Bob Moesta

Interviews have layers. First is pablum ('it was good'). Then fantasy/nightmare (exaggeration). What you want is the third layer: what actually happened. That requires interrogation, not a discussion guide.

The Jobs to Be Done misconception that frustrates me most: people think it's about pain and gain. It's not. It's about context and outcome. Context is what makes irrational behavior rational.

What will people stop using when your product comes out? That's who you should be interviewing — not people who say they want your product.

If you follow your best users' feature requests, you'll build something that destroys why everyone else is there. Adding complexity to satisfy power users kills the simplicity that attracted everyone else.

People don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their life.

People said they didn't want a dining room table in their new condo. I built one anyway — too small to actually eat at. Sales went up 22%. The table was the emotional bank account of their entire life.

There are no new jobs. The context and outcome have existed for decades. What improves is just the technology's ability to deliver on them. Most jobs you can trace back 10 years and forward 20.

Southern New Hampshire University found 50-60 students attending fully online and paying full price when that wasn't even an option they built. They studied that anomaly and now have 200,000+ students.

Snickers competes with protein shakes and sandwiches. Milky Way competes with wine, brownies, and a run. Your real competitive set comes from the customer's context — not your product category.

I raised the price of a condo, added two years of storage and moving services, and increased sales by 30%. The product wasn't the problem — friction in leaving the old situation was.

The biggest mistake with Jobs to Be Done: people sit in a conference room and hypothesize what the jobs are. I guarantee you're 100% wrong. You have to go talk to real people.

Most products fail because they made a trade-off the customer didn't agree with. It's not about features. It's about whether your trade-offs match your customer's trade-offs.

Four forces drive every purchase decision: push (context forcing change) and pull (new outcome desired) must outweigh anxiety (fear of new) and habit (attachment to old). More features often increase anxiety, not pull.

The buying journey has 6 phases: first thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, first use, ongoing use. Most sales processes are designed around how you want to sell — not where the buyer actually is.