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: 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.

Derek van Bever: One close student of Clay's work who's caught our attention is Des Traynor, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Intercom, a personal messaging service for businesses and their customers. Des first came across the theory of jobs to be done in a talk Clay gave at the Business of Software Conference here in Boston in 2011. And as he describes it, the concept stopped him dead in his tracks.

Derek van Bever: We interviewed Des in the Harvard Business Review at about the time that Clay's book Competing Against Luck came out, and we learned so much from him about how you bring jobs, insights to life in your organization, and in fact, how you can organize your whole company around jobs that we wanted to invite him back to share his insights with you. We think that anyone who wants to learn how to align an organization around the core needs of your customers to drive growth will find a lot to learn from him. We connected with Des by phone from Intercom, San Francisco offices to learn more of his story and his insights. Des, welcome to the podcast.

Des Traynor: Thank you very much for having me, Derek.

Derek van Bever: It's been a couple of years since you and I spoke on the telephone, and I was so intrigued by your whole experience with this theory of Jobs to be Done starting with your first encounter with the theory which you described as a light bulb moment, could you share that experience with our listeners?

Des Traynor: Certainly. It was early on in the days of Intercom, and for those who are curious what Intercom does, it's a customer communication platform, but a way back in 2011 was when I first stumbled upon, if you like the Jobs to be Done Theory. And back then, we were very much building the product for ourselves and trying to solve various different problems, although we probably wouldn't have even used language that mature at the time, and we were building primarily for ourselves.

Des Traynor: I attended a conference in Boston that Clay Christensen was speaking at, and he articulated the Jobs to be Done Theory very precisely in the video, this is still online and I'd recommend people check it out, but what really resonated me at the time was, obviously he tells this infamous milkshake story, but we ourselves had a problem within Intercom where we knew that people really liked the thing we were building, but we didn't really have a perfect explanation as to why. We knew it was viable to us, but it was viable in a lot of different directions.

Des Traynor: So when Clay outlines the process where they talked to people outside of the figurative milkshake store, fast food restaurants, and ask specific questions about why people were hiring, that gave me the motivation to ask a similar question, which was for us was two questions I was asking at that time, why are you trying to sign up for the Intercom products today? Really just tried to drill into, what is it in your hopes and dreams that this software will actually achieve for you?

Des Traynor: And then related, I also asked people who were using the product every day, what is it that caused you to sign in here today? Of all the tabs and all the browsers you could have opened, why have you walked into this one, effectively?

Des Traynor: And so after Clay's talk I would came straight back to Dublin, which is where I was based at the time, and set about trying to answer those two questions in a very, I would say, hamfisted way because I wasn't fully versed in the framework. All's I knew was, that there was a lot of signal in this idea of, what were people not doing because they were using Intercom? What was happening in their company or in their business life such that they believed Intercom could solve this? And I really just got deep into consistently asking people these questions. And it really sharpened our understanding at the time as to what people were trying to do.

Derek van Bever: Des, one of the things that I've picked up, maybe you're reading between the lines, is that there was some urgency for you and for Intercom as a young company trying to find its footing in figuring out what the patterns were here. Is this common for young companies, software companies?

Des Traynor: Yes. I think it really is. I think what happens when a product takes off, and Intercom was taking off at the time, what happens typically is you get more customers in a week than you were ever equipped to deal with, and every customer brings with them their own, let's say, belief in what you need to do next. And, they're all waving dollar bills saying, we'll pay double if you just X, Y, Z.

Des Traynor: So, faced with this mountain of feedback of what really passionate, people who loved our product, but they really felt that here's the direction that needs to go, combined with our own vision on what we thought we were building, we were very much standing at a crossroads saying, all of these directions look profitable. Some of them look clear, some of them look ambiguous, some of them sound the same, but are subtly different. We need to work out what are the most certain steps where we can capture new consumption that customers feel it's valuable enough to pay for, and we can see evidence that they are currently paying for this, as in it's not hypothetical or fictional consumption?

Des Traynor: So we were very keen to say, of all the things we can build, what is the stuff that is definitely desirable by the market, and definitely viable in that we can genuinely put a good price on it and realize revenue from the investment we make? And, I think as a four person team, you're so resource-constrained that you just can't afford too many missteps, so we were looking for a certainty at a time when we had that product that had effectively caught fire. But because we had never articulated exactly what we were doing, people project their own idea on what we were doing, onto our software, and tell us where we need to go. So what we were really looking for, at least what was really burning in my mind, was like, what way should Intercom go, based on what we want to do and what our customers seem to want to buy? Where is the perfect intersection of those two things? And that's where it really helped.

Derek van Bever: It's interesting you had mentioned in our conversation once, that the business press doesn't do a young company any favors either. When you see those feature tables, it kind of leads to trying to be all things to all people, just so all of your moons are filled out. Am I getting that right? Do you get this feature bloat bias by how companies get compared to each other?

Des Traynor: Yeah. I think what happens there, there's a famous quotes and software by, I think it's Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, I think. And he said something along the lines of, the two ways you make money in software are by bundling and by unbundling, meaning by like binding together adjacent product spaces, and then by distinguishing them once again.

Des Traynor: And, I think what happens a lot when people go to draw comparisons between two different products, let's say Microsoft Word and Google docs, they tend to do some sort of lookup table of the features that each of them have, and then they might do things like give them three check marks if they're really good, or one check mark if they have it, but it's very limited or whatever.

Des Traynor: So, as a product space matures, and we would believe that the Intercom category of products was not a thing in 2011, it did not exist. But once it started to exist, it attracted copycats and new entrance. Sooner or later somebody, starts drawing up this feature table, which is like all your competitors are represented by cousins, and all of the features that you could possibly imagine your product could ever have, are represented by [roads 00:08:40].

Des Traynor: If you don't have a sort of clear vision and a clear understanding of the job that your product does, your roadmap can easily become consumed by, let me build the superset of all my competitors' features, such that I can win this fictional battle of the feature grid. And I think it's dangerous to do that because effectively, I don't know if you're familiar with Hotelling's Law, this idea that when businesses are put in direct competition, they end up looking a lot more like each other rather than trying to distinguish each, distinguish themselves from each other. It's a really fascinating observation you'll see.

Des Traynor: But, what I was worried about and what we were worried about at Intercom was, if these feature grids were going to decide what the product space was, then every product would simply be the superset of all features with very little room to differentiate.

Des Traynor: So we were eager to get out of that mindset, and not be labeled or pigeonholed into being, let's say an email automation platform, or a CRM, or any of those things where people immediately project onto you, well, if you are one of these types of products, then here are the 47 features you need. You currently only have 32 of them, so your roadmap for next year is 15 features.

Des Traynor: It's a very easy trap to fall into, and I think it guarantees you mediocre outcome where you look exactly like everyone else, and you're fighting for just your share of the market.

Derek van Bever: Yeah. One thing that students pick, the notional HBS student who got a marketing degree in college, worked in marketing before school, is now in their second year at HBS and has taken a first year marketing course, and they're like, I've never heard this language, and I've been in this profession for what amounts to my whole career, so far. Were you at all concerned as you embarked on this journey that Jobs was kind of a label and a concept that was novel from your own experience and maybe too different to be useful?

Des Traynor: I think you do pay a small tax there because every time we, and bear in mind, even Jobs today in 2018 is a lot more mature than it was in 2011. In 2011, it felt like it was both Bob, Clay, maybe Ryan, [inaudible 00:10:53] and like 5 other people in the world talking about us in the software industry.

Des Traynor: On the tax that we pay, because that was sort of a new employee onboarding tax where every time somebody joins, especially a product manager who had a previous successful way of managing products, and identifying work items, and managing for outcomes, he or she would basically, they tried to impose their way of doing things onto a product team, and we would have this somewhat averse reaction to them saying no, we start with the job. We start with a firm understanding of the customer's problem, why are they hiring Intercom? Or if they're not hiring Intercom, what are they hiring? And what's the measures of success?

Des Traynor: And I think the first thing that always happens is people go, sure, sure, sure. So what you're doing, is you're relabeling what is otherwise known as a user story, and you're calling it a job, and I think that's like the the surface level misinterpretation that's really common.

Des Traynor: And, we ended up kind of getting to a place where we need to do a lot more, training is probably the wrong word, but just, here is how we apply, here is other companies that work like this, and here's why we think it's powerful and has led to a lot of success for us. We need to do a lot of that training early on with people, and obviously the more experienced the person is who has yet to encounter Jobs, naturally the more resistance they might offer because they've had a pretty successful career, would have ever happened to have known this stuff, and now we're saying it's a mandatory course, if you'd like. So, I think there is a tax you pay there.

Des Traynor: The interest of, I guess, is when we engage agencies from the outside world, let's say a positioning agency, or marketing agency, or an advertising agency, and we want them to follow our Jobs ethos. It's quite foreign to them, whereas they would be a lot more familiar with whatever frameworks that might have been popular previously, that they fit into their jigsaw a lot neater. So there is a tax to doing something different than the norm for us. We're well aware of it, and we still see it as ROI positive.

Derek van Bever: But to be clear, when you engage a marketing or advertising firm, you educate them in the way that you see and talk about the world and customers, and evangelize to them and get them to make the translation?

Des Traynor: Yeah, to the best of our ability, we give them our job boards and we explain, here's what we think is happening in the world. Here's our hypothesis as to what causes consumption. Here's the types of things that we think would speak well to that. And in genera, they're usually pretty open to it.

Des Traynor: Now, we're paying them, so of course they're going to be pretty open to it. But, it wouldn't work well if they had a different approach, or if they were doing things that didn't fit in line with our jobs. Now obviously, advertising, we use various different types of campaigns. You've got broad campaigns and direct consumption campaigns, so sometimes you won't see us translate neatly onto a billboard, but sometimes you will.

Derek van Bever: So, you alluded a few minutes ago to Bob, that would of course students of our course will recognize the reference to Bob Mesta of the Rewired Group, who is the Milkshake Man, if you will. And so, you worked I think with Bob and his team on understanding the jobs that your customers, the progress your customers were trying to make. What surprises, if any, as you listened in to the interviews, perhaps conducted some yourself, analyze them, what surprised you about your customers' hiring and firing criteria? The progress they were trying to make with why they were selecting Intercom? What circumstance they were in?

Des Traynor: I think a few different ones. One of the things that Bob pushed us on, was to really distinguish the types of people we talked to and cluster accordingly. So, we talked to new signups, people who are on trial, people who had competed to trial, and it had been successful, and were now paying us money, people who had counseled out of a trial, long-term active customers, and lastly, long-term customers who had recently quit.

Des Traynor: There was a lot of insight in that simple distinguishing factor alone when you start asking questions like, what caused you to hire and or fire. And, like for the trial list, what are you looking to hire, and what is your measure of success? All of those, I guess filters, or ways to splice our customer base, were really powerful, and we still use them to this day.

Des Traynor: So that was probably the first big eyeopener, was just the variance in what you hear from across all of those sections was really interesting. Examples would be like, we didn't realize at the time that we were getting a lot of trial lists for something that we definitely weren't selling, which was a web analytics product. But, people knew that we had this data, and they liked this for it. So, they were comparing us with people who we would never in a million years have seen as a direct, or even indirect competitor. But it helps us kind of understand, Hey, you know what? A lot of these failed trials, that's a good thing. They shouldn't be signing for us, and that made us feel better about some of that.

Des Traynor: I think the other stuff that was eye-opening to me, was the things that motivate somebody to go shopping for a product in the sales, marketing, or support space, which are generally speaking to three spaces that Intercom plays. And almost always it is one of two things. It is bad news or a bad outcome. So, they might've had a rickety customer support solution, which is a combination let's say, email, and somebody else refreshes Twitter twice a day, and somebody else is monitoring a shout out or something like that. And basically, some customer would've quit, or would have called them out on Twitter, or somebody basically would've blown up. And, that problem triggers this, you know what, we need to grow up and get a real support solution.

Des Traynor: Similarly, something on the marketing side of the house, or sales side of the house, might be like, Hey, I just came back from a conference and found out that most people get like 10% conversion on their homepage, and we only get 2%, what's going wrong? And that realization triggers them to go shopping. So, the general realization there was that, there's always an event that precedes the motivation to go shopping, which sounds like it should be really obvious. I mean, who in their right mind on a daily basis refreshes the internet looking for business to business software as a service product? No one.

Des Traynor: Realizing that there's always some compelling event that motivates this change, and sometimes it's more than one event, sometimes it's a repetitive string of events, but there's always something behind us that is actually the core thing, and when you find out you get a real clear picture on how you should be marketing, and what types of advertising campaigns you should run.

Des Traynor: The other part of that was, often a lot of this is triggered by a new financial year starting, so for us right now, we're sitting here in November, I guess, knowing that every marketer, every CMO, every chief revenue officer, VP of sales, they're all planning their financial year 2020 right now. And, part of that planning is hypothetical like, well maybe we can get an extra 10% on our website traffic, and maybe we can increase conversion by 2%, and maybe we can increase throughput or average revenue by X percent.

Des Traynor: Those plans usually get attached to software. And, oftentimes Intercom needs to be a part of that software. It might be like, well, we are going to launch a new chatbot strategy on our homepage, and Intercom's going to run that. So again, we had no idea where this came from, why we got this flurry of signups at different times in the year. But having done those interviews, we realized actually there is a real thing that happens in the world called financial planning, and when people do it, they make guesses as to how Intercom can help.

Des Traynor: And sure enough, when we heard what some of those guesses where those exact same hypotheticals made their way into our marketing, which is to say, yes, we can definitely help with these challenges. Do you have users who download your app but never launch it? Or do you have people who sign up but never log in? And, a lot of businesses have that problem. So when we run campaigns against ideas like that, it really, really helps.

Des Traynor: So I think, they were the types of realizations that we had would not have come had we not, first of all, spliced up our user base, and rather than interviewing them as a homogenous mass, actually look at them as a type of, point in time by point of time per cohort. And then secondly, asked questions specifically drilling into what was the core motivation, like, Hey, on Tuesday afternoon, you signed up for Intercom. What happened on Tuesday morning? And they'll be like, well I just came out of a meeting with VP of marketing, and her idea was that... Once you hear this, the story writes itself, if you know what I mean.

Derek van Bever: I do know what you mean. Bob has taught me how to do Jobs interviews, and I've always been struck by how powerful it is as a customer to be understood. Usually, people are both surprised and delighted to understand a little bit better how their minds work, and what situation they happen to be in.

Derek van Bever: So Des, if we were to walk into your office, how would we tell that Jobs had been here? What visible markers would we see, or what conversations would we hear around the proverbial water cooler that would tell us that Jobs was in the house?

Des Traynor: I think the most obvious would be our teams, our label teams, like Capture and Convert, Onboard and Engage, Support and Retain, et cetera. They're named after, we've organized our product teams based on the jobs that they serve, and that has been a has been one huge change because teams are set up like that, you'll have people with those jobs in their titles. I am the product manager for Capture and Convert.

Des Traynor: And you will see team rooms. Every team at Intercom gets its own war room, which is labeled on the outside based on exactly what the job that they serve is, and as you walk in, you'll see printouts of job boards, recent interviews, sample customers, potential storylines, for us to have somebody would sign up for the product under that use case, et cetera.

Des Traynor: And what you won't see, is like JTBD painted all over the walls. When you look around, you'll see a very clear evidence that we invest a lot in understanding the cause, motivation, and desired outcome of our customers, and we document a lot of it into this sort of job board format that we've published in our blog a few times, which shows you the top line description, one sentence description of the job, that picks our storyline after what types of things have to happen for somebody to want this?

Des Traynor: The competitive tool set that people evaluate, there's a section called Typical Language Used, which is just common phrases and stuff like that you'll hear. Let's say, onboarding or activation percentages is a common phrase in software companies that sell products that if they want to get somebody active, they'll all it an activation rate. And we didn't know that. The minute we know that, we can make those pieces of text native in our product, and use it in advertising.

Des Traynor: And there's other stuff on the job board like that. We often have a section that Bob Mesta added, which is like, what you call us more about and less about, which is just, this job is more about quantitative, and it's more about... He'll just have a list of bullet points of things to help you conceptually get yourself in the right zip code for thinking about the job. And that poster probably usually represents our best understanding of the job up until now, or up until it last refreshed. And then as time goes by, we have to trot them out and go again.

Derek van Bever: And as time goes by, how many updates or revisions since you first did this work have you had to undertake to stay current with your customer's evolving jobs and needs?

Des Traynor: Going back to the earlier quote from Barksdale about bundling and unbundling, often what happens for us is, we build a lot of software. We genuinely, we do release a alarming amount of software every year. And because we present ourselves to the world in these booklets of Capture and Convert, Support and Retain, Onboard and Engage, most stuff we build gets thrown into one of those booklets, sometimes, not perfectly correctly.

Des Traynor: So because of that, oftentimes we have to go back and say, all right, we don't want to rewrite our definition of the job to match all the features that have that ended up in there because that was really just a packaging decision we made at release time. So oftentimes, we need to refine, or sharpen, or split, or break out different jobs or sub-jobs and maybe we say, Hey, these five things here, it's really like an add on. It's not actually a core element of this job. So, let's sharpen the original job boards to exclude this specific thing, and then we're going to write a new job board, which is all about custom bots, which is all about automation or whatever.

Des Traynor: So what you'll see a lot, is jobs tend to get pretty fast. And then we break them down again, and refine them back to their core essence. But then, with all the tissue left over, we work out, why did we build these things and what do they represent? And usually what happens there, is we'll find there's a sub-job, or there's a job that only really exists for a certain type of customer.

Des Traynor: To give you a simple example, like permissions or security concerns, or certain annual upfront payment for software, they're all enterprise concerns, but they're not core to the job. They just happen to be extra stuff that bigger companies need. So we try to split that out, and not let it automatically attach itself to any given job. So because of all that, we ended up having to refresh our jobs to make sure that they don't end up inheriting a lot of the [inaudible 00:24:08] that you have to build to make an enterprise software offering.

Derek van Bever: Our students are often surprised to discover the presence of emotional and social attributes in B2B products. Did you discover those attributes in the research that you did? And do you somehow bake those into either product design or delivery, the emotional and social elements of the purchase and use experience?

Des Traynor: I think the way in which we experienced emotional, is we probably more than an average B2B software, invest a lot in design, a lot in use of language, the aesthetics, the actual statistical on certain user flows, et cetera. And I would say it's hard to quantify the impact of that, whether it's to say that we know it's a reason why people generally stick around or pick Intercom in the first place.

Des Traynor: The way in which stuff presents itself in a job board will often, in a more mature buyer, they won't reference beauty, or aesthetics, or phone, or any of those sort of emotional sounding words. What they'll talk more about is utility, and speed, and productivity. And they'll often like just reference our competitors, you see their forehead wrinkle up, and they get frustrated. It's mostly because something makes them less efficient in life, and everyone wants to be above all else, productive in doing things when they're at work trying using software.

Des Traynor: So what we see is that people care about things that speed them up and make them better at their job, or they care about things that make them look good. So people like our reports because they're visually attractive, and they like to print-screen them and share them. Those sorts of things are emotional, maybe borderline social as well, but it gives them a sense of feeling of achievement when they create a new message, and put it live, and it has a 10% increase in their conversions. They love having a good thing to point out, and say that was me.

Des Traynor: You could argue that purely functional, but there's loads of ways to show a 10% increase. And I think the more aesthetically impressive it is, the more it seems to check that box of, help me feel like I'm doing a good job.

Des Traynor: So that's probably the area we see it most. Over time, we've had to evolve and mature our brand quite a bit from the early days to where it is today, and where it will go in the future. I think we're bumping into it a bit there as well. People want to feel and that they are using serious business software, but they also want to feel that they're using very modern, best of breed software because they feel that the software they pick, it comes with an extension of their personal brand. So like if I'm Joe or Jane, the VP of marketing in such and such a company, and I have mandated that this company use Intercom, Intercom better speak and represent me well. I think we're seeing that a bit as we've moved up market.

Derek van Bever: How do you convey that sense of representation, that we represent you well? How do you capture that? It's interesting.

Des Traynor: I think, generally speaking, they want a tool that feels futuristic. So the best example I would give of this, is in 2007 when the iPhone launched, it was a big smack in the face for everyone who was peddling B2B software up until that point because everything in B2B software was black on gray, ugly, hard to use, and then all of a sudden, people all over the internet have access to these beautifully designed weather applications, and stocks applications, and notes applications, and all of a sudden it becomes obvious that the norm does not have to be old school in a sense.

Des Traynor: So when we see future-facing, modern day VPs of support or marketing, or customer success or sales, part of their personal brand is they subscribed to the new ideas of the subscription economy. So a lot of the reason why software is so big right now is because it's shifted to this model where you pay per month, rather than by a fee, for a big cost upfront. Part of looking, the modern software company, comes right down into like typography and aesthetics, and then also just clarity of screen design, simple workflows, et cetera.

Des Traynor: When faced with two products, one of them was designed in 2001, and one of them was designed in 2017, they generally look quite different. Now, I don't want to get into say naming names, but if we were to say pick out Microsoft Word from like 1998 and Google Docs from today, you'll see some really obvious differences that make one of them feel like it's 2018, and one of them feel like 1918, or whatever.

Des Traynor: And I think for a lot of people, that matters. To sense that, if they say, I am a modern go-to-market focused, VP of marketing and I use the best of breed technologies for all of the latest trends that are present in marketing, be they, chatbots, or automation, or whatever, they want the software to look like that statement. And when people say, Oh, you're mandating that we buy Intercom, let me go to intercom.com and have a look. They want the website to also carry that statement. They want to feel an affinity, or connection, with the Intercom brand, and they want that brand to be played out in software, too.

Derek van Bever: Listeners should go to intercom.io, and take a look not only at how the site itself is organized, access to the site is organized by Job, but something of that fun, quirky, progressive typography and graphics that you're talking about, I think, is very apparent in the experience of the site. So congratulations on that.

Derek van Bever: Des, almost last question, interestingly, what people will find when they go to your site is that you've actually been very generous in sharing insights that you've had about Jobs. There's an ebook on Jobs that you can download from your site. You all have had some conferences videoed where you've talked about Jobs. Why did you make that choice to be so open and generous with your experience with this framework?

Des Traynor: I think we've always believed that education is a great way to attract an audience. So rather, and like some people will spend like $50,000 on an ad-word campaign, and you'll get people who are searching for a certain word, and they'll click once, and they'll disappear if they didn't get what they wanted.

Des Traynor: For us, we've always wanted to grow an audience of people who, two things, who we can share ideas with that they'll find useful, such that they'll keep coming back, such that we can actually grow an audience, and they'll have a kind of fly by night audience. And secondly, ideally, there'll be people who will want to buy our software at some point in their lives.

Des Traynor: So for us, the coldest answer I give you to your question, is it's marketing. If you take a step back, I think we consider it to be like a longer term type of marketing. We know that we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who read our book, listen to our podcasts, consume our blog every month, et cetera. And we noticed there's a healthy overlap between those and people who are likely to buy Intercom at some point in their lives because of the role.

Des Traynor: So we talk, and when we market, and we write articles, and we realize books, typically, it's about the topics such as Onboarding and Engaging, or Capturing and Converting people into customers. And, we talk about those topics directly.

Des Traynor: But then we also talk about things like product management, or Jobs to be Done, knowing that they are adjacent concerns of the buyers of our software. And we're happy to share any bit of knowledge we have on those topics, knowing again, that it will buy some brand credibility.

Des Traynor: So if you've read our book on Jobs to be Done, and you're, say, working on a growth challenge in your company, you might also be like, huh, I wonder would Intercom have a good book on growth? And actually it turns out we do. And at some point you're like, Oh, this sounds like a smart idea. I wonder do they ever build this into their software? And you'll find out eventually that we did.

Des Traynor: At some point it'll be like, you'll be positively predisposed so that when you go shopping, and you're looking at those feature grids, where you've got 15 different options on 25 different rows, when you see that Intercom logo, you're going to be like, well, those people haven't led me wrong yet, so I'm going to try and buy their software, and that's what 30,000 people have done so far, so it's been working out okay for us.

Derek van Bever: That's great. I imagine that the buyer that you were describing to us who wants to communicate that they are of the moment and have a broad awareness of what's going on in their space and in their world, to have that kind of a fingertip access to all of this different learning and teaching, I imagine, is consistent with that persona as well?

Des Traynor: Absolutely.

Derek van Bever: Des, last question. What advice would you give to somebody who wants to advance from just being aware of this way of looking at the world, to evangelizing for it in their companies? Is there's something they can do that is a particularly good bit of close end salesmanship to demonstrate the impact of this?

Des Traynor: I would say the best way to win this internal discussion is with pretty competitive qualitative evidence. Often times when I've had to convince people earlier in my career that they should redesign the website, I would show them a video of somebody trying to use their website, and once they see it, and they start shouting, click the red button, Stupid, I'm like, they can't hear you. This is a recording. You've already lost this customer. And they're like, Oh my God, I need to redesign my website. I'm like, you think?

Des Traynor: I've had good success talking to companies either I've invested in, or advised, basically saying, here's what I want you to do. Talk to the next customer who quits your product. Talk to them, and ask them, what happened in their life that they quit your product, and find out what they're going to use next.

Des Traynor: The next customer who signs up, just once, the next time somebody signs up, I want you to send them an email, ask them, will they jump on Skype with you for 30 minutes, and I want you to ask them questions about what was going on in their life up until the moment that they could sign up, and now that they've signed up, what are they hoping? How do they think their world is going to change?

Des Traynor: And lastly, I want you to pick your best customer, somebody who uses your product five times a week, sort of thing, and I want you to ask them what's good about it and what's bad about it. Write your answers on an A4 page, and come back to the those three pages of information. And, if after doing all of that, you are genuinely no smarter because you had all this information before, or you didn't learn anything, then fair enough. You don't need to worry about Jobs to be gone for a second. You can go back on and live your life.

Des Traynor: But I really, really, really doubt that's the case, and that hasn't been the case for me for ever. And, what actually happens when I do that is, they talk to the first person who quit, and then they talk to six more people who quit, and then they never get back to me because they're now obsessed with finding out [inaudible 00:34:34] quit, and I have to kind of reach back in and be like, Hey, that's just one [inaudible 00:34:37].

Des Traynor: But, they get kind of obsessed. Sometimes, all this just gets misinterpreted as, talk to your customers, duh, which is not incorrect. It's just not complete because there is something to the exact findings you're looking for, and the exact questions you ask, but genuinely speaking, if you're in a company, and you're not getting any traction with this Jobs to be Done idea, I would suggest just gather three pieces of evidence of three different customers, and you'll find much like Theater 11 says, that the customer is not buying what you're selling on your website. And if they are, they're not using it in the same way that you think they are. And, even if one of those things are true, the chances are your next product line-up isn't fully aligned without an idea as well.

Des Traynor: Our COO Karen often says, we have to be building what we sell and selling what we build. And similarly, I would say you have to be marketing what you have and genuinely having what you market. And, I think there's a lot of alignment challenges, and you'll always find some lossy translation, let's say, somewhere in your company, and anytime you fix those things it's genuinely profitable.

Des Traynor: But as the first step in all of these things, is just have a single piece of quantitative evidence, an example of a customer that did or didn't work out. And once you start pulling that thread, before you know it, you'll have research teams and war rooms named after Jobs to be Done, and stuff. And that's how it goes.

Derek van Bever: Des Traynor. When we told Clay the story of your epiphany moment at the Business of Software Conference, he was so touched and so delighted to hear that he had had that impact on you and Intercom. It reinforces, I think, what Clay's teaching is all about, which is the difference that we can make in the lives of the people that we touch. Thank you, Des.

Des Traynor: No problem at all. Thank you. Anytime. Derek.

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.