I thought the genesis of this idea was Rory Sutherland, but he probably got it from Nassim Taleb who writes that fifty, one foot falls is different from one, fifty foot fall. It also came up on Acquisitions Anonymous where Mills Snell noted thirty years of experience could be two people or ten and the situations are quite different. Taleb got it from someone too – King Solomon? – that it exists in many places is good reason to take note.
Rory Sutherland writes that life is not commutative like mathematics. Put numerically: 20,000×1!=1×20,000. Credit Karma acts on this, rewarding $25 spent for lunch rather than a few tenths of a percent in interest. Gifts and maybe mileage reimbursements may act under the same human tendency.
Time management writes Peter Drucker in The Essential Drucker is also not commutative.
“To write a report may, for instance, require six or eight hours, at least for the first draft. It is pointless to give seven hours to the task by spending fifteen minutes twice a day for three weeks. All one has at the end is a blank paper with some doodles on it.”
Rather Drucker suggests locking the door, removing the phone and six hours without interruption. Then one can finish the “zero draft, the one before the first draft.” And only then work in small installments.
“It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to show us the truth. It’s our responsibility to find it. We do that by asking good questions.” – Rob Fitzpatrick
The best way to think about The Mom Test (Amazon) is as a field manual for JTBD. Bob Moesta explains that JTBD is the balance of supply-side innovation and demand-side innovation. It is the innovation balance between what we can build and what the customers want.
Often innovation is unbalanced, oriented more from the supply side. One way to judge is the language. Is a product or service explained in the company language or the consumer language?
Oooooohhhhh. Got it. So just ask customers what they like and change it!
Nope.
Fitzpatrick’s book guides the shift from supply-focused to demand-focused. It’s an informational puzzle.
To shift, an organization must focus on good questions. Fitzpatrick dubs good questions “The Mom Test”. If a question is so good even your mom answers truthfully it’s a good question. Failed startups often failed The Mom Test. Yes, our friends say, that’s a great idea.
Good questions find signal in the noise, which comes in different flavors.
Social context. People will be nice, so questions must be precise.
Vague questions. Good questions focus on behaviors. Show me your calendar and checkbook types.
Lack of listening. Take a page from Chris Voss and reply with sounds like, looks like, and seems like.
Good questions focus on aspects of a person’s life, not ideas about a product.
One difference between Fitzpatrick and Moesta is the structure of these question-and-answer sessions. Moesta tells his interviewees to think of it as background for a documentary. He reduces the stakes and that leads to a better signal. Fitzpatrick suggests reducing the stake further. Any conversation can include The Mom Test. If you want specific conversations Fitzpatrick has advice for that too.
To see if The Mom Test helps every conversation leads to a next step. There are no good or bad meetings, writes Rob, only successes or failures.
A good examiner will get out of their own way. “You’re searching for the truth not trying to be right.”
If you want to get better at creating things people want, or like a bayesian update to be more demand focused, check out 1,000+ reviews on Amazon.
You never step in the same river twice, the saying goes and this second read (the first) of Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference revealed an unknown spectrum.
Life is a series of “I want you to…”. These requests span our discomfort. For me, job-to-be-done interviews are easier than Voss’s negotiations which are easier than direct copy which is easier than face-to-face negotiations.
I dismissed direct copy and negotiations as less good and confused the metric of difficult as correct.
But they’re all the same.
Each “I want you to…” begins in another person’s world. “The goal is to identify what your counter-party needs,” writes Voss and get them to talk and talk and talk some more. For direct copy said Bob Bly, “enter the conversation they are having in their mind.” For JTBD interviews said Bob Moesta, act like a documentary filmmaker gathering information. Understanding always happens first.
But not a perfect understanding.
Voss wrote his book because Getting to Yes felt too formal. Perfect understanding is a logic puzzle. Negotiations are psychological puzzles. Like understanding Status Games, Voss wants his readers to understand people’s biases and tendencies too. Those include:
Framing: setting an anchor price or using loss aversion, each of which changes the comparison to a new price or a missed deal.
Removing the sting: I’m about to ask you for a big favor or this is going to take a while but we will go as fast as possible. These warnings are the balm for the stoic observation that we suffer more in imagination than reality.
Avoid split the difference compromises: which optimize easy and neglect the chance to be creative.
Negotiations are like the Who’s Line is it Anyway Helping Hands skit (YouTube). Each party is a set of hands and “the deal” is making something that works. Understanding the other person’s style and needs is how to make it work.
In his podcast with Jocko Willink, Joe Piersante talks about his time working in Arizona and dealing with hundreds of meth labs. If I told you I was in 500 labs, Joe says, it would be an understatement. Meth was the drug of choice in Joe’s region and between the cost to create, the large rural area, and proximity with Mexico it was difficult to police.
“It was bad at first because there was so many,” Joe says. It was too easy. What “put a dent into it,” was the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which restricted access to pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical to meth.
The COGS increase changed the business model.
…
Later in his career and the episode Joe talks about his time in Afghanistan. “We would not go after the poppy farmers because they were made to grow the opium,” Joe said, “The Taliban came in and they had the biggest stick at the time. It was a case of ‘you’re going to grow this or you’re going to get killed.'”
There were no better incentives to offer this group of laborers. “We knew they weren’t reaping the benefits so we tried to find the people getting the money.”
…
A lotta problems are multi-dimensional. Think about the field of addiction, said David Nutt, it’s about the drug, the person, and the society. Each of those is a lever. Profession problem solving is too. How would an economist solve this? How would a marketer? How would a coder? Each leads to a different island in the archipelago of thought. DEA agents think a bit like business owners, and we can add this approach to the set.
Reframing our perspective is a powerful thinking tool. ‘Sleeping on it’ is reframing. Reading books is reframing. Comparing novel things is reframing.
For a business owner, thinking of time of day, place in life, and what happened prior is reframing.
Bob Moesta notes “context creates value”. Time and place create more or less value. Birthday gifts have one value on birthdays and another value when it’s not.
But we miss this because of average lies. Average computes easily, is sometimes helpful, but is a crude tool. Sometimes we NEED this one thing RIGHT NOW!
Contrast Snickers and Milky Way. Graphically:
Commercially (2011):
Snickers is a chewy pick-me-up energy bar. Milky Way is a treat-yo-self deep breath of sweetness. The context creates value.
According to Bob Moesta, the context for eating Snickers is that I’m hungry and I want something filling, tasty, cheap, and fast. Applying average thinking, there’s not a constant demand. Find when customers consume a product reveals that product’s JTBD.
“Context creates value” fits well with Alchemy too. Channeling Rory Sutherland, it wasn’t that Snickers needed to be tastier, rather reframed. Alchemy is about solving problems with psychology rather than physics. Instead of making travel faster, make it more enjoyable with wifi, charge ports, booking flexibility, a table for tea, someplace for the kids to burn off energy, and so on. Faster is only better when the process sucks.
Consumers and customers have untapped wants. They’re hiding behind time, place, averages. They’re served by JTBD & Alchemy.
Like what is this place optimized for, places are designed to increase or reduce action frictions. Grocery stores for the end consumer are designed for comfort – stores for middlemenare designed for speed.
The end consumer grocery store has wide aisle to avoid the butt brush effect, produce in the front (colors have a relaxing effect), and pasta near the sauce because customers look for complimentary items. Fish and coffee are separate because of the smells. Stuff for kids is on lower stuff. The blueprint for a traditional grocery store is called a planogram.
For a dark grocery store the layout is different. The aisles are smaller. The seltzer is separated. Spaghetti and linguini are parted too. Salt and pepper also. In dark stores the design goal is speed which means reducing confusion. Also, shot glasses, bags, foil, garbage bags, batteries, and foil pans are next to each other because those items are ordered for parties.
The central point of JTBD is that innovators over index on what they can build and under index on progress the customers wants. Too often innovators ‘scratch their own itch.’
This doesn’t mean verbatim bequeaths . Do that, said Ford CEO Jim Farley, and you get The Homer.
No, successful JTBD innovation uses the customer’s language.
A business that offers same day responses resonates more with customers than one that has “agents standing by”. How a customer describes their issue outlines the progress a customer wants to make.
An example of customer language comes from GEICO’s advertising start. GEICO executives told their marketers that, on average, phone calls took eight minutes and customers saved about 18%. Good numbers.
But when the marketing staff listened to the customer language they found the numbers were too good. “Research pointed out,” said Ted Ward on NPR, “that ten minutes wasn’t long enough to talk about something like car insurance but fifteen minutes was, and twenty minutes was considered way too long.” Eighteen percent was too good too, hence the 15 minutes to save 15% or more.
Customer words are the breadcrumbs along the JTBD path. Innovators settle into metrics which may not be helpful but are familiar, easy to collect, and seem important. But those metrics aren’t how the customer sees the world. For instance:
Best Buy Geek Squad formerly shared the average wait time. That led to disappointed customers. They switched to 90th percentile waits and customers became a lot happier.
Netflix used to offer star ratings (3.2, 4.1, etc.). That didn’t resonate like sub-genres like my favorite, ‘one last job then I’m out’.
Temperature can be Celsius or Fahrenheit but each has different fidelity. Laymen like Fahrenheit whereas scientists subscribe to Celsius.
Canada gets avalanche descriptions. Americans describe a class three avalanche as medium ‘relative to the path’, whereas in Canada a class three ‘could bury a car, destroy a small building, or break trees.’
This same effect exists at Disney. Touring Plans creator Len Testa noted that if his app says a time that’s too far from the Disney estimate people won’t believe it.
Each of these is an example of Lutz’s subtitle: it’s not what you say it’s what people hear. When people heard 8 minutes they knew it wasn’t enough time to get a legitimate car insurance quote.
Prices are set by the amount supplied and the amount demanded. When supply is mostly fixed, like top home-run-hitters, prices rise. This is the market mechanism.
One way to shimmy around this feature is to find things nearly as valuable, but less demand. This is Moneyball. It’s also investors who “fish in smaller ponds”. It’s also art. Collectors pine for Picasso but many fewer for real estate. Discretionary income +housing budget is a lot of money. Find a different attribute to compete on can be good advice.
Sometimes. We can overcorrect. Kristen Berman noted that one experiment which shifted the incentives from monthly to daily saw sales reps “focus on selling large numbers of cheaper items rather than more expensive items that have higher margins. A focus on short term returns can undermine pursuits of higher impact goals.” It was a case where 100 monthly sales did not equate to 4 daily sales.
This is Goodhart’s Law, when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. A textbook example is higher education ranking hackings. Some schools counted “a postcard expressing interest” as an applicant. More applicants meant more rejections and a selectivity shine that was only a veneer.
But wait. Goodhart’s Law is a human quirk and quirks can be hacked. Airbnb grew because like eBay or Amazon, stars replaced brands. But while a four star hotel is mostly the same four star homes were not. So the company added subcategories.“We picked the subcategories based on what guests want,” said Jiaona Zhang, “but we also picked subcategories based on what we wanted our hosts to do.”
Airbnb used Goodhart’s Law to direct their host’s attention. Once a category was counted hosts worked toward it.
Measures are a tool. They can be like Moneyball and show cheap things. They can be like Goodhart observed and show unintended consequences, but also tweaked for tidy Airbnb hosts. Measures only seem static but really reveal a lot.
Demand-Side Sales 101 opens with a foreword from Jason Fried, from his time selling shoes:
“I noticed that when people browsed shoes on a wall, they’d pick a few up and bounce them around in their hand to get a sense of the heft and feel. Shoes go on your feet, but people picked the shoe with their hands. If it didn’t feel good in the hand, it never made it to their foot.”
Authors Bob Moesta and Greg Engle of the Rewired Group wrote this book to explain how sales fits under the JTBD umbrella. Rather than selling, Moesta (whose voice I read this in) wants sales staff to be more like a concierge.
Sales isn’t about bringing the product to the person.
Sales is about helping the person make progress.
Investors get this. An investor is only able to maneuver to the extent their limited partners allow. An educational endowment may not invest in companies whose business is distasteful to their staff, students, alumni, etc. Other investors can take advantage of this restricted action section. In the words of Seth Klarman: I want partners who cash checks when I write them and write checks when I ask for them.
Consumer good businesses get this too. It makes no sense to ‘sell to’ people who don’t want the product. Moesta wants to take this spirit and distill it: move past selling to helping.
Products that help have to start with what the customer actually needs. This is demand side (rather than supply side) innovation. Supply side tends to be features a business can create. Demand side tends to be the progress a user needs.
This orientation may lead to novel solutions. Channeling Theodore Levitt, Moesta writes:
““I need a drill, because I want a hole.” “I need a hole, because I want a plug.” “I need a plug, because I want a lamp.” “Why do you want a lamp?” “Because it’s hard to see, and I want to read better.” Now, we are beginning to understand the customer. They don’t need a drill at all; they need a Kindle.”
Think of your product, Moesta and Engle explain in their Circuit Breaker podcast, as the mustard on a sandwich. That’s how important whatever it is you do. The iPhone is the greatest product created, but it too is just the mustard. The elemental arrangement (a book about that) of sand and plastic is great – but only because it allows progress like emailing, photo taking, and reading Bob’s book.
There are four forces that affect change: Push of current situation, Pull of the new solution, Anxiety of the new solution, Habit of the current situation.
Moesta is dyslexic and sees these four aspects as an equation. Customers act when [Push of old + Pull of new] > [Habit + Anxiety]. A lot of copywriting works this way. ‘New’ and ‘Best’ are aspects of pull while money-back-guarantee is an aspect of anxiety.
Diet can be seen this way. The way we look at the scale is the push of the current and the pull of the new is the vogue diet of the moment. Anxiety is fear of failure and the ambiguity aversion of the unknown. Habit is what mindlessly eat.
Oh, and a wedding is coming up.
Understanding the four forces isn’t quite enough to make sales. Customers travel through time, and six stages:
First thought. In a competitive market it helps when there is no name for a thing because names mean competition. Meanwhile a business has to create the question that leads to progress. “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off.”
Passive looking. Buyers consider actions. Push and Pull don’t yet outweigh Habit and Anxiety.
Active looking. Something happens. I’ve had it.
Deciding. What do people really value? Everything has trade-offs. Successful organizations sync their strengths with the customers’ wants.
Onboarding. A sale occurs.
Using. How well something performs (relative to their(!!!!) expectations). This is 100% subjective. It’s not what you can build, it’s what they want to do.
The 2011 Betty White Snickers commercial is how Mars used demand side sales to sell more Snickers.
“When Snickers reframed their product from competing with Milky Way—supply-side selling—to solving the customer’s struggling moment—demand-side selling—they created pull for their product by helping people make progress.”
Milky Way is a treat and competes with glasses of wine and Oreo. Snickers is a snack and competes with Red Bull or Clif Bar.
“But great salespeople don’t sell; they help. They listen, understand what you want to achieve, and help you achieve it. A better title would be “concierge.””
Recap: Mood affiliation is when an attitude unduly influence our perception, for example cruise ships. Bayesian thinking is updating our beliefs relative to the information.
“The marshmallow study,” Andrew Huberman told Shane Parrish, “was when they gave kids the option to have one now or two if they wait. It’s fun to watch the videos where the kids sit there and use all sorts of distractions and strategies (to keep from eating the marshmallows).”
It’s enjoyable to like the marshmallow study.
We must discount it.
Being Bayesian means updating on new information and liking is information.
Selling is information too. I believe in meditation, vegetarianism, and exercise because they are hard to sell. If someone said: Sit a room and focus on your breathing and you’ll feel better, I would believe them because one of their incentives is NOT financial. Kinda. Health as a product: vitamins, beds, bells, rings, bands and so on, fails this test. Regulating my sleeping temperature (which Huberman helpfully explains) may be helpful, but the bar of persuasion is higher. That’s being Bayesian.
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