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 they 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: Hello, my name is Derek van Bever and I'm the director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation here at the Harvard Business School. As our regular listeners will know, the mission of the forum, what Clay Christensen has asked us to do, is to help spread awareness and use of the theories and frameworks we teach in the BSSE course here at HBS across working managers worldwide. We do this by paying close attention to the accomplishments and challenges that our alumni face as they translate what they've learned in our classroom to their professional and personal lives.

Derek van Bever: One alum who's recently caught our attention is Levi Belnap, a graduate of the class of 2013 and currently the vice president of business development at the tutoring company, Wyzant. Levi did what a lot of our alumni hope to do, he spotted a need to implement one of our frameworks. In this case, the Jobs to Be Done framework, and he enlisted his CEO and the rest of the senior management team in this effort in a really novel way and one that we think can be copied by anyone who wants to understand how to grow their business by connecting with customers better. We connected with Levi over the phone for this conversation, and so I invite you to sit back and enjoy. Levi, welcome to the podcast.

Levi Belnap: Yes, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Derek van Bever: There were so many things that we learned about your journey post-HBS that we wanted to share with our listeners. But for starters, you told us when we interviewed you a few months ago that you learned the hard way soon after graduation about the importance of Clay's theory of Jobs to Be Done. Could you describe that experience for our listeners?

Levi Belnap: Yeah, for sure. When I was a student at HBS, I came in as an entrepreneur and I planned to leave as an entrepreneur, and I discovered an opportunity very early in my first year that ended up consuming me. I found a co-founder from my section. We found another technical co-founder, and we basically got to work building a company. We found our opportunity, we built the company and we went out of school kind of off to the races.

Levi Belnap: Through that process, I believe that was using the idea of Jobs to Be Done. I kind of learned about it late in my process of building that company. I learned about it my second year, but we started to build the company early on in our first year. And the general premise for the company was, I had left a job prior to coming to HBS and had handed off my role to someone who had struggled to kind of keep the momentum that I had built before I left. It was looking at knowledge share. In transition, how do you hand off information and help someone get the information they need to succeed?

Levi Belnap: It started with this very basic idea of using technology to surface and search for the most important information that's buried in email documents and things like that. But the business evolved and it ended up being called FindIt. And it was basically mobile search to allow you to search across your Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive, all the different places where you might have information across the internet. We kind of went straight up and straight down, right?

Levi Belnap: We had a wonderful first kind of year where we built a great product. We raised financing. We had a team. We got a lot of press and had a lot of downloads. And what ended up happening was people didn't use the product. Everybody thought they needed it. But then when it came down to it, we didn't get the usage we needed and there was no real business without usage. And it was a very painful, personal experience, a humbling experience really on, I failed and it was not fun.

Derek van Bever: We train our students here at school to kind of, as Clay says, "Put on the lenses of theory and look through them to see if you can make sense of your experience." I guess in Clay's terms, this framework that we use, you had created a product that served, I don't know, perhaps your job but not the job of any potential customers? Is that what you took away from that?

Levi Belnap: I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I think the powerful aspect of putting on the lens of the theory is that it can save you from making mistakes that the theory would predict will happen. I think the danger is that if you don't really use the theory, then you can bend the theories to support whatever you want it to support. And so in this case, I thought I was using jobs to understand the job that needed to be done, and in the beginning I believe we did a line on the job. There was a real job which was, people leave companies, they hand off information, the new person has to onboard and succeed, and there are needs there. I have a new job I took over from somebody else. I will be most successful if I can build on what the person did before me. How do I do that?

Levi Belnap: I think if we would've stayed with that, we probably would have built a company that worked. That solved a real need in the world. There was a real job to be done. But in the world of startups, you have to quickly evolve. We needed to raise funding. We evolved away from the job and stopped focusing on the job. We started focusing on more of what we could do rather than what the job needed, and what we could do fast because we needed to make progress fast. And what was interesting to investors and what was kind of trendy and important at the moment in the market, which was mobile and cloud services, right, your Gmail, Dropbox, we would drive all the places where you had information. Almost without realizing we stopped focusing on the job and did what we thought was necessary in order to build our business.

Derek van Bever: There is so much wisdom in that experience. When we teach jobs in the classroom these days, one of the lessons that we try to teach students is that even when you've centered yourself on a job that you own, that the world will seek to pull you off of that job for a whole range of reasons, asset utilization, trying to build share of wallet with customers. That idea that you need to be able to remain laser-focused on the job, man, that that's really powerful.

Derek van Bever: And in some ways, I guess it's hard to describe an upside down V-startup experience as lucky, but it was perhaps sort of lucky for you because it prepared you for when you spotted this same problem coming around again soon after you joined. Wyzant. Could you describe a bit what you found when you joined Wyzant and what Wyzant is first of all for our listeners?

Levi Belnap: Yeah, you bet. Wyzant is the largest network of tutors in the United States. It's a marketplace, so on one side we have students who come to find tutors who can support them, and on the other side we have over 75,000 independent tutors who have joined the Wyzant marketplace in order to provide their unique expertise in tutoring services to students. The business has been around for 13 years, so we've been doing this for a long time. The founders were two Princeton undergrads who still run the business, are very involved day to day, and the business has evolved a lot over those 13 years.

Levi Belnap: When I joined Wyzant, it was soon after they had raised their first round of institutional funding. They had bootstrapped for eight years and got to significant scale and scope doing over a million hours of tutoring a year, right. They then raised financing and they brought in some managers, right. Previously, bring in the founders and the small team and they started to build more work capacity, more leadership capacity, so I joined the team soon after that.

Levi Belnap: What I kind of learned early on was marketplaces are fun and it also allows you to do everything, or at least you believe you can do anything for anyone. It was one of the surprising things to me. As I dug into the business, I realized we viewed ourselves as a technology solution that could solve lots of different problems and we were somewhat agnostic on what we were best at. We were okay with letting the marketplace do many, many different things.

Levi Belnap: Just to kind of add some color to that. In the beginning, 13 years ago, it started as a solution to help K-12, like parents and their children, find tutoring support. That could be anything from, "I have a student with a learning disability who needs additional support," to "I'm a very zealous parent who wants my kid to get the best scores and get into the best schools, and I'm willing to do to get them there." You kind of had a very broad spectrum of needs that the tutoring marketplace was supporting.

Levi Belnap: As the business evolved, it also began to support adult learners, college students and professional learners. And everyone was coming to Wyzant for very different reasons, but we didn't really ask the question, what was different? We have an amazing product team that was really digging into how to make the user experience better, but we had never really differentiated between the job, so to speak. We didn't realize there were different core jobs that were being bringing people to Wyzant.

Derek van Bever: Levi, I'll bet a lot of our listeners can identify with that. They've got a product or a service, in your case, a marketplace, a lot of different people are coming to that platform to do a lot of different things. In a way, I guess that sounds awesome, right? You've got people who are figuring out different ways to use your service, something caused your spider sense to tingle. What was that? What was wrong with that?

Levi Belnap: For me, it was, I thought back to my experience with my own startup. I thought back to the lessons I had heard. I always remember Clay talking about this idea that basically if you're not solving a job, like eventually someone else is going to solve it better. You can do lots of things okay for many different people. You're probably just a interim solution until a better fix for that job is identified.

Levi Belnap: And so I was really curious to know, what are we best at? What is the job that exists in the world that is bringing people to Wyzant that we can solve in a way that others can't solve. It really was kind of, that was the catalyst was looking for why do people choose Wyzant? What is it that's bringing them to us and how can we differentiate it and really double down on that?

Derek van Bever: Okay. Now you are definitely in a situation that a lot of our alumni are. And so I'm the person from HBS who's come into the organization who spots something that might be a miss, and you then did something that really caught our attention. You wrote your CEO a letter and you sent him a book to read. Could you talk about that?

Levi Belnap: Yes. I have been very lucky at Wyzant to work closely with the CEO and he has always been open-minded and willing to challenge the kind of core assumptions that maybe others have just taken as truth. It wasn't easy for me in the beginning to realize that he was open to that, right. It took me a while before I had the courage to say, "Do we really know what Wyzant is doing? What is tutoring? Why are people coming to Wyzant??

Levi Belnap: I find the written word as my most effective way to communicate because I don't ramble. I wrote down in a short kind of email letter to the CEO, here are some questions I have about why people use tutoring. I've read this book, Competing Against Luck. It really resonated with me. It made me think that we probably don't understand really why people are coming to Wyzant; and if we did, we could better serve that need, that job to be done and grow as a result. Really kind of capitalize on those unique circumstances that brings people to Wyzant. That was kind of the introduction to the CEO to this book, Competing Against Luck.

Derek van Bever: Clay will love listening to your story because it's always struck him that the limitation that he faces as an author and a thinker is that he can get somebody who's read something he's written excited, but then how they go out and evangelize to their team, to their boss, et cetera. I mean, that's often a stopping point.

Derek van Bever: You sent your CEO the letter, you then gave him a copy of Clay's book and something in there caught for him. What was it, do you think that caused him to go, "Oh Levi, you're onto something here. We should take the next step."

Levi Belnap: This wasn't the first time I'd talked about Jobs to Be Done. I love the concept of Jobs to Be Done since from his first time I heard it, and so I was using it with my team, I was using in other teams. I've been using the concept, I'd mentioned it before to the CEO. We talked about it, but the book, Competing Against Luck, did not exist when I finished at HBS, when I was building my company, when I started at Wyzant. This actually all happened at the same time the book came out.

Levi Belnap: Because it was almost like in leading a book, I finally had a tool to use to get other people on board. My understanding of the Jobs to Be Done theory wasn't robust enough for me to understand the nuances and to be able to apply as well enough in different areas that I had confidence in going to others and kind of getting them onboard. Something about like the book gave me what I needed to go get other people to see the same things I was seeing. And so as I gave the book to our CEO, I basically now had the foundation to explain why I was thinking what I was thinking.

Levi Belnap: And so he read the book and very quickly, I mean, he didn't even finish the book. I think he was halfway through and he responded, "This is exactly what we need right now. We, as an executive team, need to better understand strategically where we're going and to do that we really have to understand who we are and what we do best." And so he then asked me to play Jobs to Be Done professor and said, "Can you lead a executive offsite?"

Levi Belnap: At the time, I wasn't on the executive team, so I was kind of being invited into an executive offsite to do part of a full-day session on Jobs to Be Done training. What is it, how does it work, how could it apply to our company and what are next steps? How would we use this if we're going to?

Derek van Bever: Oh boy, the idea that you can actually use the theories and frameworks to help teach them what we've learned here and then apply it to your organization, what a fantastic example that you set. And so I guess you had an offsite and formed sort of a book club to read Competing Against Luck, and then asked the executives, do you know why people are hiring us or firing us? What progress our customers are trying to make? How acute were the senses, if you will, of the executives? How well did they understand their customers when viewed through the lens of this theory?

Levi Belnap: That's a great question. We are a very customer-obsessed company. Nobody at Wyzant was not paying attention to the customer. Nobody was really assuming we knew everything. Everyone was actually very open to the idea that there's a lot for us to learn about who our customers are, what they need, why they come to us. And we have a great VP of product who was very diligent in doing deep customer research, constantly interviewing customers, going through product demos with customers, basing all engineering and product investments on the feedback from customers.

Levi Belnap: But what's most interesting to me about this is, it wasn't that it was like a revolutionary idea to pay attention to the customer, but the kind of the nuance of how you do it from the jobs framework allowed us to all align on the approach and language and the key steps that maybe we were doing out of order or not doing completely that gave us all something to look at the same way. There wasn't a lot of pushback. A few of the members of our executive team are always somewhat critical of management books. "Yeah, just another book of the same things. We've heard this all before."

Levi Belnap: But as we got into the discussion, and especially the case studies from the book and applied what the learning from the case studies were to our own experiences, it became a very powerful discussion. We started asking questions about the way we were thinking and what we were currently doing that I don't think we had asked ourselves before or at least together as a group really verbalized before. The conversation ended up being very productive.

Derek van Bever: I guess at some point now they're like, "Okay, Levi, we're sold. This is a good thing for us to explore." And then you've described that now when you say, "Okay, I'm going to take the next step." I don't know if you Googled Jobs to Be Done, all of a sudden you're in the Wild, Wild West. There's a lot of takes on this theory out there, but who did you come across that you found a reliable guide or a sort of exemplar to follow as you took the next steps?

Levi Belnap: Yeah. This, I think, was, you can talk about a chasm that we had to cross, right? We did not know what to do next, honestly. We finished that offsite and everyone was very excited about the framework and the theory, and I think we had general belief that we don't currently understand the Jobs to Be Done that are causing students to come to Wyzant. And if we did understand those better, that could help us make more strategic decisions and more effective trade-offs that would lead to growth.

Levi Belnap: We now have this kind of foundational understanding and the question was, what's next? From the book and what we kind of determined was, okay, we should go through our own Jobs to Be Done analysis. Let's write down what we think the job spec is. What are the kind of functional, emotional and social components to this job or to the jobs that Wyzant is currently solving and how are we currently using that understanding, right? If we can list out what the job is, what are we doing to solve it well?

Levi Belnap: As we went through that, I think we still felt like we're not really taking advantage of this theory and the way that it could be working for us. What we did next was, it kind of all happened in parallel. Actually at the same time, I think just prior to the offsite, we had reached out to one of the folks mentioned in the book. One of the case studies in the book is around Southern New Hampshire University and it talks a lot about Paul LeBlanc, the president there, and the big transition they made to supporting nontraditional adult learners, so adult learners coming back later in life. And as we read that case study, it resonated so much with us because it parallels a lot of what our own business was going through, kind of this evolution to an older student that was not your traditional K-12 students.

Levi Belnap: And so we had reached out to Paul and asked him, "How did you use Jobs to Be Done theory? We read about you in this book, well, what happened?" And he invited us to come visit him in New Hampshire. And so the CEO, Andrew Geant of Wyzant and I just prior to this offsite had gone out and visited with Paul LeBlanc in person. And so the offside kind of came all like the book and our experience talking to Paul, and this really led to us believing that there could be a similar type of impact for us if we implemented jobs the same way Southern New Hampshire had in the way that they kind of look at the world.

Levi Belnap: And so after the offsite we kind of said, "Well, maybe we should ask those guys again, what did Southern New Hampshire do?" And as we talked to them, they had mentioned about Bob Moesta. They said they had worked with Bob as a consultant to help them learn how to do Jobs to Be Done, interviewing, Jobs to Be Done thinking. That was kind of the signal of the noise was really trusting others who had used Jobs before effectively. Because you're right, when we Googled it, there was so many people saying so many different things, we didn't know what the right next step was.

Derek van Bever: For our alums, Bob and his Rewired Group out of Detroit. Bob is the milkshake man and someone that we mentioned in more than passing in talking about Clay's engagement with this theory. Bob has been working this terrain as long as anyone. You found your way to Bob. Bob did an engagement with you. What was that like talking to customers in the language of Jobs, hearing them talk about the progress they were trying to make? What stands out for you in terms of insights or memories from this new way of thinking about customers and customer progress?

Levi Belnap: I think the thing that was most different was how the approach was not revolutionary, but the way that the pieces tied together was something that we likely would never have figured out on our own without a guidebook or a guide. The idea of don't talk to them about Wyzant, right, I mean, is very simple. And I think our product team knows this too and would do the same thing, but it's just so easy to gravitate to like what is your experience using Wyzant? Why did you choose Wyzant? How did it work for you? What did you like? What did you not like? We all gravitate back to our world. We're so self-centered, right? It's like, what do you think about my business? What do you think about our product? What are you think about our features?

Levi Belnap: And they didn't ask any questions about that. The whole thing was about, what happened in your life that led you to this decision? We'd be almost talk nothing about post-decision, go back into the details. Uncover what was happening that day, what was happening that morning? What was happening with your spouse, with your work, with your colleagues and your family? What were all the different events in your life that were triggering the emotions and the situations that caused you to end up choosing Wyzant? And that was a mindset shift for us to go back and really focus on what are the causal mechanisms in people's lives that eventually lead them to Wyzant.

Derek van Bever: I so resonate with that, Levi. And when you talk to customers, they sort of expect you to ask them questions about their experience with your product, how would you like to improve it, et cetera. And yet, what's revealing and challenging about doing Jobs interviews is that it's a little bit nosy because you're really asking them about themselves and how they make decisions, and what circumstance they were in, and how long it took them to come around to hiring Wyzant, and why did it take that long or why was it so fast? It's all things about their decision process that maybe they don't even fully recognize themselves. But this rush of, "Oh, now I understand a little better the circumstance I was in," which of course from a Jobs perspective is what you're trying to learn because that's really the learning that can help you then to grow by building on circumstance, not on attributes. Fascinating.

Derek van Bever: What are some things that you learned, if you could share with us about sort of the ideal customer for Wyzant or the job that you were ideally integrated to fulfill?

Levi Belnap: Yeah. When we worked with Bob, we were specifically focused on kind of this emerging segment of our business. Again, there's many different types of customers that are coming to Wyzant for one-to-one, deep tutoring support. We were focused on college and adult learners. The business had started and focused on K12, but the biggest and growing, fastest-growing segment was these older learners, college students, adult learners, professional learners.

Levi Belnap: And so all of the Jobs interviews we did with Bob were focused on those learners. We interviewed not as many as I would've thought, right? That's one of the really interesting learning from Bob was like, we don't need to interview a hundred people. We can interview a dozen and the patterns will emerge from those conversations that will really give us the core aspects of the job, especially if you choose your interviewees correctly, which they really helped with how you select interviewees and what you're looking for.

Levi Belnap: As we did those conversations and the pattern started to emerge, what was fascinating was failure was present everywhere. And this may sound totally obvious, we're a tutoring company and people probably need tutoring when they're struggling. But for us, it actually wasn't obvious prior to this. People also come to Wyzant because they want to excel. You have students who may be A students but want to be very top of the class and be perfect at everything and get the top scholarship, and so you get a lot of different reasons and motivations why people were coming.

Levi Belnap: But as we did these Jobs interviews, what was consistent across the board was a significant failure that had already happened or there was a significant fear of failure that was going to happen because of the student's own personal knowledge of their abilities. Whether it was, "I'm in a nursing program and I just failed physiology or pharmacology. I don't understand algebra well enough to do dosage calculations and if I don't get through this course, I will never become a nurse." That failure was now real and threatening, right? The future of that student, the progress they're trying to make in their life was now in real jeopardy unless they could get through this challenge and nothing else was working.

Levi Belnap: By the time they got to us, they had tried everything. We weren't the first solution, we were the last, but we were just the one that works. Or you had students similarly who had struggled previously in life with quantitative things, or with writing, whatever it may be, that they were now entering a course or a part of a program where they knew they were in big trouble. Before they even started the class, they knew statistics is going to kill me. I've never done well at math before and unless I get through this course, I'm not going to get this degree and I'm not going to get this job and this life path that I really want, and I need desperate help so that I don't fail.

Levi Belnap: This kind of recurring thing of failure and struggle was something that we had never owned before. We never really put a stake in the ground and said, "We're the best in the world at helping people overcome failure no matter what else they've tried before." It was very exciting for us because we knew we were different. If you look at the way Wyzant works, it's very different than really any other tutoring solution in that we have brought together the largest network of existing expert tutors with deep experience and expertise, and allow a student to find the right fit for them. It was this unique product we've built that allows students who have struggled and failed in every other situation to succeed because they're finally finding the right fit for them.

Levi Belnap: It's not a tutoring center where people just answer a question. It's not a tutoring business that it's like the tutors have all been taught a certain method and are working the same way with each student. This is a world of experts where you choose the person that's going to work best for you, and so students who have failed in every other situation have now found the right thing for them. It kind of opened our eyes to say, "Well, that's what we are. That's why people are coming to us." How do we now build upon that? Yeah, it's really been exciting for us to kind of own that and move forward with it.

Derek van Bever: As you now look at Wyzant post this engagement, what are some changes that you all made in response to what you found in terms of either how you market your service, how you structure your service? If we were to look in and say Jobs had these impacts, what might some be?

Levi Belnap: It's so pervasive the way this thinking can impact the organization that it's hard to point out all the little different ways aligning around the Job has helped Wyzant move forward strategically. Some of the most obvious and kind of measurable impacts are key strategic decisions we made. One is, historically, Wyzant was an in-person marketplace, so you had students and tutors meeting at their homes, at the library, at the coffee shop, at the university library, whatever, and we were really the only company who could do that.

Levi Belnap: What we discovered was, if your job to be done is get me through this failure, nothing else has worked, you were then willing to meet with someone online. It didn't have to be in person. It was just, I need the right person to get me through this. And we had started to shift online to help our students and tutors connect remotely so that they could work with a tutor anywhere rather than having to meet with someone in person.

Levi Belnap: But as we were kind of moving in that direction, and this really added fuel to that fire. And it gave us the confidence to say, you know what, these learners who really need help, they are willing to work in a different environment. It doesn't have to be in person. And so we pulled the trigger on that and made a big strategic decision to say, the future of Wyzant is one-to-one, synchronous online learning. It is not in person and we are going to build for that and we're going to push our marketplace there. And within 18 months, we went from it being a very small percent of our business that was online to now be majority of all tutoring is happening online via our own online learning platform. That was a really big change for the company.

Derek van Bever: Boy, that's really satisfying. You can imagine, obviously, the scaling opportunities that offers you as well. Levi, maybe a last question, how do you keep your understanding of how customer needs are evolving? How jobs are evolving? How do you keep that current these days?

Levi Belnap: I think we have a lot of work to do here. Personally, I try to continue reading the new best step I can find and talking to the people who are doing this well. I'm randomly going to a Jobs workshop next week with Bob Moesta in Palo Alto. I'm constantly looking for like how do I continue to think like this and understand how to think better this way.

Levi Belnap: Internally within Wyzant, we kind of codified the jobs. Each job is numbered so there's a handful of jobs that we kind of know them now as a company like job one is this, job two is that. We visualize them, so you can kind of think of it as like a one-page slide or visual that has the number of the job and the key components of that job, right. Like what is happening in that person's life when they're coming to Wyzant for this reason? What is the progress they're trying to make? Why are they hiring us? What else are they aspiring? Those kinds of things. And those have been dispersed broadly across the company. We update them regularly as we get new information or our understanding of the job evolves. And so I think that's been a really helpful practical tool to make it visual and present and available to everyone to reference and use.

Levi Belnap: And we continue to do the interviews. After engaging with Bob, we then went and did the same type of Jobs interviews with the tutors. We didn't know why tutors came to Wyzant. We have these 80,000 tutors. What brought them to us? Why did they come to us instead of other places? We applied that there, and we continue to use the same type of thinking as we evaluate. Why are different types of customers coming to us? What are their needs? What's happening in their lives that's causing them to come to us? What is working? What's not working?

Levi Belnap: But I don't have, and I don't know if you guys have, but this would be helpful. Just like there wasn't a guidebook for how to apply Jobs to the organization, I don't or have not found a great guide book on how to continue to embrace and use Jobs on an ongoing basis. That's a work in progress in my own mind.

Derek van Bever: Yeah, I think that's a work in progress for a lot of us. We are really interested in reaching out and learning of the experiences and accomplishments and tools that alums have created so that we can help to build this understanding, this collective understanding. Are there any other tips that you would offer our listeners or any requests that you have of them? I guess we heard that if folks out there have figured out how to stay current with your understanding of Jobs as customers and jobs evolve, that would be a really great thing to pull forward. Is there any other tip that you would offer our listeners who want to make progress, if you will, in their own lives?

Levi Belnap: In the context of how to use Jobs thinking in your organization, the one tip I think, it's about being humble. I think when I left HBS I had a big head and thought I was destined for success, and that no matter what I was entitled and the world was going to move away and let me charge through and succeed, and that wasn't the case, right.

Derek van Bever: Imagine that.

Levi Belnap: Yeah. I had a big public failure and I realized I was not God's gift to earth and there was nothing that special about me, and I needed real help and I needed to be open minded in how to be more effective as a leader, as a manager, as an entrepreneur. As I used the Jobs with Wyzant, I think this idea of humility was really important because people already have really good frameworks and models of thinking and approaches to understanding customer needs that are very similar to the Jobs to Be Done framework. Coming charging in and saying, "This is different and this is the best thing ever and this is going to solve all of our problems," wasn't a helpful approach, right? And so that's not what worked.

Levi Belnap: What worked was saying, "This is a framework that I use and I like, and it might help us tie together some of the other things we're already using that are working well and maybe it'll give us more language and more tools to be even more effective together. This is not a silver bullet. Jobs to Be Done isn't the only way to approach customer needs, but it's a really effective theory that ties a lot of different components together." And if you approach it as humbly and asking other people to help you see if this is something that could work, not forcing everyone to use it, I think it can work like it has for us. But again, there's a lot of room for failure by trying to force this on people as something revolutionary that nobody's ever thought of before.

Derek van Bever: Levi, I think your reminder of approaching this area with humility, making sure that it's not, I'm not the person bringing the wisdom, but these theories have a lot of wisdom to impart because they are more experienced than we are. If we can get out of our own way and try to understand what insights looking through the lens of theory might offer us, that might be a way for us to make progress. Levi, thank you so much, and thank you to all of you 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.