[FloorEgg]

Hahaha. I'm sorry but I find this funny. I discovered jobs to be done in 2017, then dove deep into outcome-driven innovation and spent years consulting as a practitioner who interviewed people on behalf of my clients. My clients would push for their hypotheses to validate, but instead I would approach the interviews as open-ended exploratory empathy building exercises.

I would start out my interviews with things like " in your own words, what is the purpose of what you do?" And then engage in an open conversation stopping by at questions like what do you enjoy the most about what you do, what do you find the most difficult, what do you find the most tedious, what's the most important thing that you need to get done that you're the least satisfied with?

Most of my questions would be follow-up questions. I would also do a lot of active listening.

What I find funny is that people would often be a bit resistant to doing these interviews, but almost every single interview went long because the interviewee was clearly enjoying it so much. I tended not to ask whether they had a hard stop at the start of the interview, but instead would ask if they had a hard stop about 15 minutes before the scheduled end time. Of course, when interviewees truly did have a hard stop we would end on time, but I swear about 80% of the time. Interviews went long, sometimes 2 hours long. I started to realize that part of what I was doing was providing therapy.

Often the clients hypotheses wouldn't be validated, but I could almost always point to what the interviewees would value and what opportunities were there.

I don't do this anymore because most of the clients I worked with couldn't see the value in it, and I'm sure for very similar reasons that you were lamenting in your comment.

I'm grateful for the experience. I performed over 500 of interviews like this across many different industries from Frontline workers to c-suite of Fortune 500 companies. The experience was so valuable. Now I build product firsthand and exercise the skills I developed with my own customers and the market I serve, and being in a tight feedback loop is working really well so far. It's fun to build things people want.

[uxcolumbo]

Which reading material would you recommend to get up to speed with outcome-driven innovation and JTBD.

And why didn't your clients see value in this? Was it because these insights didn't make its way to their service or product?

What's the current demand for JTBD and ODI consulting?