Clay Christensen: Hi, this is Clay Christensen and I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise". In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about, or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Derek van Bever: Hi, I'm Derek van Bever and you're listening to The Disruptive Voice. This is kind of a special episode today. We are interviewing ourselves about something we've recently learned how to do so that we can turn around and teach you. Let me explain. I'm joined in the podcast studio today by two members of the forum team here at HBS, Katie Zandbergen, the Community Manager for the forum who I imagine is familiar to many of you, and Iulia Mogosanu, a Research Associate with the school who works with us here in the forum, as well as with Dennis Campbell in the accounting and management unit.

Derek van Bever: We wanted to have this conversation today because Iulia and Katie have recently done something that a number of our listeners also want to do, and that is to learn how to do interviews using the Jobs To Be Done technique. This approach to consumer research requires the interviewer to probe pretty deeply to understand the motivations behind the decisions people make, what progress they're trying to achieve, and how they make decisions toward that progress.

Derek van Bever: This framework and approach is one of the most popular things that we teach in Clay's course here at the school and we've had a lot of interest from alumni who want to learn more about how to generate insights using this approach. Iulia and Katie chose a pretty interesting group of interviewees to learn on, members of the MBA class of 2019, and a pretty interesting research question: Why did you hire HBS? What were the jobs that our interviewees hired the school for?

Derek van Bever: I think today's conversation will be courage giving to those of you out there who want to learn how to do these interviews. And I think what Iulia and Katie learned about our students will be interesting as well. So let's get into it.

Derek van Bever: Maybe as we get started, if you could share a little bit of the backstory of the project, and Iulia, could you start off and talk about the genesis of this project, the initial interviews that you and Shay did with alumni and their interest in learning how to do jobs and what we're doing to serve them.

Iulia Mogosanu: So one of the goals of the forum is to support our alumni as they advanced in their careers. We do this in multiple ways, but I would say one of the most important is by creating content. So to have some guidance on what content would be most useful for our alumni base, we realized that we needed to better understand what challenges the alumni face when they try to implement the BSSE theories in life after they graduate from HBS.

Iulia Mogosanu: About one year ago we interviewed a small, but I would say very diverse pool of BSSE alumni. And we learned that the alumni would like to have a toolbox that explains how to actually implement the Jobs To Be Done theory in their professional lives. So we decided to do a Jobs To Be Done toolbox that would basically walk the alumni through all the steps of understanding and implementing the Jobs To Be Done, including how to recruit the customers, interview them, how to analyze the results, and then understand how the results can be used by various stakeholders.

Iulia Mogosanu: We came to the conclusion that the best way to do this would be actually to carry out a research project. So we are here at HBS, right? So we are surrounded by MBA students and ultimately they are our customers in the school. And with this in mind, we actually framed the question of our project on the Jobs To Be Done language namely why did you hire HBS?

Katie Zandbergen: And also, just to follow up on what Iulia said, it's also a really timely inquiry given all of the concern about how MBA programs are doing. For instance, there was an article I saw in the Wall Street Journal just last month about how MBA programs are reporting steep drops in applications. And in the article they cited research from the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which highlighted how applications to American MBA programs in particular have now fallen for the fifth straight year in a row. So in 2018 applications for US business programs were down 7%, and this year they were down 9.1%. Now current immigration policy is likely having some impact on these numbers, but it's not so cut and dry and there's certainly other factors at play.

Katie Zandbergen: In fact, in the BSSE course here at HBS, there's one entire class that's devoted to the topic of the disruption of HBS. And in this class, the students are asked to consider factors with potential consequences for the HBS MBA. These include things like online degree programs, massive online open courses, corporate training and universities, and prospective students questioning the value of an MBA versus other options that they may have in their professional lives.

Katie Zandbergen: Our MBA students are then asked to consider three questions. The first is, is management education being disrupted? If so, how and why? The second, what impact, if any, does it have on Harvard Business School? And the third, who are HBS' customers and what are their jobs to be done? And this last question in particular is where our research question, which is why did you hire HBS, I think is really relevant.

Katie Zandbergen: So given the current context and the trend for declining applications to American MBA programs, it's really useful for HBS to better understand the forces that draw students to an MBA program these days along with the forces that may hold them back.

Derek van Bever: Super interesting and timely as you say. Could you talk us through what are the steps in a jobs project? I guess you document six. What are they? In what order do you do them?

Iulia Mogosanu: Yeah. So Derek, as you mentioned, a Jobs To Be Done project has six main components. They are the project design, recruitment, the interviews, debriefing, analysis, and action. All the six phases are covered in detail in the toolbox where we also provide many examples from these Jobs To Be Done, why did you hire HBS project that we did. For the purposes of this podcast, we'll mostly focus actually on doing the interviews, but still I want to briefly explain these six phases. Starting with the project design, you first need to determine who the project team members will be and what their individual responsibilities are. And with your team you then define an actionable and a narrow enough problem to be solved. So this is the goal of the project. And of course, when you think about the project design, you also need to identify an initial group of people who you can potentially interview.

Iulia Mogosanu: These people are actually customers who recently hired or fired the product or service that you want to learn more about. In terms of recruitment, I would say this is the most critical part of any Jobs To Be Done project because in carrying out this research, you want to include as many different stories as possible to help identify all the potential jobs for which customers hire or fire that product or service.

Iulia Mogosanu: Thirdly, we have the actual interview. So just for our listeners to remember, the whole point of our Jobs To Be Done interview is to identify the progress that someone is trying to make in a specific circumstance. So unlike traditional marketing practices, these interviews are focused more on unpacking customers' actions, what drives their purchase behavior, what's the progress they are trying to make in their lives. So they are not focused on identifying customers' beliefs about product attributes.

Iulia Mogosanu: Next we have the debriefing phase. This is where the team takes the time to actually clarify the customer's timelines and the forces of progress. And this is a process which ideally should take place immediately after the interviews are finalized.

Iulia Mogosanu: The fifth phase, as I mentioned, is the analysis. The analysis focuses on grouping the interview stories around similar factors that cause the customers hire the product or service, and it is not around product or service attributes. There are different methods to do this, but in our research project we use the clustering method to analyze the data that we got from these interviews and the end result of the analysis phase is a complete description of the jobs for which the customers hire that product or service.

Iulia Mogosanu: The sixth and final phase is the action as I mentioned, and this is where based on the description of the jobs that you already identified. So the team recommends various steps that different stakeholders can take. At the same time, the organization that's doing the research gains a deeper understanding of where it's already servicing the customers well and which capabilities they need to improve in order to deliver a better purchase and use experience for their customers.

Derek van Bever: Interesting. So six overall phases. You design the project and identify a pretty narrow actionable question at the center, recruitment, interviews, debriefing, analysis, action. You emphasized a moment ago, Iulia, that the recruitment stage is kind of a critical stage to make sure that you're developing a representative sample. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Iulia Mogosanu: So before you select the people to talk to, the first step is to create broad pool of potential interviews. And for this we defined some broad screening criteria that best describe the core market for that respective product or service. And just to give some examples, they can be gender, age of the customers, income level, geographic location, and so on.

Iulia Mogosanu: From this broad pool of potential interviewees, you then select around, I would say 10, 20 customers to actually interview. You need to ensure that you have a representative sample of people. So when you select these interviewees from the initial pool, you should use set of variables that describe the most important characteristics of the target market. And I actually want to clarify something here. When you initially create the pool of people to talk to, the screening criteria is broad, but when you select the interviewees, these variables are very specific to your market. For our project, we defined eight variables, gender, nationality, prior work experience, industry, HBS legacy, English as first language, startup experience, and MBA funding sources. And we used these variables to select interviewees using the Latin square method, which actually people will be able to learn more about this in the toolbox.

Iulia Mogosanu: But essentially what this means is that you need to do ... what you need to do is to ensure that the selected interviewees fit within these set of variables. And this actually is a guarantee that you are provided with the most diversity possible in the 10, 20 stories that you will hear during the interviews.

Derek van Bever: That's interesting. So as we were talking about before we started recording today, ironically or paradoxically, you do use demographics as you're figuring out whom to interview in this target population, but the whole purpose of the jobs approach is then to leave demographics behind and to go to different factors, circumstances, what progress people are trying to make, et cetera. That's very interesting. Katie, you love this part of the process. Did the calls have a script or an intended flow where you like questioned one, B, three, or how did that go?

Katie Zandbergen: No. So when you're doing a jobs interview, there is no script, and that's part of what makes it actually really fun because you start off with one idea or question, but you're not exactly sure where you're going to end up or how you're going to get there. But just because there's no script, that doesn't mean there's not an intended flow. So there is certainly some flow to the interview. You're essentially having someone tell you their story. So as I said, there's no predefined questions and there's also no right or wrong answers, which is also nice in terms of the interviewee being more at ease. It's not like they can get it wrong.

Katie Zandbergen: So the next question you end up asking someone in an interview is often triggered by the interviewees' response to the previous question. As I said, you know the starting point of an interview, but you don't know ahead of time what sort of information you're going to uncover along the way.

Katie Zandbergen: That being said, we did start every conversation with kind of introductions and a description of the project and letting the person know that it shouldn't take more than about an hour. And also asking them if they had any questions before we began.

Katie Zandbergen: In terms of moving beyond the introductions, there's two different approaches that we could have chosen from. One approach is to start with the moment that the individual decided to hire the product or service, and then circling back to their first thought of doing so, and then tracking them through their decision making process along the way. The second strategy, which is the one we ultimately used, was to delve into the forces of progress taking a timeline approach. We decided on this option, given the nature of the question that we were asking, which is why did you hire HBS? Deciding to come to HBS is not an impulse buy and as we discovered was sometimes something for which the seeds had been planted in childhood.

Derek van Bever: Interesting.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah. So this being the case, we always started by asking them about where they were from and tell us about your families and about some childhood experiences. And in particular we were curious to learn more about how these things related to their educational achievements and their trajectories through and beyond high school and college. And as you can imagine, it would be easy to lose focus on the purpose of the interview in the sort of situation where people are telling you about childhood memories and grandparents and siblings and college.

Katie Zandbergen: So we do, as I said, want to have a bit of an intended flow to the interview. And what helps to keep us more focused along the way was really our quest for uncovering pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits of the present. We always kept these four categories in mind and we filled them out on a whiteboard as the interview progressed.

Katie Zandbergen: And briefly in thinking about polls, what we were considering is really the question of how did the idea of HBS motivate them or pull them towards it. And in terms of pushes, the question was what was going on in their life that was pushing them to make progress. Anxieties are pretty self-explanatory, which is essentially what about hiring HBS were they worried about, and habits of the present is essentially the question, what allegiances did they have to the old way of doing things that were hard for them to break. So in a nutshell, these are the forces of progress that we're trying to uncover during the interview process.

Derek van Bever: Interesting. So our alumni will recall from the BSSE course that there are two exhibits that you'll see in the toolbox and that you might remember from class that we use to kind of guide ourselves through the interview process. One is the forces of progress that Katie was talking about. And the other is that timeline from first thought through the various events that lead to the moment of purchase. And you're just really trying to understand how does someone make a decision to move themselves along that timeline. How long did it take? What got in their way? And again, something that's often very surprising to the interviewees. We're not asking them, so how do you like HBS? What's best about it and worst about it? We're trying to figure out how they make decisions, and that's typically sort of surprising to people. That's not what they think we've asked them to talk about, but that's what you're really looking for.

Derek van Bever: Anyway. So I was interested to see that when you did the interviews, you actually collaborated, you were both on the interviews and kind of trading off as you asked questions. Was it useful to work as a team?

Iulia Mogosanu: Yes, definitely. I strongly recommend that the Jobs To Be Done interviews are done in a team of two, where each person has a different role. I think it's really important to have a thought partner so that you can actually discuss the interviews together once they are done.

Iulia Mogosanu: So what worked well for us was having one person focused more on the conversation and the other person taking notes. So who does what should be decided before the interview. And of course the person who takes down notes also asks questions. What the two of us did was to actually draw the timeline in the forces of progress diagrams on big whiteboards that we could both see. I would open the interviews and lead the questions and then Katie would take the notes and ask additional questions. Katie mentioned identifying pushes, pulls, and so on. During the interviews Katie would actually identify and write on these whiteboards keywords that would describe important details in the conversations that would ultimately represent these pushes, pulls, or events in the timeline. And those keywords would actually help the two of us keep track of the details of the conversation and figure out what was still missing from the story and whether we actually understood the causal mechanism behind the purchase.

Iulia Mogosanu: I want to mention that having a team during the interview helps with the debriefing phase because we can then debate about the meaning of the words that the customers used during the interview and reach a common understanding of those interviews.

Derek van Bever: I saw you spending hours in the conference room doing exactly that. This is not for the faint of heart. This takes some time to do. What were some of the biggest challenges that you encountered in this process? Katie, you're laughing.

Katie Zandbergen: I think one of the biggest challenges, at least for us, and given this question of why did you hire HBS was keeping the interview to about an hour. Because people are telling you their story about their childhood and their grandparents and this amazing trip they had, and you want to learn more about these things and you're having a conversation, and you look up at the clock and, oh my gosh, 40 minutes have gone by and they're telling us about like freshman year in college and we really need to speed this up.

Derek van Bever: Move this one, yeah.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah, exactly. And so even with our pushes and pulls on habits of the present and anxieties to keep us focused, it is sometimes hard to stay focused or to know which avenues to pursue and which to move on from. If they say something interesting, you want to know like, "Oh, is there more to it? Could this be relevant in terms of pushes and pulls and anxieties and habits of the present, or do we just kind of move on to the next question?" So that's a bit of a challenge. I think as we interviewed more people, it became easier for us to keep it to the hour.

Iulia Mogosanu: I agree.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah. But that was an initial challenge for sure. So after you've done the interviews, you also need to transfer what you learned onto note cards. And the info on these three by five cards needs to represent these forces of progress, that is the pushes and the pulls that people were trying to make. And this led to some interesting debate between Iulia and myself, for instance, about whether something is a push or is it a pull. One example of this, just to give some meaning to what I've said, is someone told on the one hand that their employer expected them to get an MBA. I think it was Boston Consulting Group in this instance.

Iulia Mogosanu: Yes.

Katie Zandbergen: Like that was the expectation. If they wanted to get a promotion, they would first get their MBA. And on the other hand that they really loved their job and they wanted to climb the corporate ladder. So then Iulia and I are getting into a big debate like is this a push from their employer to apply or is it a pull because it's based on their intrinsic desire to step it up and to hire HBS. And you really have to figure out the intent behind what a person has said, like the energy behind it in order to determine if something is a push or a pull to hire HBS. And obviously this isn't always straightforward, but it also just stresses the point that it's so important to have a thought partner so you can kind of hash these things out.

Katie Zandbergen: One piece of advice here I think is that you really should be thinking about pushes in terms of statements that start with when I am or when I feel or when I need to and pulls are statements that start with, so I can. But yeah, it's still sometimes challenging.

Katie Zandbergen: After this process you end up with around 100 pushes and 100 pulls, and then you need to work them down to about half that number when you rewrite them in the Jobs To Be Done language of when I am and so I can, and you'll eventually use these for affinity groups. And what you're interested in doing is combining pushes that have like intent, and then also combining polls that have like intent. And again, it's not always straightforward and the debate is an important part of the process I think.

Katie Zandbergen: And I know we're focused more on the interview process in this podcast discussion, but I think it's also worth noting that analyzing the data can also be a challenge and time consuming. For instance, you need to work to keep the individuality of each story and interview in mind and really work to focus on the patterns and key factors that led the customers to hire the product or service. And this isn't always easy to do. They're like, "Wait, who said that? Was that this person or was it that person?" And then you're going back and revisiting transcripts and so on.

Katie Zandbergen: Also, some things that we initially thought were pulls like the prestige and reputation of HBS or this people like me have attended HBS scenario turned out to ultimately be attributes. Speaking about the brand of HBS, it really, it turns out that the brand is an effect and not a cause of hiring HBS. It's what does the person intend to accomplish with the HBS brand. That's really what we're interested in. It's the progress they're trying to make in a given circumstance. But that wasn't clear to us initially.

Katie Zandbergen: Also, some things that we initially thought of as jobs like help me explore or help me to transition were also ultimately determined not to be what we thought they were. For instance, in the case of help me explore, because it applied to everyone who we interviewed in one way or another, it was a common feature that had different manifestations in each job and it was not a causal mechanisms for why someone decided to hire HBS.

Katie Zandbergen: And in the case of help me to transition, after doing more analysis, we determined that it was ultimately part of the job to help me escape, which I think Iulia will talk more about the specific findings, but just to say, there is certainly a learning curve in doing this. But that's also part of the fun of the whole jobs process.

Derek van Bever: So what did you all learn about the Jobs To Be Done? Why do people hire Harvard Business School in this day and age?

Iulia Mogosanu: So after we analyzed the data from all the interviews that we did, we found three jobs to be done for which people hire HBS. One of the jobs is help me escape. This is the job of students who are on a job or a career path that they don't actually like, so they are not happy, they don't feel successful where they are. And this job is about getting out of this situation, and of course not necessarily knowing what you'll do in the new situation when you get there.

Iulia Mogosanu: Another job that we found was help me to do what others expect of me. I would say this applies particularly to students who come from industries where the employer expects them to do an MBA, for example, from consulting or investment banking. Any it also actually apply to students who come to HBS because their family insisted on it. So in general, it's about feeling some external pressure of some sort.

Iulia Mogosanu: And the third job that we found, it's help me to step it up. This relates more to internal pressure this time. So meaning it's time for me to take my game to the next level. For example, someone who likes the current job and wants to climb the ladder of the same employer. What was interesting is that even though it was great variability in the students' motivations and in their decision making processes that we could actually hear initially during the interviews, after we analyzed the data, we realized that there is a pattern of this causal mechanism, and this pattern translated into the three jobs that I already mentioned.

Iulia Mogosanu: We also observed that people often haven't really thought about their motivations for hiring HBS, and that they themselves actually discovered new personal insights into their decision making process during the actual interview with us, which was so exciting. I mean, we even had reactions like, "Oh, I didn't think about that when I applied, but upon reflection, this is actually completely accurate."

Derek van Bever: I completely agree. That happens a lot, that part of what makes jobs interviews fun for everybody involved is that it's a process of discovery on both sides of the conversation.

Derek van Bever: So rounding out here, do you have any advice for people who are doing their first calls? I assume that the materials that you created will help people understand the structure and framework for how to approach a project. But if you're sitting down to do your first interviews, what advice might you have for people who are hesitant but determined to do it?

Katie Zandbergen: I think there's a few things that you should kind of always keep in mind throughout the process. The first thing to keep in mind is the fact that Jobs To Be Done is essentially a pre hypothesis. You start the process saying, "I actually have no idea at all why this person decided to hire HBS." So you're really starting off with a blank slate. And that's okay. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And then the jobs interview helps you to collect causal data along the way.

Katie Zandbergen: You should also keep in mind what you're trying to determine, which is the progress that someone is trying to make in a specific circumstance. You're out to find the causal mechanisms. I like to think of it, and actually Bob Moesta talks about it this way, "What dominoes had the fall for that individual to decide to hire HBS when they did?" Also, what are the variables that if we took them out, then the person doesn't land at HBS. Like you're breaking the circuit. Those are also interesting to think about.

Katie Zandbergen: Also to keep in mind is the fact that you're trying to determine the social, emotional, and functional aspects of a person's job to be done. You're really wanting to better understand customer's behavior and purchasing decision making processes. And to do this as we've been talking about, like we're not analyzing huge data sets, but rather we're gaining deeper insights into a smaller handpicked sample of people who have direct experience with the product or service, in this case, the Harvard Business School.

Katie Zandbergen: And in terms of keeping the interviews focused, we've already discussed this a little bit, how it is a challenge sometimes, but one thing that you can also do is at the start of the interview, let the person know that sometimes you may cut them off, and it's not that you're trying to be rude or hurt their feelings. In fact, it's all about trying to make sure that you've understood what they're saying, and maybe that you're needing to bring the conversation back to the main topic at hand. So if the interview starts to go off track, it's actually okay to say, "Okay, okay, I think I got it. Let's go over here." You can direct people, and you can say something like, "You did this. What happened next?"

Katie Zandbergen: And you can also summarize what they've said in order to refocus the conversation and also to make sure that you haven't gotten anything wrong or missed any important details. So, if we have people telling us about kind of childhood experiences and high school experiences, that's kind of a good point after that to say, "Okay, let me just make sure I've got this right." And you kind of say back to them in the first person what they've told you, and then you're making sure that you haven't forgotten any details. Sometimes during that process people go, "Oh my gosh, I totally forgot to mention this other thing," and that's actually probably relevant. So that's a nice way to kind of also pick up on information that you might have missed that is maybe relevant and I think it's really a helpful technique to do in a jobs interview.

Iulia Mogosanu: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Katie I agree, and just to add more insight. If you notice on the timeline and the forces of progress notes that the responses are not actually explaining the causality of why the customers made the decision to hire the product or service, start asking different questions. Push more for that why, because why I'm saying this? At the end of the interview, you should be able to reproduce the customer's story in your own words. Also, try to do the analysis soon after you've completed the interview so that everything, all the details from the interviews are still fresh in your mind. And during this process, keep in mind that attributes can be pulls and definitely pay attention to which factors are pushes and which ones are pulls.

Iulia Mogosanu: Also, what we noticed from our experience of doing these interviews, I think it's important to be empathic because your interviewees are sharing some very personal information about their own experience. So it's important to resonate with their stories. At the end of this process, so after you did the interviews and you analyzed the whole data, right, you end up, I would say not with this is the answer, but rather with recommendations for where you can innovate, assuming that you have the time and resources to do so. So these findings are, let's call them a fuel that help you to understand what to do next.

Iulia Mogosanu: And I would say, the interviews can be really fun. So getting to hear someone's story in a totally unscripted way leads to some really interesting insights.

Derek van Bever: So super interesting. We talked the other day as we were preparing for this podcast, what we don't know is how HBS might make use of these findings. It's best, I think the conventional wisdom is pick a problem that you own, a problem whose solution you could manage yourself so that you can kind of learn through baby steps how to do this process. We talked about the ways in which HBS might want to use what you all found in terms of student selection, in terms of figuring out services to offer here on campus, and just checking in with people to see how their experience has paid off for them, how the decision to come here paid off. But we will leave that to them and I'm sure that we'll share what we found with the various powers that be here at the school and see what use they make of it.

Derek van Bever: For all of you, we will be publishing the toolbox later this academic year. And in the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you want to discuss any aspect of the learning that we've done or are doing as we gain reps and as you gain reps and mastery of this very powerful technique. And to you, Iulia and Katie, thank you very much for coming in today, and to all of you out there for listening.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck everybody.