Fourteen months ago I left Mural, my work home from home of nearly three years (May 2020–February 2023).
(You might recall I was at Fullstory, a SaaS company out of Atlanta, before. I am a shareholder there now.)
While at Mural, I built out content marketing and communications, managing everything from executive keynote presentations to assisting with a rebrand and “category creation” to writing and publishing a book. For nearly half of my time there I had no obvious manager, floating from CMO to CEO to CMO to CEO. It was wild. Too many things to mention.
It was a challenging three years. I learned a lot. Got a lot of XP.
I hope Mural and FullStory succeed, though I know fewer and fewer folks there these days.
Really, that’s one of the problems with these tech companies. You could call it burn out, but you might as well call it burn up. As in, you’re there, you fuel the growth of the business, you leave, and little evidence remains. Mostly ashes. Memories.
When the work is fully remote, well, it’s stranger still. Like so much in our modern time, we see the clear benefits of technology, but we struggle to understand the hidden, abstract, long-term costs.
And if you didn’t catch it, I wrote a book that hints at these problems last August: Exec on the Desk.
The present, Spring 2024
About December 2023 I decided to have a go at building out my own marketing practice.
So I founded R-ght. I started leaning into my network, talking to folks, bidding on projects. As anyone who has done this will tell you, this is a fun rollercoaster experience. I got various leads. Some were incredibly exciting and others more raw work.
One of my leads took me to a remote monitoring and management (RMM) software company for connected products called Canopy.
Unlike “RMM” for IT — used to manage corporate tech like laptops, servers, and phones — Canopy offers mission-control, backend software to technical support and product teams. Canopy’s RMM software acts as an agent for thousands of devices to be controlled remotely.
For example, Canopy makes it easy to remotely fix and upgrade that self-checkout lane you use. That way, it doesn’t sit broken for days (or weeks), angering harried shoppers and store employees.
B2B connected products are pervasive, like it or not, and most of these remote devices require some serious backend magic to stay working.
So Canopy helps the makers of these devices weave software, hardware, peripherals, etc. together in a way that “just works” (to borrow on Steve Jobs’ favorite phrase).
How I ended up at Canopy
You see, I got to know Canopy. I figured Canopy might become a client for R-ght.
Well, a couple months go by and out of nowhere they’re asking me to lead up their marketing efforts.
So I took them up on their offer: I joined Canopy as Vice President of Marketing three weeks ago.
This is a great opportunity. There’s much to do.
Unlike Mural or Fullstory, Canopy is the smallest company I’ve ever joined. It’s also quirkily traditional, having its roots in professional services before becoming a software company two years ago.
Presently, I’m adjusting to a hybrid work setup. This is taking some time — literally. On those three days a week I trek into the office, I lose about five hours in total. It’s the time to drive and all the time to prepare to head in.
But it’s got benefits. Talk to me about it in six months.
Now what about R-ght?
Yeah, so about R-ght. Though the business didn’t ever catch its stride, I’m happy with what I created:
Please go to www.R-ght.com and subscribe by email. During the days I was building out the business, I went ahead and built out some significant articles on concepts that nearly everyone would benefit from understanding:
Agenda-setting theory: Understand what might be the most important concept of Internet existence — how media influences what you think.
What you see is all there is: Daniel Kahneman’s most important idea, apart from things like prospect theory, the focusing illusion, and other ideas, of course.
You can now speed run from blank page to fully illustrated book, published on Amazon, in 57 days (or less).
How do I know? Because I did it. And even taking nearly two months—and even having never self-published a book before—I estimate it only took around 80 hours of work to do. That’s writing, illustration, and publication with zero outside help (apart from friends and family feedback). I also built a website and social media in this 57 days.
TL;DR
What did it take to get this done?
I had a solid idea—i.e. the concept “Elf on the Shelf meets corporate America.” Mix it up with a backstory involving a magical consultant, the remote work vs. return to office dilemma, and all the typical absurdities of modern work …
The story practically wrote itself. I suppose that’s how the muse is, right?
The magic, for me, was in using AI + easy-to-use software + YouTube to provide the illustrations, the compositional power, and the self-publishing know-how to go from words to fully illustrated, laid out book across three formats.
The details
I have never authored and self-published a book before. But! I’m a creator with 30+ years creating under my belt—going all the way back to my childhood as an “artist.” I was early in the “content” and web publishing game too. I’ve built websites to facilitate content creation for nearly 20 years now. Professionally, I make content for B2B SaaS companies, from blogs to ebooks to microsites and more.
That I could use generative AI (around 1500ish Midjourney prompts) to source my illustrative raw material.
Or that an easy-to-use tool like Canva would make it possible to create near-final layouts I could use for my hardcover (with finalization on Adobe InDesign,
Now I’ve created all kinds of content in the last 20 years. I could not have imagined this was possible a year ago or even 6 months ago.
But here we are. With readily available software (and YouTube for the blind spots) Exec on the Desk is out in the world (Get the book here).
✨
Timeline
Story … I can do this (3 days)
June 27 — Begin a Google Doc and write the ~450 word story in 4 hours. Try Google Bard for ad hoc “rhymes with” help, as needed.
June 30 — 10 hours in, have rough layouts, having created illustrations using Midjourney for the first 7 pages of the book.
Start thinking, “I can create this entire book using AI in about 20 hours.”
Rapidly illustrating a book with AI (12 days)
July 1–12 — Learn that consistent characters for multiple illustrations require patience and lots of tinkering. 😅
Persevere with Midjourney to conjure up McKinsley and then a few dozen Execs.
In total, run between 1200–1500 Midjourney prompts (mostly remixes) to brute-force the creation of raw illustrations to further edit and compose into book layouts. Often do this “on the go”—i.e. running a prompt, walking away, coming back and remixing it, etc.
Note: Midjourney does not like to imagine a single banana. There are ways. 🍌
Use Canva to compose illustrations and copy, laying out all the pages.
Use Figma too for a plugin that helps with transparency, as needed.
Feedback + vacation (18 days)
July 13 — Share a draft of near-final book to friends+family for feedback. Based on feedback, revise and improve certain illustrations and compositions. Lots of revisions as perfectionist brain kicks in.
The publishing process (24 days)
July 31 — Begin creating print-ready book for self-publishing on Amazon KDP + IngramSpark.
Make lots of mistakes learning the details of layouts and bleed. Also learn and apply the basics with Adobe InDesign. Thankful for YouTube.
August 7 — Submit proof to IngramSpark. 9 days later receive physical proof of hardback book from IngramSpark to review. 🙌 Had one major layout improvement to make, which added 2-3 days to revise and approve a new proof—but I didn’t even bother with a new physical hardcover proof.
August 18 — Create ebook and paperback for Amazon KDP, order paperback proof.
For whatever you’d want to do, there’s an app for that.
But there’s a catch. Every gift from an app comes with a hidden cost.
The cost is buying products you don’t need. The cost is bewilderment about places. The cost is naive belief in search results. The cost is distorted facts as news. The cost is losing common experiences. The cost is bullshit work that never ends.
The benefit is clear. The cost is not. And the cost is still more than you think.
Apps bind you.
They determine how you can interact. They deem what can be important—and what can’t. They set what you can see and what you can’t. They control who you can communicate with and how.
Apps constrain the possibilities, and by constraining, they change your capabilities. They change how you think. They set the table for what you can even think about.
Apps frame our existence today.
And everyone complies by simply opening them. We extend our hands and put the shackles on ourselves, the handcuffs so obvious that we are blind to them.
But there’s hope.
The reign of apps exists only as long as you accept the bind. Realize the costs and constraints and throw off the chains.
Wake up. Wake up your family and your friends.
The technological trinkets and quick fixes are junk that’s not worth the cost.
Usual frame: There’s an app for that. Reframe: Apps are traps.
The original Midjourney conception of the Exec on the Desk, as pulled from a prompt by Alex T.
They keep saying if you want serendipity, you have to go to the office. Maybe all it takes is having a little fun with friends.
Exec on the Desk all started with a Slack message. A group of former, mostly marketing co-workers all regularly keep up with each other over a shared Slack instance.
One morning I shared a screenshot of a job posting from an Atlanta-based company that, while little known, makes a remarkably well-known Christmas product — i.e. magical, shelf-sitting elves that keep an eye on little boys and girls for Santa. These elves get up to all sorts of hijinks around the house, which kids love, and some parents love and others hate. (If you know you know.)
I shared this job posting over Slack, and a friend quickly responded with what he imagined it’d be like to work there:
“They will install an elf in your home office to report back your daily deeds to their Purity Board of Appropriate Behaviors”
That’s when an absurd idea was born, the “Exec on the Desk”—a micro manager for knowledge workers everywhere, loyal to companies, always there to keep you productive and on task, in or out of the office. 😳
Next thing, another friend creatively mocked up a “manager doll” in Midjourney.
The synapses were firing. The muse was at work. That’s serendipity.
From these humble but quick beginnings, Exec on the Desk was born. By midmorning, we’d joked about how the little Execs would work:
👉 “Add that extra ‘fun’ to work-from-home with a mini boss permanently scrutinizing your every action. Complete with the typical furrowed brow and canned corporate phrases.”
👉 “Can’t get time to talk over a tricky problem with your manager? Just tell the Exec on the Desk! Raise issues—complain all day long!—the Exec on the Desk will listen to it all and not do a damn thing about it!”
Soon I’d grabbed domains, imagining how to play out this silly little idea. All of this happened 90 days ago now. And truth be told, I didn’t have the chance to do much of anything after that first day, being the last day of school and the beginning of summer break … until a month later.
And that’s when I drafted the story, putting words to digital paper, going from idea to publication of a book in less than 90 days—with the bulk of that done in 57.
”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
This expression, known as Hanlon’s Razor, proves a useful refrain, but it does not go far enough. Why? Because it suggests that it’s mere stupidity that leads to seemingly malicious outcomes.
Consider, for example, COVID-19. Could it have been created intentionally and released on purpose? Sure. Or could it have been stupidity — or incompetence — in a lab, leading to its accidental release?
Hanlon’s Razor might call to mind Occam’s Razor. That’s not a coincidence. Stupidity leads to all kinds of bad outcomes by its very nature. Consider Cippola’s The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity — that stupidity is definitionally where someone acts in a way that is harmful to both self and to others. Applied to organizations — in our example bio-labs — “stupid” outcomes may just be stupidity at scale, where scale comes from a system (as opposed to an individual) doing something harmful.
So what does this have to do with conspiracies and systems?
Start with systems
Systems are all around us. And to be clear, in this context (and for the purpose of this discussion), this is a discussion about systems created by people. In this context and defined simply, systems are meta-structures created by and run by people. Examples: organizations, corporations, institutions, legal structures, etc. Critically, systems have something analogous to a life of their own. Yes, they depend on people, people who give them agency. People offer up their agency in exchange for the fruits of maintaining the system. Wealth, status, healthcare benefits … you name it, and systems will offer it to people in exchange for their agency. Systems also know how to use sticks. If they can, they will punish.
At their simplest, systems demand tending. Otherwise they create problems (See: John Gall’s Systemantics).
Consider a legal entity established to run a business. Once you create it, you must file reports, taxes, and if you don’t, you have problems.
Any remotely complex system soon starts to exhibit unexpected behaviors. The agency and actions of those tending to the system combines in unexpected ways, bringing scale and creating incentive structures. The combination, despite being made up of people, is fundamentally inhuman. It plays by its own rules.
A system does not love. It does not need food. It simply needs people — your agency and the agency of others, too — and that’s all. Grow a system to thousands or tens of thousands of people, and you have an organism that’s alive in every sense. Those who refuse to do the systems bidding, care not for the trade of agency for _____ … those people can and will be replaced by others who will.
Nothing personal. Nothing human.
End with conspiracy
Critically, any system like this — call them “behemoths” if you will — will inevitably do things that are definitionally stupid. They will also do things that are fundamentally malicious.
Systems will be stupid. Systems will be evil. They will still be run by people.
This last part is key. Because when you see systems acting in ways that seem fundamentally inhuman, evil, and harmful to mankind, it’s people that everyone sees. It’s Koch Brothers and Bill Gates and George Soros that people see. People do not see the organizations — that is, the millions and billions of funds deployed, all underwriting the paychecks of thousands of anonymous systems-operators.
So it is that conspiracy theories tend to ground themselves on actual individuals. Scapegoating an individual — like Gates (who assuredly is a busybody, even if one with good intentions) — is a convenient way to scapegoat a system. Evil needs to have a name, and it’s much easier to name Google, Phillip-Morris, Exxon, _______ than it is to name the fundamental structure that distances individual human agency from the meta-organism, the parasite, of a system that draws its lifeblood from many people.
Just-so stories …
Bring it back to Hanlon’s Razor. Why do people end up creating these complex narratives to villify Gates, Soros, etc.?
Sure, these people may have qualities that are disagreeable if not outright dangerous, but are they really the devil incarnate?
Or are they just systems doing systems stuff — at scale and to massive, dangerous effect?
I believe it’s the latter. And I believe it’s critical that you and I see the nature of what’s going on — it’s not about some cabal pulling the strings in the shadows, orchestrating impossibly complex schemes.
Mankind is in the systems business. And rather than Frankenstein piecing together some monster from inanimate lifeforms, people create monsters from individuals. You and me, we are the lifeblood of these systems, yet we’re so distanced from the evil they do, we have no accountability for it. We don’t realize they couldn’t exist but for our subservency to them.
Uncertainty is all around me. Not only do I not know what the day will bring, what the weather will be, or what surprises await behind every corner, but even the people I engage with! They are all unpredictable.
This is the nature of life. And while some level of unpredictability brings novelty, surprise, and excitement, too much uncertainty terrifies.
Modern life exposes me to a never ending stream of information bringing with it more uncertainty. Like the theoretical “butterfly effect,” events occurring around the world insist on proclaiming themselves to my world—whether it’s through social media, the news, or through the rapid proliferation of a novel virus literally crossing oceans in to infect my community …
Drowning in so much information paradoxically makes it harder to know what to do, what to think, how to live. What do I do about a novel virus? What do I think about the events in ________? How do I cope with knowing the suffering of human beings a world away? How do I quiet my uncertainty about the climate? About population growth? About the food that I eat?
On and on the uncertainty goes.
Today easy answers to all this uncertainty are available on demand. But there’s a problem. A decade ago I wondered about the problem of “confirmation bias”—that Google offered a way to confirm whatever strange idea I had. Today, I need not wonder. You can find any answer to life’s most uncertain questions. The right diet? Find an army of people who proclaim “_____ is the way, the truth, the light!”
Answers to uncertainty are everywhere and everywhere they contradict. See the people who are vehemently pro-[______], and see their enemies who are as dogmatically anti-[______]. Both sides, all sides, believe they know the truth. They believe with absolute certainty.
And so much certainty leads to more uncertainty.
The dogmatism cannot be trusted because paradoxically it is a sign of uncertainty. No one rages about what’s true. What’s known as true is not up for passionate debate.
What’s true is apparent. What’s true is certain.
So the dogmatism is a sign. It’s a sign many are now controlled by a dependency—the need to be certain.
So it is that desiring certainty goes from a natural, useful tendency to something more pathological.
And the pathology is now cultural. Modern man believes he can solve the riddles of reality. What can’t science tell us about the world? The universe?
Don’t adhere to a scientific world? That’s okay: What does your preferred God tell you is the answer?
Priests, experts, research, religion, answers, dogmatism … as far as the eye can see. If you want answers, you will find them.
What will make you happy? You do not know. But if you insist, someone, some product, some way to know will present itself, and you will accept it. Because you need to know.
How do you manage uncertainty? At the core, living in a world where you don’t have the answers, where we can’t know the answers, where the answers so strongly believed are probably—certainly—not the right answers …
How do you live this way?
And if you opt for certainty, the certainty of some system, what do you give up along the way?
That might make you think of Luke Skywalker with his bionic arm or Darth Vader. Maybe it’s The Six Million Dollar Man (well before my time) or some blend of The Terminator. A cyborg is just a mix of man and machine where the machine—the technology—extends the man.
Man and machine.
Do you see what’s before you? That screen you’re staring at, the one you’re holding in your hands, the one sending information directly to your brain through your eyes, the one doing your bidding through taps, scrolls, and swipes …
That’s your extended mind.
When was the last time you went anywhere you’ve never been before without using an app to tell you how to get there?
How do you get information?
How do you order products?
How do you broadcast your life, your thoughts?
And the more we rely on our phones to extend ourselves into the world, the more like cyborgs we become. Yes, the interface between our extended selves is clunky—synapses mediated through glass, WiFi, camera sensors, speakers and screens. Yet it’s your extended self all the same.
Reflect on that for a moment. How does that make you feel? And what what does it mean for you, for me, everyone?
Analog to digital
Real life is messy. You take in the world through your eyes, your feet, your smell, your skin. “Real life” is analog. It’s full bandwidth and continuous, all cylinders firing. You take in more information than you can process and your focus directs your mind. You send out more information through your body, your face, your actions and inactions. To the extent that you can “escape” from real life, it’s done by physically separating yourself from others. You can’t really shut it off. Though you try.
Digital is clean. You open an app. You scroll. You click. Your eyes take the information in through words and pictures. Digital is binary. 0s and 1s. So clean. You can only take in what’s there. Low dimensionality. Only what you want.
You want to engage with the world? Send out information, edited however you want. You want to escape? Close that app. (Or open another one.)
That space between
What about all that space between? What fills in the gaps between all the zeroes and ones?
That’s the question before us all. Because the more we engage through those extended pocketable and oh-so-pampered rechargable and inexhaustible brains, the more we reach out and touch a virtual world through the smooth touch of glass, the more we run from the real world, the more our minds must fill in the gaps.
And boy do they. Using whatever decompression algorithms we have, within the context of whatever mood holds us, under the pressure of news, anxiety, social feeds, personal philosophy, politics, whatever … we decompress all that’s presented to us. We bring that digital into our analog space. And though it’s as lossy, pixelated, and full of artefacts, because it’s the only information we have, we take it as truth.
This is life today. Zeros and ones served out and served up to us, held up as truth like so many filtered selfies, not real yet reality.
We’re going cyborg. And we need to face this and try to understand it. Because at some point the machine takes over.
Why does that happen? And what’s lost along the way …
With attention the signal to rule them all, everyone has something to say.
It’s too much talk. Too many opinions. Too many thoughts and feelings. It’s time we shut up. And not just to listen, either. It’s time to remain silent so that we can let possibility have a chance. To have action speak louder than words. To refrain from letting our words define us — or define how we see others.
In this moment when news and social media and politics and opinions are all we can think about, perhaps we should embrace quiet, instead. Because it’s in the silence that we are open and undefined. Be quiet and let the truth unfold. Let it emerge.
Maybe we can make the world a better place when we stop trying to define it — and everyone with words.
Updated, April 2020. Over 11 years have passed since I first read this book (Originally published Feb. 18, 2009), yet I still reflect on the ideas Glasser set forth in it, applying those ideas in my own life and sharing them with others.
This review covers many components of William Glasser’s 1985 book Control Theory, “A New Explanation of How We Control Our Lives.”
Control Theory details a model for understanding why people behave the way they do to assert control over the world. Glasser doesn’t delve into the science of the brain. Rather, he offers a framework for understanding why people do what they do—and how behavior maps to the desire to control the environment.
Clayton Christensen, the late author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and former Harvard Business School professor, made the case that to understand what motivates people to act, you first must understand what it is they to need to get done.
When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them …
If a [businessperson] can understand the job, design a product and associated experiences in purchase and use to do that job, and deliver it in a way that reinforces its intended use, then when customers find themselves needing to get that job done they will hire that product.
Christensen’s theory is known as the “Jobs” or “Jobs to Be Done” theory (“JTBD”) because it’s built around a central question: what is the job a person is hiring a product to do? What is the job to be done?
If you can solve the mystery of Jobs to Be Done, you can build the kind of products people love … like milkshakes for breakfast.
How Do You Satisfy Your Hunger on Your Commute?
Professor Christensen told a wonderful story to illustrate the Jobs to Be Done concept.
It starts with a fast food company’s attempt to make a better milkshake. The fast food company took a classic approach. They identified their target milkshake-slurping demographic and sent researchers to analyze this audience’s milkshake preferences. Unfortunately, once the fast food company began making new, evidence-backed and “better” milkshakes based on the research findings, they discovered milkshake sales didn’t improve, at all.
What went wrong?
This milkshake story is so good and so well told by Christensen, it’s worth the four minutes it takes to hear the late Professor tell the story (YouTube; alternatively, read the transcript of the milkshake story included below).
How do you satisfy your hunger on your commute?
Professor Christensen tells a wonderful story to illustrate JTBD theory. It’s about a fast food company’s attempt to make a better milkshake. Said fast food company took the classic approach. They identified their target milkshake-slurping demographic, surveyed them about their milkshake preferences, implemented their findings, and didn’t improve milkshake sales whatsoever. What happened?
Christensen tells the milkshake story so well that we recommend you give him a listen (4 minutes, YouTube). Alternatively, the story is transcribed below.
Clayton Christensen talks about milkshakes.
We actually hire products to do things for us. And understanding what job we have to do in our lives for which we would hire a product is really the key to cracking this problem of motivating customers to buy what we’re offering.
So I wanted just to tell you a story about a project we did for one of the big fast food restaurants. They were trying to goose up the sales of their milkshakes. They had just studied this problem up the gazoo. They brought in customers who fit the profile of the quintessential milkshake consumer. They’d give them samples and ask, “Could you tell us how we could improve our milkshakes so you’d buy more of them? Do you want it chocolate-ier, cheaper, chunkier, or chewier?”
They’d get very clear feedback and they’d improve the milkshake on those dimensions and it had no impact on sales or profits whatsoever.
So one of our colleagues went in with a different question on his mind. And that was, “I wonder what job arises in people’s lives that cause them to come to this restaurant to hire a milkshake?” We stood in a restaurant for 18 hours one day and just took very careful data. What time did they buy these milkshakes? What were they wearing? Were they alone? Did they buy other food with it? Did they eat it in the restaurant or drive off with it?
It turned out that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold before 8 o’clock in the morning. The people who bought them were always alone. It was the only thing they bought and they all got in the car and drove off with it.
To figure out what job they were trying to hire it to do, we came back the next day and stood outside the restaurant so we could confront these folks as they left milkshake-in-hand. And in language that they could understand we essentially asked, “Excuse me please but I gotta sort this puzzle out. What job were you trying to do for yourself that caused you to come here and hire that milkshake?”
They’d struggle to answer so we then helped them by asking other questions like, “Well, think about the last time you were in the same situation needing to get the same job done but you didn’t come here to hire a milkshake. What did you hire?”
And then as we put all their answers together it became clear that they all had the same job to be done in the morning. That is that they had a long and boring drive to work and they just needed something to do while they drove to keep the commute interesting. One hand had to be on the wheel but someone had given them another hand and there wasn’t anything in it. And they just needed something to do when they drove. They weren’t hungry yet but they knew they would be hungry by 10 o’clock so they also wanted something that would just plunk down there and stay for their morning.
Christensen paraphrasing the commuting milkshake buyer:
“Good question. What do I hire when I do this job? You know, I’ve never framed the question that way before, but last Friday I hired a banana to do the job. Take my word for it. Never hire bananas. They’re gone in three minutes — you’re hungry by 7:30am.
Fun facts about the above foods: (1) The banana has the “lowest calories,” but the Snickers bar is in 2nd place; the medium milkshake is the most calorically dense, tied with the donuts (2) The back of the Snickers bar boldy says, “SATISFIES” — now, why would they say that?
“If you promise not to tell my wife I probably hire donuts twice a week, but they don’t do it well either. They’re gone fast. They crumb all over my clothes. They get my fingers gooey.
“Sometimes I hire bagels but as you know they’re so dry and tasteless. Then I have to steer the car with my knees while I’m putting jam on it and if the phone rings we got a crisis.
“I remember I hired a Snickers bar once but I felt so guilty I’ve never hired Snickers again.
“Let me tell you when I hire this milkshake it is so viscous that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up through that thin little straw. Who cares what the ingredients are — I don’t.
“All I know is I’m full all morning and it fits right here in my cupholder.”
Christensen concludes:
Well it turns out that the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors, which in the customer’s minds are not Burger King milkshakes but bananas, donuts, bagels, Snickers bars, coffee, and so on.
I hope you can see how if you understand the job, how to improve the product becomes just obvious.
“Let me tell you when I hire this milkshake it is so viscous that it easily takes me 20 minutes to suck it up through that thin little straw. Who cares what the ingredients are — I don’t.
“All I know is I’m full all morning and it fits right here in my cupholder.”
Solving Jobs to Be Done With Empathy
How we confuse consumers with consumption.
Christensen’s milkshake story illustrates how asking a direct question—“What would make our milkshakes better?”—is a fast way to arrive at the wrong place.
Should we be surprised? Are milkshake buyers little more than their demographics? Of course not. “Demographic determinism” leads us to a dead end because demographics fail to predict intent.
And in this case, confusing the milkshake consumers with what they hope to do (Satisfy hunger, add excitement to a boring commute, or whatever they hope to accomplish), will result in developing “a one-size-fits-none product,” as Christensen put it. Worse, you can bet this product will do little to nothing for sales.
Meanwhile, a business organized around solving for the actual needs of consumers has a clear reason for being because it’s those needs that drive a customer’s behavior in the first place.
Remember: The consumer is not the same as what they consume.
It’s All About Intent! And Intent Starts With Empathy
Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done framework brings to our attention something we all know: intent matters. Everyone has reasons for the choices they make—a need to meet, desire to fulfill, objective in mind, whatever! Shakespeare captured this quintessential insight about human nature some 400 years ago while writing Hamlet: “Though this be madness yet there is method in it.”
If you want to be effective at your job, you need to identify their job. You have to discover what need, desire, or objective they hope to satisfy.
Finding the method behind the madness—that is, the intent of the customer—begins with empathy. Whether you’re a product manager, a support professional, a salesperson, marketer, whatever, if you want to be effective at your job, you need to identify their job. You have to discover what need, desire, or objective they hope to satisfy.
Empathy grounds us with a deep understanding of the customer’s mind, putting us in that mindset so we can discover intent.
And when it comes to lovable products and customer experiences, you must direct that empathetic understanding toward solving for that intent. And you have to do it better than anyone else.
This is why it’s so important to question whether the features we’re building or product branches we’re developing will do the job better than the nearest alternatives.
Because if the product being developed is built without customer needs in focus, you might find we’ve developed the most amazing product … only it’ll be one that no one wants.
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
—Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business Professor
Using Jobs to Be Done to Build More Perfect Products
You can only find the right answer if you ask the right question.
So now you’ve got a firm grasp on Jobs to Be Done. How do you put it to work? How do you tap into empathy and discover customer intent?
Applying JTBD to understand consumer needs can be as simple as asking, “What did you turn to the last time you needed to do this?”
In Clay Christensen’s milkshake story, this question helped consumers to think back on a previous time they were in the same situation and needed that specific job done. That is, the milkshake buyer needed something to satiate their hunger—or their boredom—on their long commute to work.
It sounds so easy, except we all know how hard it can be to uncover exactly what jobs a customer needs doing.
Which is why we’ve put together a handful of questions you can ask that can help reveal clues to solve the JTBD mystery.
1. The Switching Question—”You’re Fired!”
Is your product so good that your audience would ‘fire’ their current product in order to hire yours?
Be kind — Rewind (to a time when that was a thing).
Reflect on the product you “fired” before hiring the current product. You can tease out why customers choose your product or service by considering what the customer used before they switched to your product. From there, thinking about the “why” can help clarify just what job needs doing.
The “fired” lens in the Jobs to Be Done framework can be used to understand how many once-successful businesses were displaced by competitors that simply did the job better. Examples:
Netflix doing the job of Blockbuster — “I need something to entertain me … but I don’t want to work too hard to find it.”
Uber, Lyft replacing taxis — “I need to get from point A to point B easily and painlessly.”
Google — “I need to know ______ and I’m only willing to work so hard to find the answer.”
Amazon — “I need to have ______ and I don’t want to overpay for a product I’m not confident I’ll like.”
Smartphones — “I need _____” … Truly smartphones are a JTBD powerhouse, fueling all kinds of businesses over the last 15 years.
Ask this critical question: “Is my product (or service) so good that my intended customer will stop using the product and make the switch?”
“What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product?”
Remember: If you can’t answer the “switching jobs” question clearly, could you reasonably expect a potential customer to?
2. The “WWYSYDH” Question
What does your product or service actually do for someone?
If you’ve seen the movie Office Space you certainly remember when “the Bobs” asked our slacker protagonist a simple question:
“What would you say you do here?”
This simple, straight-to-the-point question deserves some focused attention. If you articulate all the things the product actually does for a customer, you will paint an impression that will help you tease apart what job it is your customer is trying to get done.
Be both specific and general. The details matter more than you might think. The drill makes holes. The milkshake gives you food and it takes awhile to drink. Starbucks gives you energy and it also gives you a place to go. Make a WWYSYDH list.
Contrast your list with the product’s enumerated features. Do the features your product developed solve for the things on your list — the things your customers need doing?
If you’re struggling here, you might also try The 5 Whys. If you’re unfamiliar, this approach is simply asking and answering “Why?” where each answer you provide is further challenged by asking, “Why?”
3. The Hierarchy of Needs Question
Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? How does your product fill these needs?
Now it’s time to go up a level. Think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Christensen has written that, “With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension.”
What social need does the product solve?
What emotional need is being solved by the product?
How will using the product make the customer feel?
While it may seem far-fetched to think of how a given product solves some intangible need of a customer, it makes sense: customers buy products for reasons (see above) that exist under specific circumstances (context). These reasons can be simple or incredibly complex. Meanwhile, because most of us don’t question the underlying reasons for why we do the things we do, understanding how our behaviors satisfy our basic needs as human beings can be exceptionally difficult to articulate.
This is why the Jobs to Be Done framework can be extended to understand all sorts of things about others and yourself — from your career choices to your hobbies and relationships. You can ask yourself, “Why am I really doing ______? What is it I really hope to accomplish here?
Apply the Jobs to be Done framework introspectively and you may be surprised what you find.
Build More Perfect Produts With Jobs to Be Done
Now that you’re well-versed in the Jobs to Be Done framework, take a second to look at your product roadmap. Does it lead to products that meet the specific outcome expectations of your customers? How could your product better fit their intent?
Evangelize the JTBD theory with your team members. Expect some lively discussion and at least a few “A-ha!” moments.
Apply the Jobs to Be Done lens to every business decision and you’ll always have customers ready to hire your product for that job.
