Intentional Growth

Understanding Your Customer & Defining Progress


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Bob Moesta, current President and Cofounder of The ReWired Group, created the Jobs To Be Done Theory along with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. The theory has successfully helped Moesta start, build, and sell several startups and launch over 3,500 products over the years. It is the main method used in his current occupation which helps business owners reevaluate their companies and drives them to really understand their customer to be a more profitable and valuable company.
If you listen, you will learn:
What businesses are mistakenly doing that cost them customers and sales
How to use the Jobs To Be Done Theory to reevaluate your company
How to define progress and what that looks like to you
What causes people to make progress
How to frame your product or service as a solution to your customer
How context can create value
The Backstory and Theory
From an early age, Bob Moesta always had a notion of questioning and wanting to know how things work. He always took apart things and put them back together. Because of his dyslexia, it made it hard for him to read and write but he learned by questioning and listening.
He took this way of learning and his knack for product development and created the Jobs to Be Done Theory which is described in the book “Competing Against Luck” written by Clay Christiansen.
“People don’t buy products or services, they hire them to do a job in their life,” Moesta explains in the podcast. When you ask people what they want out of a product or service, they usually have no clue. They know what their desired outcome is which is what a company must understand to be able to sell to them.
Moesta goes into a business and intently interviews new, current, or previous customers about the company’s product or service. His goal is to find out what actually made them switch to or away from the product. What caused them to buy or choose a different product? What was their struggling moment that caused them to make progress? The Jobs to Be Done framework allows you to see the struggling moment leading to the customer’s purchase.
 
Putting Theory into Practice
After multiple customer interviews, business owners should be able to have an idea of what they should be focusing their business or messaging on. Some businesses need to completely reevaluate how they bring their products or services to market and may have to change their focus entirely.
“You can sit in a conference room all day and guess what people will say,” says Moesta. Actually understanding why a customer purchases your product or service will help you position the product in a way that makes the consumer see you as a solution rather than just another product.
“The moment that a customer or consumer struggles, they care about something and want something better. The more you find struggling moments and understand the progress they want to make, then you can design better products,” says Moesta. 
You have to understand what causes people to value something over something else. This knowledge will not only make better products and drive revenue, but can help cut costs of marketing to the wrong people or in the wrong way.
 
Value & Progress
Bob’s main reason for doing what he does it to ultimately create value for companies. Bob and his team help businesses grow by understanding what their customers need in order to progress into a sale. The customer interviews conducted may result in a company having to change their offeri
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Intentional GrowthBy Arkona - Intentional Growth