Introduction: Jobs To Be Done interviews

Qualitative interviews are an ideal starting point to uncover opportunities, in the form of underserved (or overserved) target audience segments and their unmet needs. However, they carry the risk of feeding into your confirmation bias. If you pitch your idea to a friend and ask them whether they like it, they will most likely say yes.

Jobs To Be Done interviews are a better way. They comprise of open-ended questions which help you understand the jobs your target customers are trying to get done, which problems they face, the alternative(s) their using, and how big and recurring the pain is. They also teach you the words your customers use when they describe all of the above, which is extremely valuable in achieving language/market fit.

The big benefit of an interview vs. a survey is that during a free-flowing conversation with your audience or customer, you can dig deeper into what they’re saying. This is not the time for a sales pitch, however, a 15-minute JTBD interview can be the perfect intro to a sales demo, allowing you to learn about your prospect and tailor your demo specifically to their jobs and needs.

Differences Customer & Audience

Customer interviews aim to understand your current customer base. I recommend focusing on the people who love your product: those who have reached their ‘aha’, ‘eureka’ and possibly even ‘habit’, and who are paying for your product. These are the types of people you want to tailor your marketing, sales and product for.
Besides that, you should run short churn interviews to understand why users are leaving your product.

Audience interviews help you understand members of your target audience who aren’t customers (yet). Audience interviews are great if you simply don’t have any/enough customers yet, are expanding into a new market or target audience segment, or are pivoting your business to serve a new target audience.

Weaknesses

1. Don’t take what your customers / audience tells you at face value. As marketing guru David Ogilvy put it: “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say”. Always dig deeper to find the pains, needs, motivators and fears behind the answers. Take the outcome of your qualitative interviews as the starting point for real-world experimentation to validate your new-found assumptions. Find my guide on Idea Discovery and Validation methods here.
2. You’ll most likely never achieve a big enough sample size to accurately reflect your target audience (which isn’t the point of qualitative interviews). Surveys have a stronger evidence strength, assuming you achieve a big enough sample size (calculator. Example: for a target audience size of 500k, 95% confidence level and a 5% margin of error, you need to collect 382 responses).

I recommend kicking off with 10-15 interviews (to formulate assumptions and gather a first understanding) and follow up with surveys, either with customers (if you have a big enough customer base) or with your audience (external respondents, e.g via userinterviews.com)

When & how often

• In the early phases of your startup / new product / new market: When you need to uncover or validate a relatively new idea and don’t have a big customer base to fall back on (rule of thumb: < 500 customers). Perform at least 10-15 interviews.
• In the growth phases of your business or product: continue speaking to appr. 2-3 ‘power users’ every week

The interview questions

Customer interviews

1. How do you use (PRODUCT) in your day-to-day life? What goal are you trying to achieve with it? (Look for the main job)
2. Can you think back about the time before (PRODUCT) (or a time at a different organization where you didn’t use PRODUCT): What was difficult or frustrating about (JOB) without (PRODUCT)? ****Which moments were the most frustrating? ****(Look for the pain, struggles, trigger moment, and the alternatives your customers were using - useful for messaging and understanding the competitive landscape)