In order to get that little higher, where are you right now? And where are you trying to go? And we uncover jobs like I got slaughtered at work today.
I'm on the train, on the ride home, and I need to find something quickly that is comical, that is calming. I'm trying to go from stressed Down to calm. I have had a lazy day and I'm feeling unproductive. I need something that is going to teach me and engage me. The overlap between that and games has got to be pretty close, right?
Where, where are you, where are you now? And where are you trying to go? Are you trying to get jazzed up or get excited? Are you stressed? And you just want to shoot them up game to get all that stress out so you can calm yourself down. But in my mind still, how are you spending your money? How do I see the game to say, I think that's going to help me.
I think I've played that a lot. When are you pulling it out, [00:21:00] man? That thing that I bought last week, that game, I'm stressed. When I get home, I'm hiring that council up. I'm going to feel so much better to now where you guys focus. Now I'm in, I don't want to put this thing down because it's that satisfaction part.
Like it's creating so much value for me. I'm so enthralled. I'm going to tell my friends about it. I'm continuing to build that habit over time.
Amy: Struggling moments. That's what it's all about. Yeah. So let's talk about. I want to know what's intriguing to you and what's new and exciting to you. Trends you're following, what's, you know, we haven't brought up crypto at all.
I'm interested in what your thoughts are on that, but like what's pulling at you on the edge these days?
Chris: I, I think you nailed it. The crypto, so you, you can tell by my slant on all this stuff, I, I lead the shiny object people who are much, much better at technology and really fascinated by that stuff. I am, I spend my days fascinated with the struggle and the problem, and I chase after that and I lean on other people to [00:22:00] bring in the shiny objects and the technology to, to solve it.
And we've got amazing people at Autobook to do that. The, if I let myself cheat the crypto DeFi movement, just because I am in FinTech and financial services is an exciting space right now. And I think for anybody interested in it. Think about how jobs can be applied to that space. I think right now it is a solution in search of a problem, right?
And we have all of these fundamentally novel technical concepts that are out there. And we're launching, if you look at the, the sort of GitHubs around ether and things like that, we're launching things out there saying, who's going to grab ahold of this application and really start using. Smart contracts for their business or a DAO in a new situation.
We're basically just throwing things in the air and seeing what sticks, which is fascinating. But I think there is another way to go at this, which is Where are people struggling today and how do we come up to meet them? And I think a lot of times the technology is abstracted away You don't need to know that it's blockchain or a Dow or [00:23:00] anything like that But you're struggling and i've got a solution and we can talk about the details, but i'm gonna help you make progress I'm, pretty fascinated around how that's going to tip. And I think it's close to tipping.
I think the product people will meet the technology people and it's going to start to really accelerate quickly.
Amy: Awesome. So is there anything you're particularly excited about that's coming up on the horizon?
Chris: Yeah, I think to circle back to Autobooks, anyone who's a small business owner, keep an eye on what we're doing here.
I think there are a lot of struggles in the small business space. You know what I work on. So I'm interviewing small business owners every day and every week who tell me it's more complicated than it should be to get paid. I've yet to talk to a business owner that doesn't have that concern around getting money from their clients or their, their customers, and just the process of incorporating and getting a business checking account and signing up for merchant services.
What is merchant services? All of these complexities, we're making some really huge strides on the product side at Autobooks to wash all that away and make it very easy for business owners to connect all [00:24:00] that, bundle it up and almost make it seamless or make it go away as a challenge for them.
That's really what next year is going to be all about for us.
Amy: Is your business primarily US-based or more international?
Chris: Right now it's entirely US-based.
Amy: Got it. Thank you so much, Chris. My mind is blown. It looks like a mirror has a question. Please introduce yourself. Speaking of blockchain.
Amir: Hello, Chris.
Chris: Hey Amir.
Amir: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this wonderful talk. It was valuable for me. I'm from Moscow, Russia, and I'm a software engineer, and I'm just switching my career as a PM and trying out new things in this role. Crypto is my passion. I'm into blockchain for several years and working on blockchain based messaging solution.
I have, I have the question about the notion of when, you've mentioned it several times in your talks. I'm wondering why asking when is more important than [00:25:00] asking why questions? Can, please tell a bit more of them.
Chris: Yeah, it's a fantastic question. So one of the core things that I came to understand through working with clay and working with Bob is that context creates value.
You'll hear him say it over and over again. So if I don't ask when, and I take the situation that the person is in and everything that's going on in their life. And I take that out and I start just asking why, uh, questions, right? Why not choose this product over this product? Why not choose this product over this product?
It's, it's, um, I call it espoused behavior. Like it's meaningless to the person. Because it's valuable for me as the product developer, but as the person that I'm asking the question, their mind is on a hundred different things. So they're going to give me answers because they're nice and they're probably trying to help me get down my path, but the answers aren't connected to anything.
There's a story that I always tell about [00:26:00] my friend buying a minivan. Right? Third kid on the way, go to visit. Wife is pregnant, sitting down with both of them. They've got the two, one's got a sports car, the other's got a small SUV. And they're basically saying, we're upgrading. We're in Detroit. So all we talk about is cars.
We're weird like that. We got to upgrade. We need a car with third row seats. We got to be able to fit the kids in. We got to go out and shop for this, right? So I'm talking, okay, what are you going to get? Husband, we're going to stay sporty. I'm going Audi Q7. It's got three rows. It's got a big V8 with a supercharger.
It's going to be amazing. Wife. I want the big Yukon, the big Chevy, right? More like a truck. I think I can get the car seats in easier. It's huge. Okay. Let me know how it plays out, by the way. Like why not a minivan? You're having a third kid. They're super offended. We've had these conversations. I'm sure you're going to, we're not minivan people.
Those are so lame. I'm never buying that thing. Like it's just not a fit for me. Talk to him two months later, the baby has arrived. What's in the driveway. Oh, we went to the dealership and we looked at the Yukon and [00:27:00] we looked at the Audi Q7. It was so hard to get around, but man, the minivan simplified all the doors will slide open.
There's so much room inside. If it's cold, we can climb right in all this stuff. So what we have is a 30 billion product category for a product that no one will ever tell you that they're going to buy. And this is back to where, when I add context in and when I add struggle, the baby's on the way, you've got a timeline, the problem is emerging in front of you, and when you're trying different solutions, try the Yukon, try the Q7 with the car seats, nothing is really working, all of a sudden I've got fit, but I only have fit because the context is creating the fit.
If I just pull up in the minivan, hey Amir, what do you think of this? No, no way. And the line of questioning fails on both sides. I show up with a super sexy product. Talk to a technologist. I'm doing blockchain messaging, totally anonymous, all the security things. Oh my God. I'll switch to that for, for in a heartbeat.
A [00:28:00] lot of times we're let down by those conversations. Or where is the adoption? We launched the thing. Everybody said that they would sign up for it. Where are these users? And it fails on the other side too. It's the minivan. If we would have gone out and asked people, what if we built this thing? Everyone would have said, no way we miss out on hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of the minivan.
So I've always got to inject. If I don't have a person in that switching moment, I've been doing this for 15 years now, so I'm the extreme, I won't give it the time of day. Okay. I just can't ask the questions. I'm throwing away the feedback. I just can't use it. Does that help? Does it?
Amir: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Chris: Okay, great.
Amy: So I want to emphasize a couple of things and then get to your next question. So context and struggle, that is what makes people do something. Today's the day I've had enough. Today's the day I need to make a change. Oh, look, that's my interview is a perfect example of that. And then talking to the right people is so critical.
Five of the right people will give you far better [00:29:00] feedback than 50, uh, great overlap in our approaches of the best people to talk to are actually using your direct competitors.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Amy: Because they have a problem to solve, or they recently quit, or they recently stopped using it out of frustration.
Chris: Yeah. And even Amir in your industry, like there's great switching happening, right? So many people in the last couple of weeks, they switched to WhatsApp, they switched to Signal. There's like, they might not have the exact same, but. Something to switch to a new messaging platform. I'm on iMessage all day long here in the States.
It's like ubiquitous. I have adopted a couple of things recently, but a lot has to happen in order for me to download, I got to find my friends. I got to do all this stuff. There's energy there. And then the last thing that I think I should also add is like, the why questions are all packed in. All I care about is causality, right?
So like probing into, you had a conversation with your son. Why that day? Why that more? Like, I want to know what's causing them to make the decisions, but I can't do it without time, without context. Yeah.
Amy: Back to you Amir.
Amir: Chris, on the [00:30:00] timeline you've mentioned the satisfaction point and it is essential to find it and understand what the point is.
So right now I am at the pre MVP stage and right now, I'm at the moment when I'm searching and I don't know exactly what I'm searching for. Using your words, I'm having 50 stickers on my wall and I do not know which one to pick. So should I have the satisfaction points, a set of them and test each of them?
Or should I find them during the interviews? What is the best way to, to specify?
Chris: Fantastic question. I, so the way I always go about it is I, I pull them out of the interviews, right? So I basically, if I'm doing 10 interviews with people that switched, I want to basically categorize those into These people switched from iMessage to Signal and they were blown away.
These people switched from iMessage to WhatsApp and they've got all these concerns, like how many times have you used WhatsApp since you installed it two weeks ago? Maybe [00:31:00] once. I'm going deep. Okay. I need to know, you spent all this time, you were thinking about it. You downloaded it. You got an invite, something happened.
What did you expect WhatsApp to do for you that it didn't do that's causing you to put it down and never pick it up again? If I can find those nuggets and you're going to do 10 interviews, you're going to find those nuggets. The post its will come right off the wall for you. This is they expect one thing and it's falling short and they're not getting value.
That's where I'm injecting all my energy into making sure that I nail it.
Amy: And Amir in our system and Chris, I can tell you more about this in our next conversation. We have a three stage filtering mechanism for finding the right people. It starts with a screener, very short, six questions, very specific.
Get at context and struggle. Then it has five minute interviews and that's to screen people. And then we do the one hour or 43 minute thing, but we do it with storyboards of [00:32:00] the customer journey. Not all the detail of every screen perfectly designed, which is very distracting because then you get into the UX details, but the journey, you communicate the 30 day journey.
Okay. Including the moment of sale. That's where it extends this thing that you've been talking about. So we do the deep dive, but it's after a couple of stages of filtering and it's with a visual prompt, but it includes an interview on the front end. So it's like the interview is strung out over time.
And so Amir, that will answer your questions about which of the 50 stickies will come down. Because yeah. You can show them, first of all, if you put it all into a context immediately, you'll see what works and what doesn't design wise. And secondly, your part of the strategy is really understanding what delighted them, what was most important to them, what was most memorable to them.
Once you show them this kind of [00:33:00] higher level 30 day journey.
Chris: That's fantastic. I've done a fair amount of that. I don't know if this is identical to what you're doing, but it might plant some seeds. We did the interview, right? The next thing is what I've now done is I've taken you into that shopping moment, right?
If I've done a good job over the course of 15, 20, 30 minutes, right? Apartments. Now is the opportunity to basically layer in my new product into the conversation. And it's not, this is very nuanced and tricky, but it's not, would you buy this product now? But Amy, I want you to reflect over the last two weeks and your shopping process of the diffuser.
Imagine that this thing existed. I just want your feedback about it. What questions would you have about it? What's interesting, what creates anxiety, things like that. And that's where I can layer in the buyer journey. And it's like a, a pretty abrupt left turn in the interview. You got to set the stage correctly, but okay, I've learned what caused you to shop, what caused you to make the decision where your satisfaction is now play [00:34:00] a little game with me. If this thing had existed, you back two weeks ago, how would you have interacted with this?
And, and what would the outcome have been? Once again, like tricky process, but if you've got prototypes and ideas on the table, you can play them in and ask them to play along with you.
Amy: What we do is we use storyboards and they can be stick figures or comic figures from Canva. Canva has this wonderful set. And that really comes from Pixar and how a lot of movies are developed. And yes, it's similar, but it's. Making it concrete and the storyboards don't show you the product. They show you people using the product in a context.
So it lets you take what, you know, from your job stories, interviews, and your JD jobs to be done interview, and then create a testable context. But I'll tell you that's harder than designing the product in many ways, really thinking it through, but it lets you like take a bunch of the stickies off the wall.
Chris: [00:35:00] Yeah. So I want to join, tell me, uh, Amir, like next time you're doing one, I want to be a fly on the wall. I like, I, I think this is like a, this is an innovation in the jobs framework. I would love to. Just observe and see how you guys are doing it cause,
Amy: That would be great. I'd like to teach you so you can go use it.
Cause it's really useful seeing you use this, like these, Oh my God, that would be so exciting. Anyway for the future, but I think the punchline is you get at the, when and. You can go deeper and ask questions, but you don't ask people to tell you why they do things, you probe. So they reveal it. Is, is that correct, Chris?
Did I capture it?
Chris: You absolutely did. And it's back to, it's back to the disarming. And this is something practice on your friends, like practice outside of your domain. If you go straight into the thing you're working on, like you've got anxiety about nailing the process. You've got anxiety about finding the right answer and making the right, you know, product decisions.
If your friend bought a couch or a [00:36:00] car or a house, have a beer, spend an hour. They're going to think you're a little weird. Tell them you're working on this new thing, but just practice that. And what you're going to find is the more you try to nail them down, the more they look at you. What are you doing here?
Why did you spend your Saturday on that's ridiculous. You could have been doing better things. Well, I don't know. That's a weird question. Okay. So you woke up Saturday morning. When did it pop into your mind that you wanted to go shopping for a car? You gotta be able to probe around it without drilling directly in.
And it's just, you do a couple interviews. It's a little bit of an art form and you'll be right there. That's fantastic.
Amy: So did you have another question Amir?
Amir: Yeah, maybe that's one small personal question because maybe you're the best person in the world to know answer on that. So, I'm wondering whether there's some kind of a metrics that one should measure in order to understand how good the PM is.
Chris: Ooh. That's fantastic. I don't know that I, man, you're, you've planted a seed. Now I'm going to go work on this. And I don't know that I've found, I have anything novel [00:37:00] aside from the traditional we're in a growth stage business. I've been involved in a lot of growth stage business, the typical, what's the adoption of the thing you're working on?
What's the annual recurring revenue SaaS metrics, things like that. Outside of that, everything is more quantitative, right? I'm basically looking at the product team. Saying, are you embracing the struggle and the problem that people are facing, or are you off on a tangent chasing the next exciting thing and trying to, trying to measure against that?
I will say if you do it and I've done it a couple of times, you can create highly successful product organizations. And the success can be built on basically an allergic reaction to the wrong sort of insight. So it's another way to judge a product organization or a product team, where they will start to be immune to those sorts of ideas we're doing.
So at Audible, it's very easy, we're doing crypto tomorrow, right? All right. I've got 30 million businesses in the U.S. 3 percent of them, maybe are even exposed to crypto. I'm excited about crypto, [00:38:00] but show me some conversations that you had with our small business units, users, and people who are switching.
That show me that's the thing to invest our, our resources on our, I will say our team right now, basically repels. If you don't show up with stories and insights and things like that, you won't get anybody excited about your idea. So I think on the qualitative side, kind of the standard SAS metrics is what we use, but on the quantitative sort of soft side, we've got some ways to judge and make sure that we're on the right path.
Amy: By stories, you mean job stories?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Amy: Versus. Because I want to differentiate job stories from Agile user stories. A lot of people get those confused. I know it's like a knife to the heart, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, language is important. So job stories. One of the things I'm working on right now with the guys from Basecamp and Ryan Singer is what you do with the jobs insight, right?
How do you take that and hand it to a team consisting of a product manager and a group of developers and make sure that they are able to understand the What we uncovered through the research and that they [00:39:00] build something that, that addresses it. So when I talk about job search in the most concrete way, if you were to sit in on a meeting here at Autobooks, when a development cycle was going to start, you would see a product manager with a lead developer, a designer and a couple people.
Basically talking that hours and hours of stories, but talking through, here are the users I talked to. Here are the situations that they were in. Here's what they bought and where they were struggling. And here's our idea about what we're going to go engineer and ship. That's going to solve that. And everyone on the team will get immersed and it's challenging in a very productive way, right?
The engineers will say, wait, I want to know more about the story. I'm not sure I understand like what we know where's the timeline here, but they will get immersed in these stories and in these switches before they go build and start to develop.
Amy: And they're based on conversations with people that are really using things.
Chris: These are, all of them are actual, like you will have first name, last name, the business that they own and the story from there, this is as concrete as it gets.
Amy: [00:40:00] How do you deal with the persona versus job story issue in a situation like that?
Chris: We, we don't.
Amy: Do you just not use personas?
Chris: No, just jobs from a sort of strategic level.
We have four situations that small business owners are in, that they need to make progress and they're struggling that they hire us. And we basically will build our product strategy around that. I think the maybe well kept secret is these methods tend to wash out over time. So if you talk to Bob and I, and we're purists and you've heard me over the last hour hammer away, you've got to do hour long interviews and you've got to do 10 of them and like we've seen success there, there are.
Sort of derivatives of that and different forms of that where people will say, I did it in three minutes and I didn't in five and five minutes, I think if you go into persona creation and you go back to when the guys that created that body of work were really working on it, you will find something very similar to jobs where they are doing really deep interviews, long interviews, a lot of [00:41:00] analysis and clustering and coming up with some very meaty things.
I think if you read articles published in 2020, 2021, you've got people saying, I'm in front of a whiteboard and I'm brainstorming with my team and we're imagining our buyer and coming up with it. So there's a lot of similarity there. If you read the right things about personas, but we're all in, we're staking our product strategy on the jobs.
Amy: We've come to a similar place in the work we do internally with clients and the way we teach it. I never grabbed somebody's personas out of their hands, but they're clutching tightly, but doing the work. We attach a person to it, like a synthesis of several people that were in the, in the actual test.
It's a difference between a screening conversation. And a deep dive, we do the deep dive. We just do a bunch of screening first, but the, the persona thing, people want to get to it, especially people that have had a lot of background [00:42:00] with it. And they feel like they're an expert and I want the thing that I'm an expert in to come in here.
So sometimes I'll give the personas names, but the crucial difference is that these aren't personas because multiple jobs could exist in one person.
Chris: Yes, exactly.
Amy: They're not like personas in that. And personas are fundamentally a marketing segmentation tool. That's the other inside. They're really good for that.
But for product development, I have found a small set of jobs to be what you have found it to be the best thing to focus you down from the 50 stickies to the three core systems.
Chris: That's it. And you nailed it. I think over the years, personas have definitely evolved into that. I can't buy advertising, and I can't do marketing unless I have demographic data to target off of.
So, like, at Autobooks, we have jobs. One of our jobs, if I look at the canonical stories, has a psychiatrist, one woman show that's been in business for three years, and a school district with a 20 [00:43:00] million annual budget. And the buyer was a CFO. And you look at it like, okay, I got to buy advertising. Who the heck do I target?
This is all a mess. Then you got to go up a level and you can figure that stuff out. And that's where demographics starts to get interesting. But if I've got to make product decisions, the causal factors are the same. I can do it off of the physician and off of the school district because they're struggling with the same thing.
That's what I'm really excited about when I'm doing the innovation work.
Guest 2: I do have one question, I just observe what you're doing, it follows all the basic structure of telling a story. If you're writing a story, the number one thing is a conflict, which is a struggle. And then creating a plot, you want causality all the way through.
One thing causes the next. That's, so you're deconstructing a story.
Chris: That's it. And I think Amy made reference to it. We use the Pixar pitch a lot. Once upon a time, every day, something happened because of that. And then resolution, it's all tying together. And I'm taking a bunch of stories and bringing them into.
What Amy [00:44:00] just described, you need to, it can't be one person. I can't just have a CFO at a school district. I've got to abstract a little bit. That method is, is fantastic for bringing it all together.
Amy: Thank you again, Chris, for taking the time today. And this was amazing for me. I just, I can't resist. I want to clap.
Chris: Thanks for having me. Really great conversation. Thanks for the questions, Amir. Enjoyed that part as well.
Amy: All right. Take care. Bye.
Chris: Thanks.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast [00:45:00] episodes.