Today we want to explore how Jobs-to-be-done thinking is used in Product Design with our guest Chris Belmore. Chris is Director of Product Design at On the Beach – an online travel agent. He was Director of Product Design at the Financial Times, where he and Yann met and has long time agency experience, amongst others at Ostmodern – a digital product agency – as a research and design leader before he moved to the corporate dark side…

Today we will dive into one of the biggest problems that startups face – and I would expand this to teams in general –: each other! We are joined by Martin Gonzalez one of the authors of the book The Bonfire Moment that we will focus on today. Martin created Google’s Effective Founders program and Josh is a cofounder of the Google for Startups Accelerator. They both have impressive careers, and I will just pick a few highlights. In 2023 for example the Aspen institute recognized Martin as a First Movers Fellow, and this year he won the Thinkers50 Radar Award. He worked at BCG and Johnsons & Johnson before Google.

Today, we welcome Jeff Baker. Jeff is president of IGI Group Consulting; standing for Insight for Growth & Innovation. a firm that uses Jobs-to-be-Done and research methods to help firms grow and thrive.

Jeff and I worked together, years ago, when we both worked for Strategyn - which is ground zero for Outcome-Driven Innovation, a proven system for applied JTBD. He’s been a steady contributor to the world of JTBD for quite a few years now.

Jeff: It’s great to reconnect and I know that we have a lot to talk about.: Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!

In this episde we hand over the mic to Pam Henderson an let her interview us about Jobs-to-be-done.

Pam is an entrepreneur, professor, and founder and CEO of NewEdge, a growth strategy firm that anchors growth in “opportunity” also, she’s the author of a book with an intriguing title, “Killing Ideas: You can kill an idea, you can’t kill an opportunity. .

Today, we’re passing the interviewer role to Pam - while Yann, Jonathan and I will be the guests - and our topic is a show favorite - JTBD.

Today, we have an extra special episode as we welcome two superheroes of Jobs-to-be-done and we plan to get into the weeds.

First, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Lance is widely published, and all practitioners should know his work, most notably with MIT Sloan Review and Harvard Business Review. All should know his HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” where Lance and Tony Ulwick first described the job map… He also has extensive experience as a consultant, doing JTBD projects across many industries, and today is a Professor of Professional Practice at TCU.

Next, Eric Eskey. If you look at the most experienced JTBD practitioners worldwide, Eric is among the top few. You cannot name an industry that he hasn’t worked within. He’s not only a pro at framing and executing qualitative projects, but Eric is a data analysis wizard in the most practical sense, meaning that he can make data come alive in pictures, he helps others to see the story.

I’ve personally worked with both Lance and Eric as well, both with Tony Ulwick’s firm Strategyn as well as afterwards. But more important than all that, they’re both great dudes who I’m proud to call friends.

Lance and Eric, Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!

Today, we’re talking shop, as in JTBD-practitioner shop.

We’re going to be talking about challenges when converting customer needs into an “outcome statement.” When we say “outcome,” we’re referring to a customer-need as defined by Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven innovation.

An outcome is a metric that a customer uses to define how well a job is done. For example, if mowing the lawn, we’ll work with customers to get a list of outcomes such as:

• Minimize the frequency of grass clumps
• Minimize the time to mow the lawn
• Minimize the amount of uncut grass next to obstacles

Etc.

In practice, a moderator interviews customers to uncover outcomes… and we run across some situations that are a bit tricky. Today, we have a list of six challenges in which our experts are going to help us out.

I will lay out the challenges, but then we’ll all participate as we figure these out together.

Today, we have an extra special episode as we welcome two superheroes of Jobs-to-be-done and we plan to get into the weeds.

First, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Lance is widely published, and all practitioners should know his work, most notably with MIT Sloan Review and Harvard Business Review. All should know his HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” where Lance and Tony Ulwick first described the job map… He also has extensive experience as a consultant, doing JTBD projects across many industries, and today is a Professor of Professional Practice at TCU.

Next, Eric Eskey. If you look at the most experienced JTBD practitioners worldwide, Eric is among the top few. You cannot name an industry that he hasn’t worked within. He’s not only a pro at framing and executing qualitative projects, but Eric is a data analysis wizard in the most practical sense, meaning that he can make data come alive in pictures, he helps others to see the story.

I’ve personally worked with both Lance and Eric as well, both with Tony Ulwick’s firm Strategyn as well as afterwards. But more important than all that, they’re both great dudes who I’m proud to call friends.

Lance and Eric, Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!

Today, we’re talking shop, as in JTBD-practitioner shop.

We’re going to be talking about challenges when converting customer needs into an “outcome statement.” When we say “outcome,” we’re referring to a customer-need as defined by Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven innovation.

An outcome is a metric that a customer uses to define how well a job is done. For example, if mowing the lawn, we’ll work with customers to get a list of outcomes such as:

• Minimize the frequency of grass clumps
• Minimize the time to mow the lawn
• Minimize the amount of uncut grass next to obstacles

Etc.

In practice, a moderator interviews customers to uncover outcomes… and we run across some situations that are a bit tricky. Today, we have a list of six challenges in which our experts are going to help us out.

I will lay out the challenges, but then we’ll all participate as we figure these out together.

In this episode we continue our exploration of the Cynefin framework and how to apply it to innovation. We have already discussed it in a previous episode (Episode 64 with Tom Kerwin). We now want to look at it from another perspective.

Our guest William Bartlett is in the field building solutions, meaning he has first hand experience with the challenges of turning the output of a discovery process, such as an idea or some other form of direction into the delivery an actual concrete product.

This space between the idea or the output of the discovery process and the actual realization of the idea is not one we have discussed much on the podcast and we look forward to exploring it further.

William is an active software engineer, he is also an agile coach and speaker. William also has a very interesting blog where he mostly writes in french, so sorry to all non french speaking listeners!

He is very active in the Cynefin community and in our discussion we will cover William's journey from agile to where he is today and how he tries to integrate these ideas in his thinking and in his work.

Learn more about William Bartlett here: https://namrats.net/

With us today is Steve Portigal. I have been recommending his book “Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights” all the time for anyone interested in interviewing users.

It’s now out in a second edition and with the promo code QUEST you can get 10% off here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users-second-edition/.

Steve helps organizations build more mature user research practices. He has vast experience in interviewing all kinds of users, from families eating breakfasts to rock musicians. In these interviews he has uncovered insights that informed the development of wide range of services and products such as medical information systems, wine packaging and music streaming services. Head over to portigal.com if you want to know more, find his books and the Dollars to Donuts podcast he’s hosting.