Bob Moesta
Co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework, CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group
Where to hear and read about Bob Moesta1 episode or test
Bob Moesta is co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework and founder of The Re-Wired Group, an electrical engineer with almost 30 years in product who has done seven startups. The thing most worth learning from him is to interview people who recently switched, because their stories show the struggling moment that creates demand and the friction that blocks it.
The context makes the irrational rational.
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)
Bob Moesta: the story and the lessons
1Bob Moesta's path from tinkerer to JTBD co-creator
Moesta cannot read or write well, so he listens for patterns. He cannot look words up fast enough, so he forgets each word before the next one. He has no trouble when someone reads text aloud to him.
His mother taught him to circle the five longest words on a page and find what they share. He skims a book three or four times, using the first five words of the first paragraph and the last five of the last. For him JTBD began as a workaround for not being able to read and write.
Taking things apart as a kid pointed him toward building for others. His mom let him bring home anything that fit in the trunk on Big Trash Day, which started his habit of taking things apart. He has done seven startups and learned he cannot build products for himself.
His mission line is to help make the abstract concrete, which led him into teaching and writing.
Deming took him to Japan at 18, and Ford followed. At Ford he helped cut product development time from 72 to 36 months.
He paints his mentors every night: Deming, Clay Christensen, Taguchi and Willie Moore. Taguchi taught him designed experiments and Willie Moore taught him the empathetic perspective.
Clay Christensen gave him four hours a quarter for 27 years. The meetings had no agenda. Clay told him they needed to turn the work into a theory, and Moesta helped on Competing Against Luck for 16 months.
Christensen supplied the theory and Moesta the tactical method. Clay also pushed him to speak and write books, though Moesta hated books. Taguchi had told him to write one in 1990, and he opened his 30 years of notebooks when his youngest child moved out.
He tested his ideas by building about 1,000 homes in Detroit. His building company built about 1,000 homes across 14 sites in Detroit. The condo stories he tells come from that work.
2How Moesta explains demand
Moesta says demand starts with a struggling moment, not a product. Southern New Hampshire University found 50 or 60 students who paid full price but never came to class. Studying them revealed a large underserved group of adults wanting to finish school, now over 200,000 students.
He plans features only for the first 90 to 120 days, then plans by struggling moments, since each can be solved many ways. Nobody saw ChatGPT coming, so a feature roadmap had to be undone.
People move only when push and pull beat anxiety and habit. The push is the situation that makes today the day to leave the old product. Adding features raises anxiety, while removing friction costs nothing in product.
His downsizing condo buyers cancelled because they could not get rid of their stuff. He raised the price and bundled in moving and two years of storage, and sales rose over 30%.
He defines competition from the customer's moment, not the product category. A Snickers is eaten when a meal was missed, so it competes with protein drinks, sandwiches and Red Bull. A Milky Way follows an emotional moment and competes with wine, a brownie or a run.
Looking at customers through your own product gives you the wrong rivals.
He says never guess the jobs in a conference room. JTBD research builds hypotheses, where most market research only tests the ones a company already holds. After 12 interviews, clients are often shocked that buyers had different reasons than they assumed.
"I will guarantee you you're 100% wrong." Teams in a room picture ideal outcomes and miss the trade-offs and the irrational piece.
Moesta tells teams to choose what to suck at. He says nine times out of ten, failed products made a trade-off the customer did not agree with.
Value depends on where a customer starts, so overshooting what they want can invite requests for a price discount.
3How Moesta interviews buyers
He interviews about ten recent buyers about the purchase, not the product. He asks what was going on, what they hoped for, feared, gave up and how they convinced others. He listens for functional, emotional and social energy behind the decision.
Pushes, pulls, anxieties and habits start to repeat around interview seven or eight. He does 10 to 12 and prefers two rounds of 12 over one of 24.
He skips the discussion guide and follows the story. A fixed question list hides the answers with the most information. He asks for examples and says 'tell me more' instead of repeating 'why'.
At the edge of language he offers two options, or replays the story slightly wrong so the person corrects it and says more.
He peels back layers of language to find what actually happened. The first layer is pablum like 'it was good', then fantasy or nightmare exaggeration. A buyer called a car deal a dream, but the old car had 280,000 miles, three big repair bills in four months and a long trip coming.
People also compress their decision. A $137 coat rack took 18 months to buy, and the buyer said a week. He calls it criminal and intelligence interrogation that feels like therapy.
He talks to people who actually switched, tried or churned. 93% of house buyers said they wanted an Energy Star home that cost $30,000 more. Nobody paid for it, and they all bought the finished basement.
His rule is 'Bitchin' ain't switchin'.' At Basecamp, customers said they would leave without Gantt charts and never did. Churned customers are still making progress elsewhere, and something in their context changed.
4Moesta's JTBD results, rollout and limits
Autobooks quadrupled conversion by selling to the buyer's stage. Autobooks split one demo into three, matched to buyers who were learning, comparing options or deciding. Conversion rose about 4x and the sales process got almost half as long.
"We meet them where they are as opposed to where we want them to be."
Intercom turned off features by pathway instead of building four products. Intercom found four reasons people hired it and priced against the rival each replaced, such as HubSpot or Zendesk. It grew to a valuation over $2 billion.
Most products are hired for 3 to 5 conflicting jobs, so he clusters stories into pathways instead of segmenting. Intercom took off once its whole leadership team did the interviews.
A dining table nobody wanted to use lifted condo sales 22%. Downsizers said they did not want a dining table, yet would not move until they knew where it would go. Moesta gave up the second bedroom suite to make room for it.
The table was the emotional bank account of their lives. People used the space for puzzles, not meals.
For a new product, he studies what people will stop using. A large social media company studied why people set up eBay and Etsy stores before building anything. It became a marketplace worth about $3 billion.
He says there are no new jobs, only better hire and fire criteria.
He pilots JTBD in one struggling team and spreads it by case study. In a large company he picks a group that keeps getting wrong insights and gives it a small area and some space.
He shares the cases where it worked and where it did not. He kept the framework in the public domain so people could try it.
He says JTBD fails where buyers have no real choice. Employer-provided health insurance has no real trade-offs. Someone who has used Tide for 20 years just makes up a reason.
There he studies how people use the product, the 'little hire', through ethnography and prototypes. People cannot recall buying chewing gum but can describe when they chewed it. He also refuses to build the case for jobs a client has already chosen.
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)
Jobs To Be Done treats demand as caused by a struggling moment in a specific context, and the episode shows how to interview buyers, map the forces that move them, and design around friction instead of features. Examples include a 4x sales conversion lift at Autobooks and a 30% sales increase from bundling moving and storage into a condo deal.
Moesta cannot read or write well, so he listens for patterns. He cannot look words up fast enough, so he forgets each word before the next one. He has no trouble when someone reads text aloud to him.
His mother taught him to circle the five longest words on a page and find what they share. He skims a book three or four times, using the first five words of the first paragraph and the last five of the last. For him JTBD began as a workaround for not being able to read and write.
Taking things apart as a kid pointed him toward building for others. His mom let him bring home anything that fit in the trunk on Big Trash Day, which started his habit of taking things apart. He has done seven startups and learned he cannot build products for himself.
His mission line is to help make the abstract concrete, which led him into teaching and writing.
Deming took him to Japan at 18, and Ford followed. At Ford he helped cut product development time from 72 to 36 months.
He paints his mentors every night: Deming, Clay Christensen, Taguchi and Willie Moore. Taguchi taught him designed experiments and Willie Moore taught him the empathetic perspective.
Clay Christensen gave him four hours a quarter for 27 years. The meetings had no agenda. Clay told him they needed to turn the work into a theory, and Moesta helped on Competing Against Luck for 16 months.
Christensen supplied the theory and Moesta the tactical method. Clay also pushed him to speak and write books, though Moesta hated books. Taguchi had told him to write one in 1990, and he opened his 30 years of notebooks when his youngest child moved out.
He tested his ideas by building about 1,000 homes in Detroit. His building company built about 1,000 homes across 14 sites in Detroit. The condo stories he tells come from that work.
Moesta says demand starts with a struggling moment, not a product. Southern New Hampshire University found 50 or 60 students who paid full price but never came to class. Studying them revealed a large underserved group of adults wanting to finish school, now over 200,000 students.
He plans features only for the first 90 to 120 days, then plans by struggling moments, since each can be solved many ways. Nobody saw ChatGPT coming, so a feature roadmap had to be undone.
People move only when push and pull beat anxiety and habit. The push is the situation that makes today the day to leave the old product. Adding features raises anxiety, while removing friction costs nothing in product.
His downsizing condo buyers cancelled because they could not get rid of their stuff. He raised the price and bundled in moving and two years of storage, and sales rose over 30%.
He defines competition from the customer's moment, not the product category. A Snickers is eaten when a meal was missed, so it competes with protein drinks, sandwiches and Red Bull. A Milky Way follows an emotional moment and competes with wine, a brownie or a run.
Looking at customers through your own product gives you the wrong rivals.
He says never guess the jobs in a conference room. JTBD research builds hypotheses, where most market research only tests the ones a company already holds. After 12 interviews, clients are often shocked that buyers had different reasons than they assumed.
"I will guarantee you you're 100% wrong." Teams in a room picture ideal outcomes and miss the trade-offs and the irrational piece.
Moesta tells teams to choose what to suck at. He says nine times out of ten, failed products made a trade-off the customer did not agree with.
Value depends on where a customer starts, so overshooting what they want can invite requests for a price discount.
He interviews about ten recent buyers about the purchase, not the product. He asks what was going on, what they hoped for, feared, gave up and how they convinced others. He listens for functional, emotional and social energy behind the decision.
Pushes, pulls, anxieties and habits start to repeat around interview seven or eight. He does 10 to 12 and prefers two rounds of 12 over one of 24.
He skips the discussion guide and follows the story. A fixed question list hides the answers with the most information. He asks for examples and says 'tell me more' instead of repeating 'why'.
At the edge of language he offers two options, or replays the story slightly wrong so the person corrects it and says more.
He peels back layers of language to find what actually happened. The first layer is pablum like 'it was good', then fantasy or nightmare exaggeration. A buyer called a car deal a dream, but the old car had 280,000 miles, three big repair bills in four months and a long trip coming.
People also compress their decision. A $137 coat rack took 18 months to buy, and the buyer said a week. He calls it criminal and intelligence interrogation that feels like therapy.
He talks to people who actually switched, tried or churned. 93% of house buyers said they wanted an Energy Star home that cost $30,000 more. Nobody paid for it, and they all bought the finished basement.
His rule is 'Bitchin' ain't switchin'.' At Basecamp, customers said they would leave without Gantt charts and never did. Churned customers are still making progress elsewhere, and something in their context changed.
Autobooks quadrupled conversion by selling to the buyer's stage. Autobooks split one demo into three, matched to buyers who were learning, comparing options or deciding. Conversion rose about 4x and the sales process got almost half as long.
"We meet them where they are as opposed to where we want them to be."
Intercom turned off features by pathway instead of building four products. Intercom found four reasons people hired it and priced against the rival each replaced, such as HubSpot or Zendesk. It grew to a valuation over $2 billion.
Most products are hired for 3 to 5 conflicting jobs, so he clusters stories into pathways instead of segmenting. Intercom took off once its whole leadership team did the interviews.
A dining table nobody wanted to use lifted condo sales 22%. Downsizers said they did not want a dining table, yet would not move until they knew where it would go. Moesta gave up the second bedroom suite to make room for it.
The table was the emotional bank account of their lives. People used the space for puzzles, not meals.
For a new product, he studies what people will stop using. A large social media company studied why people set up eBay and Etsy stores before building anything. It became a marketplace worth about $3 billion.
He says there are no new jobs, only better hire and fire criteria.
He pilots JTBD in one struggling team and spreads it by case study. In a large company he picks a group that keeps getting wrong insights and gives it a small area and some space.
He shares the cases where it worked and where it did not. He kept the framework in the public domain so people could try it.
He says JTBD fails where buyers have no real choice. Employer-provided health insurance has no real trade-offs. Someone who has used Tide for 20 years just makes up a reason.
There he studies how people use the product, the 'little hire', through ethnography and prototypes. People cannot recall buying chewing gum but can describe when they chewed it. He also refuses to build the case for jobs a client has already chosen.