A Script to Kickstart Interviews About Someone’s Jobs to be Done

‘Jobs’ interviews are fun and tremendously helpful. This script will help your team get started with them.

If you and your team are not taking advantage of Jobs To Be Done style interviews during customer & market research — you may be digging for copper when you could be striking gold.

The keystone of the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) philosophy is the customer interview. When you’re able to work with a customer to relive that moment of struggle, it’s amazing what we can learn about the events and forces that progress customers towards and away from our product. Even more interesting, is when we start uncovering our hidden competition: the consideration set and failure.

Yet, for those without much experience with conducting JTBD style interviews, getting started can be intimidating.

To help resolve the anxiety around conducting interviews, I worked with David Wu to create a loose script interviewers can use to help frame their questions, guide the interview and remind them of the key timeline moments we need to be searching for.

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A Treatment For Interview Stage Fright

‘Jobs’ interviews can take anywhere between 15 min to an hour. It all depends on factors such as your skill as an interviewer, the amount of emotion involved in the purchase and the type of person you’re interviewing.

You can’t control the emotion of the purchase or the disposition of the person you’re interviewing, but you can improve your interviewing skills.

To help grow your skills, here are a few questions and key moments to focus on:

The Point of Purchase

1. When did you purchase the product?
2. Where were you?
3. What time of day was it? (daytime/ nighttime?)
4. What was the weather like?
5. Was anyone else with you at the time?
6. How did you purchase the product?
7. Did you buy anything at the same time?

Starting with the point of purchase is something everyone can relate to. It’s also what the interviewee will expect. It’s a great opportunity to break the ice, begin a rapport and set the stage for the rest of the interview.

Opening the door to your customers’ memories

There is, however, something else going on when we start with questions like the ones above… besides asking easy, non threatening questions, our goal is to help our customers, not only remember, but to get them used to the feeling of remembering.

Most of our memories are made and recalled though association between places, people, things and our senses. If I asked you what the weather was like yesterday, you may struggle to remember; however, if I asked you what clothes you were wearing, you might remember how your feet got really wet because during your walk to work, it unexpectedly rained and your feet got wet because you were wearing sneakers...

Because we want to eventually uncover anxieties, motivations & situations, we want to help the customer become familiar with recalling emotional subtleties.

Finding the first thought

1. When did you first realize you [needed something to solve your problem]?
2. Where were you?
3. Were you with someone?
4. What were you doing, or trying to do when this happened?

Just like securing a boat at sea, we begun by dropping our bow anchor by starting with the actual purchase; now, we want to drop our stern anchor to secure the timeline reconstruction.

We are trying to build the timeline (pictured above) which delineates the progress events our customer encountered on their way to the purchase. We’ve already begun getting them used to the feeling of remembering, now it’s time to jump back to uncover their first thought.

There are lots of things to look for when discussing the first thought; however, try to focus on triggers which cued our customers to realize that their current way of solving their problem(s) wasn’t working or that they would need to make a change in the future.

Building the consideration set

1. Tell me about how you looked for a product to solve your problem.
2. What kind of solutions did you try? Or not try? Why or why not?

With the two anchors set, we start exploring the space in between their first thought and their eventual purchase. An important part of this space is exploring the consideration set. Exploring what a consideration set is lies beyond the scope of this article; however, in short, it’s the alternative solutions your customer was considering. The interesting thing is, it’s rarely what you think your competition is.

An example could be a boot purchase. Perhaps someone bought a new pair of boots at Steve Madden. You might think the competition for Steve Madden is Aldo, but in this case, you might learn that your customer was considering buying hiking boots or even getting their existing boots resoled.

Because solutions such as buying hiking boots or getting boots resoled would have negated the need to buy new boots, they are in fact competitions to your product.

Building a consideration set is a great way to indirectly learn about passive looking, deciding and consuming.

Be curious about emotion

1. Did you ask anyone else about what they thought about the purchase you were about to make?
2. What was the conversation like when you talked about purchasing the product with your <spouse/friend/parents>?
3. Before you purchased did you imagine what using the product would be like? Where were you when you were thinking this?
4. Did you have any anxiety about the purchase? Did you hear something about the product that made you nervous? What was it? Why did it make you nervous?

Exploring emotion is tricky and takes time to master. A pointer here is to take any opinion based questions with a grain of salt. Asking someone to analyze why they did something or why they felt a certain way can be tricky. People rarely actually understand why they did something, rather, they usually rewrite their memory into a story that flatters themselves.

As long as you understand the common traps we fall into when we think of why we do things, you should be able to better interpret your customer’s explanation of their emotions.

Above All, Be Engaged and Positive

While conducting an interview, it’s important to be genuinely interested and non judgmental about what your customer is talking about. They will notice this and be more willing to reveal themselves — particularly their anxieties, prejudices and insecurities.

The sample questions mentioned in this article, few as they are, will empower you towards becoming a proficient interviewer.

If you are interested in learning even more, consider signing up for the JTBD interview udemy class or the upcoming Switch workshop in NYC on May 16th.