Bob Moesta's Jobs-To-Be-Done: Your Fix for Selling Without Gagging

What It Covers

Bob Moesta explains Jobs-To-Be-Done theory: customers hire products to make progress in their lives, not based on demographics. Understanding struggling moments and buying context beats traditional personas for product development and marketing.

Key Questions Answered

• •Interview Method: Talk to recent buyers about past behavior, not future intentions. Ask about the last time they used a product category, what they stopped doing when they started, and the context that triggered the search for solutions.
• •Intercom Case Study: Identified four distinct jobs customers hired the product for (acquire, convert, onboard, support) instead of one value proposition. Changed positioning from technical features to customer problems, grew revenue from five million to seventy million dollars annually.
• •Snickers Strategy: Research revealed the candy bar competes with apples, coffee, and protein bars (fuel during missed meals), not Milky Way (dessert treat). Repositioned as food bar, not candy bar, growing revenue from three hundred million to two billion dollars.
• •Pattern Recognition: Conduct ten customer interviews to identify causal mechanisms and struggling moments. Look for similarities in context and desired outcomes across stories, not demographic traits. Build surveys only after understanding causation through qualitative research first.