Product Quest Podcast: Recent Episodes
Scott, Jonathan and Yann
The Product Quest Podcast follows Jonathan Edwards, Scott Burleson and Yann Wermuth on their quest to the land of product excellence. Along with their guests, they bring together topics, tools and cutting-edge approaches that help companies develop products that customers will buy and love.
Today, we have an extra special episode as we welcome two superheroes of Jobs-to-be-done and we plan to get into the weeds.
First, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Lance is widely published, and all practitioners should know his work, most notably with MIT Sloan Review and Harvard Business Review. All should know his HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” where Lance and Tony Ulwick first described the job map… He also has extensive experience as a consultant, doing JTBD projects across many industries, and today is a Professor of Professional Practice at TCU.
Next, Eric Eskey. If you look at the most experienced JTBD practitioners worldwide, Eric is among the top few. You cannot name an industry that he hasn’t worked within. He’s not only a pro at framing and executing qualitative projects, but Eric is a data analysis wizard in the most practical sense, meaning that he can make data come alive in pictures, he helps others to see the story.
I’ve personally worked with both Lance and Eric as well, both with Tony Ulwick’s firm Strategyn as well as afterwards. But more important than all that, they’re both great dudes who I’m proud to call friends.
Lance and Eric, Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!
Today, we’re talking shop, as in JTBD-practitioner shop.
We’re going to be talking about challenges when converting customer needs into an “outcome statement.” When we say “outcome,” we’re referring to a customer-need as defined by Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven innovation.
An outcome is a metric that a customer uses to define how well a job is done. For example, if mowing the lawn, we’ll work with customers to get a list of outcomes such as:
- Minimize the frequency of grass clumps
- Minimize the time to mow the lawn
- Minimize the amount of uncut grass next to obstacles
Etc.
In practice, a moderator interviews customers to uncover outcomes… and we run across some situations that are a bit tricky. Today, we have a list of six challenges in which our experts are going to help us out.
I will lay out the challenges, but then we’ll all participate as we figure these out together.
Today, we have an extra special episode as we welcome two superheroes of Jobs-to-be-done and we plan to get into the weeds.
First, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Lance is widely published, and all practitioners should know his work, most notably with MIT Sloan Review and Harvard Business Review. All should know his HBR article “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map,” where Lance and Tony Ulwick first described the job map… He also has extensive experience as a consultant, doing JTBD projects across many industries, and today is a Professor of Professional Practice at TCU.
Next, Eric Eskey. If you look at the most experienced JTBD practitioners worldwide, Eric is among the top few. You cannot name an industry that he hasn’t worked within. He’s not only a pro at framing and executing qualitative projects, but Eric is a data analysis wizard in the most practical sense, meaning that he can make data come alive in pictures, he helps others to see the story.
I’ve personally worked with both Lance and Eric as well, both with Tony Ulwick’s firm Strategyn as well as afterwards. But more important than all that, they’re both great dudes who I’m proud to call friends.
Lance and Eric, Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!
Today, we’re talking shop, as in JTBD-practitioner shop.
We’re going to be talking about challenges when converting customer needs into an “outcome statement.” When we say “outcome,” we’re referring to a customer-need as defined by Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven innovation.
An outcome is a metric that a customer uses to define how well a job is done. For example, if mowing the lawn, we’ll work with customers to get a list of outcomes such as:
- Minimize the frequency of grass clumps
- Minimize the time to mow the lawn
- Minimize the amount of uncut grass next to obstacles
Etc.
In practice, a moderator interviews customers to uncover outcomes… and we run across some situations that are a bit tricky. Today, we have a list of six challenges in which our experts are going to help us out.
I will lay out the challenges, but then we’ll all participate as we figure these out together.
In this episode we continue our exploration of the Cynefin framework and how to apply it to innovation. We have already discussed it in a previous episode (Episode 64 with Tom Kerwin). We now want to look at it from another perspective.
I am personally particularly excited to talk to our guest today, because he is an engineer... a builder. He is in the field, actually building solutions, meaning he has first hand experience with the challenges of turning the output of a discovery process, such as an idea or some other form of direction into the delivery an actual concrete product.
This space between the idea or the output of the discovery process and the actual realization of the idea is not one we have discussed much on the podcast and I look forward to exploring it further.
Our guest today is William Bartlett. William is an active software engineer, he is also an agile coach and speaker. William also has a very interesting blog where he mostly writes in french, so sorry to all non french speaking listeners!
He is very active in the Cynefin community and in our discussion we will cover William's journey from agile to where he is today and how he tries to integrate these ideas in his thinking and in his work.
With us today is Steve Portigal. I have been recommending his book “Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights” all the time for anyone interested in interviewing users.
It’s now out in a second edition and with the promo code QUEST you can get 10% off here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users-second-edition/.
Steve helps organizations build more mature user research practices. He has vast experience in interviewing all kinds of users, from families eating breakfasts to rock musicians. In these interviews he has uncovered insights that informed the development of wide range of services and products such as medical information systems, wine packaging and music streaming services. Head over to portigal.com if you want to know more, find his books and the Dollars to Donuts podcast he’s hosting.
Today, we welcome Pam Henderson. Pam is an entrepreneur, professor, and founder and CEO of NewEdge, a growth strategy firm that anchors growth in “opportunity.” - in quotes, I say ‘in quotes’ because Pam created a method known as Opportunity Thinking, a creative approach to innovation.
She’s the author of a book with an intriguing title, “Killing Ideas: You can kill an idea, you can’t kill an opportunity. .
Pam: It’s great to speak with you again and I know that we have a lot to talk about.: Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!
Today we have a guest that if you don’t know him it more than about time that you do. He’s something of a UX rockstar and one of the leading most influential experts in the field: Jared Spool. He is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers and where he’s training the next UX generation. In the decades he’s been in the tech field, he’s worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. And I can recommend his talks, his writing and his courses to anyone interested because Jared is not only a great communicator but always insightful and rarely at a loss for words!
Our guest today is Tom Kerwin. Tom is an innovation and UX consultant and coach. He is the author of the card deck Innovation tactics, a deck of methods, exercises and frameworks that helps to make things people really want (we like that here). Tom is also an active proponent of Cynefin (Spelled C-Y-N-E-F-I-N), a decision support framework created by Dave Snowden and he has co-facilitated a workshop with Dave using a complexity framework called The Estuarine framework of Estuarine mapping which we will discuss.
Today, we welcome Urko Wood. Urko is the founder of Reveal Growth Consultants, a firm that uses Jobs-to-be-Done to help firms grow and thrive.
Urko and I worked together, years ago, when we both worked for Strategyn - which is ground zero for Outcome-Driven Innovation, a proven system for applied JTBD. He’s been a steady contributor to the world of JTBD for quite a few years now.
Urko: It’s great to reconnect and I know that we have a lot to talk about.: Welcome to the Product Quest Podcast!
Today we have Robyn Bolton as our guest. Robyn M. Bolton is the Founder & Chief Navigator of MileZero, an innovation consultancy that works with leaders of medium and large businesses to navigate the uncertainty of innovation's "fuzzy front end" to confidently grow their businesses. Before founding MileZero, Robyn was a Partner at Innosight, the innovation and strategy firm that does not need an introduction here since it was created by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. Robyn worked at BCG and was a Brand Manager at P&G where she was on the team that developed and launched Swiffer and Swiffer Wetjet.
Today, we welcome Brandon Cornuke. Brandon is Senior Director of Innovation for University Hospitals Ventures, an organization charged with deploying healthcare innovation at scale.
He’s the author of The Value Proposition Matrix, something that we’re sure to get into today.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Dr. Theomora Ziamou. She is a behavioral scientist who has worked for the EU through the European Commission, Ernst & Young, UNESCO - and today with her own consultancy, Enlexis.
Our stated goal on the Product Quest Podcast is to better understand innovation and product strategy. A real mystery that most product managers and leaders face - is the uncertainty with how their customers make decisions.
Today we’ll be chatting to Greg Larking who calls himself a business punk. From what I can see the emphasis is on both: business and punk.
He predicted the subprime financial crisis in 2006 and worked as a director of product innovation at Bloomberg. Now he advises companies such as Google, PWC, Uber, Sky and other Fortune 500 companies to launch transformative products and empower entrepreneurs. He has also built a vetted, invite only community of 200 business punks around the world called Punks & Pinstripes and he's written a book “This might get me fired”.
Check out https://www.punksandpinstripes.com/
In this episode, Jonathan Edwards, Yann Vermuth, and Scott Burleson talk to Professors Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza from the School of Management at Politecnico di Milano about their book "Platform Thinking" (more at: https://platformthinking.eu/). They talk about the different kinds of platforms and how platform thinking can be used to think about businesses and foster innovation.
You will learn how renowned companies, such as Uber, Airbnb, Apple, and Google, but also others are revolutionizing the industry by leveraging platform models in unique ways.
How can platform thinking lead to strategic opportunities? and how can traditional businesses' develop their own platforms?
Gaining insight into the true nature of platform-based businesses helps foster innovation and creativity, and to develop new avenues for your business.
Tune in to this episode and start your journey on the path of platform thinking!
Many listeners will know that this podcast has a JTBD affection to put it mildly. In this episode we will do something very Un-JTBD like: We will talk about a solution! It’s a solution that everyone is talking about right now: Artificial intelligence. What we want to do today is look at AI from two perspectives. The first one is how AI is or might be useful in the context of the Jobs-to-be-done philosophy and practice. The second one is more general: What customer jobs might AI help address? When we think about a company context: What jobs is AI well suited to do? It’s the PQP-Team only this time and we jump right in.
Our guest today, Eckhart Boehme, is a strategy consultant and the developer of the Customer Progress Design method. He is the co-creator of the Wheel of Progress, a canvas based on JTBD and inspired by Bob Moesta's 4 forces model. More recently Eckhart has been experimenting with AI tools and has developed an AI-based app that helps with analyzing customer interviews and processing the data.
Eckhart is also an expert on Clayton Christensen's work and prior to becoming an independent consultant, he worked at Microsoft for over 18 years.
Eckhart is the founder and managing director of Unipro Solutions (website: unipro-solutions.com). You can also find additional information about his tool, the Wheel of Progress, which we will discuss today at wheelofprogress.com in one word.
Wermuth and Jonathan Edwards.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Dan Adams. Dan is the founder and president of The AIM Institute and is author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth. He’s a chemical engineer by training and the holder of many patents, including a listing in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
He has also recently published another book, “Business Builders,” which will be our topic for today.
Today we will dive into the challenges of becoming and being a Product manager with Dr. Bart Jaworski. Bart is a Senior Product Manager at StepStone, he has worked as a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and is a LinkedIn Top Product Management Voice. Through his online courses on https://drbartpm.com/ he has trained over 18.000 people in various aspects of Product Management – from how to land a PM job to running Design Sprints and much more.
In our podcast we often talk about innovation frameworks, models, theories and so on. While these topics are important, innovation success also depends A LOT on people and how they collaborate – or not. With our guest Sebastian Hamers of human insight, we want to talk about people and how they are best put together to achieve high innovation performance teams.
Sebastian has worked in and studied innovative entrepreneurship and business development in depth. Be it at the University of Twente and hop to spin out patents and technologies developed there. He worked at a Growth Accelerator Program before joining human insight where he is the managing partner.
Today, we welcome our special guest….and our first repeat guest, Leah Tharin. And, well well well, where to begin?
Last January, I was captivated by Leah’s writing on a topic that I knew nothing about, Product Led Growth even as I myself lead Product for The AIM Institute..
In getting up to speed, I found Leah’s writing to be concise, educational, entertaining, sometimes irreverent, often funny, but always…USEFUL. And I’m not the only one.
She had 12k followers on LinkedIn when I reached out to her in January. I think it was around 15k by the time she appeared on the podcast. Today she’s over 34k and by the time you crazy people hear this episode, I expect she’ll be over 40k.
And… as a result…, Leah has created some new opportunities for herself recently. And we are certain to get into that.
Today we welcome Prof. Dr. Frank Piller of the RWTH Aachen University. Dr. Piller is considered one of the leading German experts for innovation management, open innovation, customer co-creation and product individualization. His research has received numerous awards, like the PDMA Co-Creation Award or the nomination for the “Innovating Innovation” award from Harvard Business Review and McKinsey. He previously worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management before becoming a professor in Aachen where he is now the Head of Chair of the Institute for Technology & Innovation Management. Frank habilitated in 2004 on Open Innovation and User Innovation at the TUM Business School in Munich, where he headed the research group “Customer Driven Value Creation”. I got to know Frank and his work in more detail by going through the Micro Master Program at the RWTH on “Managing Technology and Innovation: How to deal with disruptive change” which I can only recommend. All this screams for having him on the podcast and not lastly because in that course he mentions his appreciation of the Jobs-to-be-done approach which is something of a household philosophy here at the Product Quest Podcast.
Here are the additional links that we talked about:
Lead User Method:
https://evhippel.mit.edu/teaching/
Lead user input and cocreation for innovation:
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/reducing-the-risks-of-new-product-development/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1975523
Paper on AI and innovation and the double diamond model:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpim.12656 (free download)
Self Driving Chemical Labs
https://www.matter.toronto.edu/basic-content-page/ai-for-discovery-and-self-driving-labs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00231-0
The Nature article with the material science experiment I described:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1335-8 (Summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01978-x)
edX: Free Innovation classes
https://www.edx.org/micromasters/rwthx-managing-technology-and-innovation-how-to-deal-with-disruptive-change
Executive Program on Using AI for Innovation (taught entirely in VR)
https://thegemba.com/course/leading-intelligent-engineering-vr
Innovation master program at RWTH:
https://www.business-school.rwth-aachen.de/en/programs/m-sc-management-engineering-in-technology-innovation-marketing-entrepreneurship/
This is episode number 50 and we’re thrilled to have Hannah Keartland as a guest for this milestone episode. No pressure Hannah! Hannah is an award-winning strategic thinker with 20+ years of extensive and varied leadership experience as a director and on the board level. She has worked in finance, in for-purpose businesses, charities and as an innovation consultant. Today she’s all in on impact for example as a co-founder of the Impact Pioneers, an invitation only community of business leaders who want to have an impact in the world. She’s a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and a member of their sustainability Committee and has several expert advisory roles. She lives and breathes impact and has so for a long time: She wrote her first impact report in 2007 – so, way before it was cool! She founded Keartland & Co and helps business leaders maximize and scale their positive impact on the world. Oh, and did I mention she’s a TEDx speaker? So, without further ado, Hannah, welcome to the product quest podcast!
Hannah: https://www.keartland.co/
Project Drawdown: https://www.drawdown.org/
WWF Sustainable Office guide: https://www.wwf.org.uk/media/57626
Today, we welcome our special guest, Patrick McGowan. is the CEO and founder of The Service Design Group, a firm that specializes in service innovation. It should be no surprise then, that Patrick is an expert in service design.
He has well over two decades of experience, first with IBM before launching his own firm. Patrick has a really interesting background though, having graduated from design school at NC State… which one of the most difficult bachelor’s programs to get into, at least here in North Carolina. I’m curious as to how he leverages that knowledge, but we’ll get into that in a bit.
Patrick’s firm, The Service Design Group, has an impressive list of clients across industrial, governmental, biotech categories…. just to name a few.
But on a personal level, Patrick is engaging, funny, super smart… just the person that you want walking into your door when you want to upgrade your service game.
We continue our discussion about the relationships between philosophy and Jobs-to-be-done, starting with the causality of action, Aristotle and Jobs-to-be-done and Romeo and Juliet!
The core argument of Jobs-to-be-done
Human beings want to achieve certain things, call these things a “Job”
To achieve them, they use different means and different means can allow them to achieve the same Job, call these means “solutions”.
Some of those solutions are better, some are worse. We decide and judge which are worse, and which are better depending on how well the solutions help us get the job done, call this the “utility of a solution”.
For us to use new solutions to achieve the job, the solutions must significantly improve getting the job done compared to how we get it done now.
There is a way to know, even predict if a new solution does get the job done significantly better or not. This depends on how well the solution performs against the set of criteria that we use to evaluate the utility of a new solution, call these “outcomes” or “job metrics”.
We can express and know all our outcomes.
If a new solution allows us to get the job done significantly better, i.e. performs better measured by the outcomes, we are much more likely to adopt it.
Therefore, with Jobs-to-be-done it is possible to know if a new solution will be adopted to get a job done.
This time we are going to try something a little different. There’s no guest and we are going to take a philosophical perspective on Jobs-to-be-done. Some listeners will know that philosophy is dear to Yann's heart and something that he's brought up in the podcast here and there. Today we want to make these comments and hints front and center. It’s also worth noting that Scott and his book Statue in the Stone was the one that first connected JTBD and philosophy and it’s the very reason we three found each other.
Philosophy is often about arguments and we will reconstruct Jobs-to-be-done as an argument in the podcast. Here it is in it's full length:
The core argument of Jobs-to-be-done
Human beings want to achieve certain things, call these things a “Job”
To achieve them, they use different means and different means can allow them to achieve the same Job, call these means “solutions”.
Some of those solutions are better, some are worse. We decide and judge which are worse, and which are better depending on how well the solutions help us get the job done, call this the “utility of a solution”.
For us to use new solutions to achieve the job, the solutions must significantly improve getting the job done compared to how we get it done now.
There is a way to know, even predict if a new solution does get the job done significantly better or not. This depends on how well the solution performs against the set of criteria that we use to evaluate the utility of a new solution, call these “outcomes” or “job metrics”.
We can express and know all our outcomes.
If a new solution allows us to get the job done significantly better, i.e. performs better measured by the outcomes, we are much more likely to adopt it.
Therefore, with Jobs-to-be-done it is possible to know if a new solution will be adopted to get a job done.
In today’s episode we welcome Gretchen Goffe. Gretchen is on a mission to make design thinking accessible to everyone. She’s the founder and CEO of the DT-Live-lab that helps companies become customer-centric at scale through teaching and training teams on human-centered approaches to innovation and customer experience. She has 20+ years’ experience in innovation in many industries such as consumer goods, as finance, and healthcare. She was also the Executive Director of the innovation initiative at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and is a member of Fast Company. In short: There’s a ton of experience to dive into here, so let’s get to it!
Today, we welcome our special guest, Büsra Çoskuner. Büsra is an experienced product manager who now as the founder of Producteer. Se coaches, mentors other product managers and helps companies to develop their product management function.
In reading Büsras bios, what I’m immediately attracted to is that she is a practitioner FIRST… and coach/mentor second.
The product manager position is much better understood than it was even 5, 10 years ago. And I personally appreciate the revolution that practitioner leaders, such as Byshra, are leading the charge.
Olaf is a certified trainer in Value Management and Value Analysis, a consultant and a lecturer, who has lectured at numerous universities and business schools in France and Switzerland.He is the former president of the AFAV, the "French Association for Value Analysis", a network of value professionals (https://www.afav.eu/) and the cofounder of the Value University (http://www.valueuniversity.org)and of the Swiss Value Association.He is also the co-author of the book "What is it for" and the author slash curator of the book "Valeur(s) & management", Values and management (which is unfortunately not yet available in english) and he is currently working on a new one (in French so far) presenting a lot more applications in all domains.Interestingly, Olaf has a background in Agronomy Engineering.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Jason Knight.. Jason is a 20-year veteran of B2B technology and product management, with experience in both corporations and startups. He’s a speaker, writer, podcaster, and coach and mentor to product development teams… but especially to product managers; as he feels this is the key role that makes good product development work… and I happen to share this view by the way. And I have a LOT of questions!!
FINDING JASON
- You can find Jason on Twitter at ONE JASON KNIGHT
- Host of the podcast ONE KNIGHT IN PRODUCT
- on LinkedIn JASON KNIGHT
- Or his website - ONE KNIGHT CONSULTING . COM
Today we talk about one of those shiny words in business that many talk about, yet few really understand and that word is “Scaling”- So many businesses are looking for business models that can scale, yet very few succeed. Today is all about scaling and New Business Building with our guest Frank Mattes and his approach and company called Lean Scaleup. Before we jump in let me just say that it’s always inspiring to talk to Frank and – I’m talking from experience here, a great guy work and think with. He brings the experience, the thoughtfulness, and the energy and momentum to make great things happen – all in one person
This is part 2 of our conversation with Eric Eskey.
Eric is the managing director of Dark Horse Works. If you’re in innovation, product management or jobs-to-be-done, you’re in for a treat - and listen carefully. Eric is one of the most experienced JTBD practitioners on the planet… and likely across other planets too.
Like myself, he was personally trained by JTBD pioneer and creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, Tony Ulwick. He has nearly 20 years of experience in executing JTBD projects. He’s completed projects across many industries: healthcare and medtech, government, finance, textiles, software, agriculture, food… and I expect many more. Both large multi-nationals and start-ups as well.
But when you meet Eric, you find a humble dude who listens more than he talks and asks amazing questions.
Last year, I jumped at an opportunity to work with Eric on some projects, and I was quite transparent about how much I valued his expertise; but I can tell you that I value his friendship even more, and listeners, we’re all in for a treat today to learn from one of the top global practitioners of JTBD.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Eric Eskey. Eric is the managing director of Dark Horse Works. If you’re in innovation, product management or jobs-to-be-done, you’re in for a treat - and listen carefully. Eric is one of the most experienced JTBD practitioners on the planet… and likely across other planets too.
Like myself, he was personally trained by JTBD pioneer and creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, Tony Ulwick. He has nearly 20 years of experience in executing JTBD projects. He’s completed projects across many industries: healthcare and medtech, government, finance, textiles, software, agriculture, food… and I expect many more. Both large multi-nationals and start-ups as well.
But when you meet Eric, you find a humble dude who listens more than he talks and asks amazing questions.
Last year, I jumped at an opportunity to work with Eric on some projects, and I was quite transparent about how much I valued his expertise; but I can tell you that I value his friendship even more, and listeners, we’re all in for a treat today to learn from one of the top global practitioners of JTBD.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Dr. Harvey Castro. Dr. Castro has such a diverse and amazing background, it’s tough to know where to begin. He’s a serial entrepreneur who started his first company selling vitamins at 16. He’s a physician, an executive, an entrepreneur, and product developer - having led teams to create over 30 apps; oh, and also he’s the author of multiple books.
In particular, he’s been writing about the intersection of healthcare and AI, something we’re sure to get into today.
Many of you, innovators out there will have been faced with the following question by a senior leader about an early-stage innovation idea: “Yeah, but what’s the ROI?” Of course, sometimes you just don’t know yet and it’s a bad question at a bad moment in time. But then again: Management is there to manage, whether it’s about the core or about new ventures. So how can we measure innovation? Our guest today took a brilliant approach to this problem she calls “Innovation accounting”.
Esther Gons is one of those thinkers in innovation that just seems to win a prize with every new publication. Together with Dan Toma and Tendayi Viki she wrote “The Corporate Startup” which won a 2019 Golden Axiom Business Book Award and the 2018 Management Book of the year Award. The latest book “Innovation accounting” again won a 2022 Axiom Business Book gold Award. Esther is the founder and CEO of GroundControl, an innovation management software that helps corporate startup teams with the structure and learning for new business models. Esther is an international speaker, an entrepreneur for over 20 years and has mentored several hundred startups as an investor in the NEXT startup ventures, lead mentor in the Rockstar accelerator program or in the Lean Startup Machine weekends.
One word that comes up often in design and innovation is the word "need". "Goals" are central to Alan Cooper's influential "goal driven design". A famous book in Jobs-to-be-Done theory is called "what customers want". And of course the word "job" is right there in the name "jobs-to-be-done". Chairs, rocks, stories, stars, information, music and countless other things do not have "needs", "goals", "jobs" or "wants". But people, animals, organizations, societies do have these things. And they have them because they are what we might call purposeful systems, they can have goals and try to reach them.
The original movement to scientifically study and understand purposeful systems was cybernetics and many important ideas in engineering and AI can directly be traced back to the work from the original cyberneticians. It has had an influence on just about any field one can imagine: Psychology and Architecture to Management, Education and Theatre... you name it! From the beginning, through the work of major figures in the field like Ross Ashby, cybernetics has had quite a bit to say about design, which is what we discuss in this episode.
Our guest today is Paul Pangaro.
Paul is the president of the American Society for Cybernetics which was founded in 1964 and is currently a visiting scholar in both the School of Architecture and School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Paul worked for a time at the famous startup incubator Idealab, was the CTO of several startups, and also founded several of his own. He has taught many courses over the years, namely at Stanford, on the role of cybernetic models in the design of products, services, and teams. He is a recognized expert in the cybernetics field of conversation theory, which is central to his understanding of design and which we talk about in our discussion.
You can find Paul at www.pangaro.com on twitter at @paulpangaro.
Show references:
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Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations, Pangaro & Geoghegan
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ON MODELING What is interaction? are there different types? Dubberly, Pangaro, Haque
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Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action, Dubberly & Pangaro
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A Cybernetic Perspective on Design and Creativity: a Conversation with Dr. Paul Pangaro
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Introduction to Cybernetics, Ross Ashby
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Conversation Theory, Gordon Pask
Today, we welcome our special guest, Leah Tharin. Leah is the Head of Product at Jua.ai. She’s an advocate for product-led growth, something we’re certain to get into today. She has an impressive background in product management and product leadership, but the thing that brought her into view for me is that she is a direct and brilliant communicator really on all things product, from the challenges of a product team to those of leadership.
Find out more here: https://www.leahtharin.com/
Get the product-led Growth Guide here: https://www.leahtharin.com/p/the-product-led-growth-guide
Today, we welcome our special guest, Rob Schade. Rob is the Chief Customer Officer of Strategyn. Strategyn, of course, is the innovation firm founded by JTBD pioneer Tony Ulwick. Rob was actually the second employee of Strategyn over 20 years ago and has personally been part of the JTBD’s development from a theory where we just talk about milkshakes to a repeatable process that innovators can actually use.
For our listeners, let me make an impassioned plea for why you’ll want to listen to this episode from beginning to end. The most critical part using JTBD is framing… or establishing the bounds of a project and define your market to be pursued. Rob has led this activity perhaps more than any other person in the world. So let that sink in, Rob has framed more JTBD projects than anyone else; so hang with us today as we’ll explore some tips for how to do this well.
Additionally, Rob has had some other interesting experiences, including owning a night club in New York City. I personally have a lot of questions about that!
Our guest today is Wolfram Nagel Senior UX Designer at TeamViewer. I think it’s fair to say that Wolfram has been in UX before it was cool and has worked in different companies and as a freelancer. He’s published a book on Multiscreen UX Design, is co-founder and main curator of designmethodsfinder.com, he’s a public speaker and regularly publishes insightful articles on wolframnagel.medium.com. In addition to that the likelihood to meet him at a Jobs-to-be-done or UX Meetup is quite high. So, today we will take a deep dive on how UX and Jobs-to-be-done are a match made in heaven.
Decisions shape the future. Making better decisions is critical for people and for society.Businesses make strategic decisions all the time about where to invest, who to partner with, where toadvertise and much more. Customers make decisions about what products to buy and to use. Innovators, designers and engineers make decisions about what to build so that customers purchase and use what they makeBusinesses have become more and more data-driven, with data science becoming ubiquitous, butconventional data science has its limitations.
In this episode we discuss why understanding causality is critical for making better decisions and how leadingbusinesses are increasingly looking to incorporate causality in their data driven decision makingOur guest today is Paul Hünermund. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at theCopenhagen Business School, his research interests lie in the area of innovation, firm strategy, R&D policyand causal inference. He is the co-founder of causalscience.org, a platform for fostering knowledge exchangebetween industry and academia on topics related to causal data science.
In this special episode we review all the guests we interviewed on the show this year and reflect upon what we learned, what we liked and the questions we wished we had asked!
This episode turned out to be much longer than planned, so here are the timestamps if you want to jump to a particular guest:
01:40 Ruth Hartt15:50 Lance Bettencourt25:04 Ronan and Jane31:20 Indi Young40:14 Jim Kalbach53:00 Dan Adams1:05:30 Beat Walther1:13:00 Jan Schmiedgen1:22:00 Katerina Kozludzhova1:25:10 Murat and Francesco1:31:17 Michele Hansen1:41:45 Lindsay Zaltman1:54:50 Min Basadur2:04:30 Gerry McGovern2:11:20 Giorgio Pauletto2:19:50 Tim Macarthur2:24:10 Joe Leech2:32:00 Ian Kerr & Jason Frasca2:37:15 Sergei Ikovenko2:46:20 Tony Ulwick
Today, we welcome our special guest, Tony Ulwick. If you’ve worked in, read about, or even heard of JTBD, then you know his name. Tony is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, known as ODI. ODI takes this theory, this philosophy of JTBD and presents it as a repeatable process.
Tony is well published with his key work from 2005 “What Customers Want" or his HBR articles “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” and “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” which have become classic reads of our field.
Today, we welcome Dr. Sergei Ikovenko. Sergei is one of the world’s leading authorities in the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, commonly known as TRIZ. He has conducted over 1,500 workshops (that’s 1500) on TRIZ at a long list of companies, including P&G, GE, and Hyundai… and many others, including the Chinese Patent Office and the Swiss Patent Office…he’s lectured all over the world at Harvard, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford. Sergei has doctorates in mechanical engineering as well as environmental engineering – and to keep it interesting - a master’s degree in patent law. He’s written over 100 publications and books, has been a TEDx speaker and keynote speaker at events such as the MIT Sloan Management Forum.
Our guests today are Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca from Emergent Futures Lab (emergentfutureslab.com), a strategic innovation consulting firm focused on radical innovation.
Iain and Jason founded the Emergent Futures Lab in 2018 as a platform for the rethinking of creativity, invention, and change. They have developed a number of new tools including the Innovation Design Approach, which we will be talking about today.
Iain Kerr is a designer working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems.
He is a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University within the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation He is a co-founder of SPURSE, an award winning creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. He regularly works as a consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on creativity, innovation, and design and has done so for institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Columbia University, Parsons, Yale, and others. He formally studied philosophy and architecture, but his deep immersion in the wilderness around Vancouver where he grew up spawned many interests that have since expanded to cover a wide range of fields including ecology, complexity science and evolutionary theory and as you will see these are major influences on his work.
Jason Frasca is a native New Yorker and an entrepreneurial business executive, marketing, and sales professional who has worked with Fortune 500 and nationally recognized clients in many diverse sectors of the economy. He cut his teeth at Boardroom Reports, a business newsletter to executives, where he learned Direct Response Marketing from several legends in the field
With Iain he is also a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University where he teaches innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing and provides mentoring to startups. His research revolves around disruptive innovation models and frameworks for entrepreneurship and he uses 3D Printing as a mechanism to demonstrate and teach these methods and approaches.
You can find out more about Iain and Jason here:
emergentfutureslab.com
Referenced on the show:
Books by Deleuze
Books by Stephen J Gould
Books by Elisabet Vrba
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
The Box, Marc Levinson
The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker
Our guest today is Giorgio Pauletto. Giorgio is Head of Strategy and Innovation at SIG, the Industrial Services of Geneva. SIG is Geneva’s public utility company, providing water, energy and telecommunication services to the canton of Geneva.
Giorgio studied management sciences and engineering at Stanford, got a doctorate in econometrics at the university of Geneva and was a visiting fellow both at the Hoover institution in Stanford and then at Yale.
Before joining SIG, he worked as a Technology, Strategy and foresight advisor for the state of Geneva.
Today we will be talking to Giorgio about how to foster innovation within a large public utilities company and the challenges that one faces. And we will also talk about how to get a glimpse into the future through foresight also known as future studies.
Referenced on the show:
The Corporate Startup, Tendayi Viki
Black Swan, Nassim Taleb
Looking at Mindfulness, Christophe André
Today we have an exciting guest Joe Leech. Joe is an energetic coach and advisor to CEOs, has a lot of experience working with startups, high growth tech unicorns and Fortune 100 companies. 20 billion $ in revenue go through the products he has worked on, an impressive number. He has a background in psychology, more specifically in neuroscience, was a primary school teacher for some time and has written a book I want to recommend about Design and Psychology: Psychology for designers, a pocket guide. Besides that he is also a great and very entertaining speaker and writer. Today however will focus on C-level questions and how Jobs-to-be-done can help answer them. So, stick around if you want to learn why Jobs-to-be-done is one of the keys to successful C-level strategy.
Referenced on the show:
Psychology of Design, Joe Leech
Empowered, Marty Cagan
Nokia “Burning Platform” memo, Stephen Elop
The Last Blockbuster Netflix documentary
Today we the Product Quest Podcast Team discuss the challenges you face when it comes to Jobs-to-be-done projects. What can go wrong? What needs to be in place before you start? And of course what can you do to overcome them? What are the learnings from all of our experience in applying Jobs-to-be-done in many industries?
Today we will deep dive into the topic of service design with our guest Tim Macarthur. Tim Macarthur is a Service Designer based in Dublin. His career has seen him work in the enterprise such as IBM, in consultancy and in service innovation for various international organizations. Tim co-founded the Service Design Network in Ireland and is a visiting lecturer at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. Tim is deeply interested in the intersection of Service Design and other disciplines in bringing valuable, delightful services to life. Certainly, a mission we can all get behind.
And here's the reading list we promised:
This is Service Design Thinking, Marc Stickdorn
This is Service Design Doing, Marc Stickdorn
Orchestrating Experiences, Chris Risdon & Patrick Quattlebaum
Designing the Invisible, Lara Penin
This is part two of our talk with Gerry McGovern. He has developed Top Tasks, a design framework that helps identify what truly matters to people. It has been developed over a 15-year period and applied more than 500 times by companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Toyota, and governmental organizations such as the European Union and of course the Irish government and the WHO.
Gerry is a highly regarded speaker and has proven it in more than 40 countries around the world, he appeared on CNN, the BBC an various other media. He has written 8 books of which I strongly recommend Top Task a how-to guide, and another one Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation and of course his latest book called World Wide Waste: How digital is killing the planet and what to do about it.
Today we talk to Gerry McGovern. He has developed Top Tasks, a design framework that helps identify what truly matters to people. It has been developed over a 15-year period and applied more than 500 times by companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Toyota, and governmental organizations such as the European Union and of course the Irish government and the WHO.
Gerry is a highly regarded speaker and has proven it in more than 40 countries around the world, he appeared on CNN, the BBC an various other media. He has written 8 books of which I strongly recommend Top Task a how-to guide, and another one Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation and of course his latest book called World Wide Waste: How digital is killing the planet and what to do about it.
Dr. Min Basadur is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and founder of Basadur Applied Creativity. He has three patents and a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
But Min is best known for his creativity system, Simplexity. In the 1970’s, Min developed his method when building upon the work of colleague Sid Parnes. It’s a system… complete with all the essentials for defining problems, for generating solutions, and for selecting the best to act upon. It also considers the dynamics of different thinking styles – and includes an innovation profiler, which we are sure to discuss. This is part 2 of our discussion with Min.
Dr. Min Basadur is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and founder of Basadur Applied Creativity. He has three patents and a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
But Min is best known for his creativity system, Simplexity. In the 1970’s, Min developed his method when building upon the work of colleague Sid Parnes. It’s a system… complete with all the essentials for defining problems, for generating solutions, and for selecting the best to act upon. It also considers the dynamics of different thinking styles – and includes an innovation profiler, which we are sure to discuss. This is part 1 of our discussion with Min.
As listeners know, on the show we love to dive deep into innovation and business theories and frameworks. But at the end of the day what really matters is actually building products and services that people want in order to build successful businesses. Well… our guests today definitely know a lot about that, Murat Göker and Francesco Cardoletti are both successful and experienced serial entrepreneurs who have built businesses in diverse industries and geographical regions. This is part 1 of our discussion.
Murat has built and operated ventures in retail fashion, concierge services, commodities trading, advising micro-startup for equity and for the past 10 years, he has ventured into pharma. Namely in 2013 he founded Ideogen with his father and brothers: a 360 degrees commercialization platform for specialty therapies (mainly orphan or rare disease) in which he currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
Francesco has built and operated ventures in the health, telecom, fin-tech, fashion and edu-tech sectors in both the UK and US. He is the co-founder and was the CEO of PawSquad, a company providing telemedicine for pets, which was acquired by IVC Evidensia in 2018. He currently works as Strategy and Product Lead at Unilever Foundry where he works with the best scaleups and startups in the world to launch disruptive innovation on a global scale.
Murat and Francesco have worked together as business partners in the past and as all great teams, they are very complementary in their approach and ways of thinking which is the reason why we decided to invite both of them together on the show!
As listeners know, on the show we love to dive deep into innovation and business theories and frameworks. But at the end of the day what really matters is actually building products and services that people want in order to build successful businesses. Well… our guests today definitely know a lot about that, Murat Göker and Francesco Cardoletti are both successful and experienced serial entrepreneurs who have built businesses in diverse industries and geographical regions. This is part 1 of our discussion.
Murat has built and operated ventures in retail fashion, concierge services, commodities trading, advising micro-startup for equity and for the past 10 years, he has ventured into pharma. Namely in 2013 he founded Ideogen with his father and brothers: a 360 degrees commercialization platform for specialty therapies (mainly orphan or rare disease) in which he currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
Francesco has built and operated ventures in the health, telecom, fin-tech, fashion and edu-tech sectors in both the UK and US. He is the co-founder and was the CEO of PawSquad, a company providing telemedicine for pets, which was acquired by IVC Evidensia in 2018. He currently works as Strategy and Product Lead at Unilever Foundry where he works with the best scaleups and startups in the world to launch disruptive innovation on a global scale.
Murat and Francesco have worked together as business partners in the past and as all great teams, they are very complementary in their approach and ways of thinking which is the reason why we decided to invite both of them together on the show!
Today we will venture into the twilight of the unconscious and see how that helps create strategies and campaigns that click with customers on a very different level. A special guest Lindsay Zaltman who knows all about this is joining us today. Lindsay is CEO and Partner at Olsan Zaltman a consumer insights and strategy agency. Lindsay is co-author of a book I highly recommend “Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors reveal about the minds of consumers”. He’s been published in the Harvard Business Review and speaks at conferences all over the world and regularly at Fortune 500 companies. This is part 2 of our discussion with Lindsay, part one was last weeks episode.
Today we will venture into the twilight of the unconscious and see how that helps create strategies and campaigns that click with customers on a very different level. A special guest Lindsay Zaltman who knows all about this is joining us today. Lindsay is CEO and Partner at Olsan Zaltman a consumer insights and strategy agency. Lindsay is co-author of a book I highly recommend “Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors reveal about the minds of consumers”. He’s been published in the Harvard Business Review and speaks at conferences all over the world and regularly at Fortune 500 companies. This is part 1 of our discussion with Lindsay.
This is part 2 of our talk with Jan Schmiedgen. We will talk about all things Design and Innovation. Jan is one of those Duracell-bunny energy level kinds of people, which shows in his career path. Among doing many things he has published and blogged a lot on Design and Innovation in various places. He co-curates the blog thisisdesignthinking.net, is an entrepreneur who had several businesses and now managing partner and Innovation strategist at Codify. There is one sentence on the Codify website that sums Jan up: “intellectual curiosity paired with the strong need for independence”. Jan cofounded Codify, an agency that supports organizations in innovating their innovation management and supports them in a lean and evidence-based way.
This is part 1 of our talk with Jan Schmiedgen. We will talk about all things Design and Innovation. Jan is one of those Duracell-bunny energy level kinds of people, which shows in his career path. Among doing many things he has published and blogged a lot on Design and Innovation in various places. He co-curates the blog thisisdesignthinking.net, is an entrepreneur who had several businesses and now managing partner and Innovation strategist at Codify. There is one sentence on the Codify website that sums Jan up: “intellectual curiosity paired with the strong need for independence”. Jan cofounded Codify, an agency that supports organizations in innovating their innovation management and supports them in a lean and evidence-based way.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio, along with her husband Mathias. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.
She’s also a co-host of the Software Social Podcast, a weekly conversation between two SaaS founders… self-described as “one just starting out, and one who’s established.”
Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing, “Deploy Empathy”, which we are certain to get into today.
Today, we welcome our special guest, Katerina Kozludzhova. Katerina is an experienced product manager who became so enthusiastic about innovation, she went on to get a PhD, with her dissertation on the commercialization of software innovations.
Today, she is the Chief Assistant Professor of Business Innovations at Plovdiv University in Bulgaria where she teaches courses on innovation, creativity, design thinking, product development, and commercialization.
She’s the author of the book, “Business Innovation,” which we are certain to get into today.
So we release part 2 of our effort to try to break jobs to be done. We prod it, push it, pull on it and generally try to exploit its weaknesses to see how it holds up. We will look at situations where JTBD seems to break down... situations where things people do are hard to explain from a jtbd perspective. We will talk about the role of emotion in people’s behaviour. In JTBD there is this notion of an emotional job which we will take apart.
Today, we try to break jobs to be done. We prod it, push it, pull on it and generally try to exploit its weaknesses to see how it holds up. We will look at situations where JTBD seems to break down... situations where things people do are hard to explain from a jtbd perspective. We will talk about the role of emotion in people’s behaviour. In JTBD there is this notion of an emotional job which we will take apart.
This is part 1 – the riddle. Stay tuned for part 2 next week!
Today, we welcome Beat Walther for the second part of our talk. Beat started out his career at P&G, has worked at McKinsey and is managing partner at Vendbridge, the agency I work at and which he co-founded 20 years ago. He is co-creator of the CFI approach. CFI stands for Customer-Focused Innovation, an approach which helps companies focus their innovation resources on the winning ideas. Beyond his work at Vendbridge he is a board member and has coached more than 200 Startups.
To listen to part 1, just scroll down to episode 8!
Today, we welcome our special guest Beat Walther. Beat started out his career at P&G, has worked at McKinsey and is managing partner at Vendbridge, the agency I work at and which he co-founded 20 years ago. He is co-creator of the CFI approach. CFI stands for Customer-Focused Innovation, an approach which helps companies focus their innovation resources on the winning ideas. Beyond his work at Vendbridge he is a board member and has coached more than 200 Startups.
This is part 1 of the podcast with Beat. Stay tuned for part 2 next week!
Dan Adams is the founder and president of The AIM Institute and is author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth. He’s a chemical engineer by training and the holder of many patents, including a listing in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
Dan is a teacher to thousands of innovation practitioners, has coached hundreds (if not thousands) of innovation projects, and is the chief architect of Blueprinter® software – the tool that helps novice Voice of Customer practitioners to be as effective as experts, and helps experts to be as effective as masters.
Anyone in the Jobs-to-be-done space by now surely knows his name and work but it’s worth pointing it out. He is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He has written 3 books: Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). He is also the Co-founder and Principal at the JTBD Toolkit, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content. Jim blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.
If you’ve heard or used the term mental models, that’s because of her work and the book she wrote with that title “Mental Models”. Indeed she pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Indi is a writer, researcher, and coach for inclusive product strategy. Beyond Mental models she’s published Practical Empathy and she is very close to publishing her next book “Time to listen”. You can find all of that and more on her website indiyoung.com
Today, we welcome our special guests, Ronan Healy and Jane Hession. This husband and wife team are the founders of the “How Might We” design studio. Their mission? To help to be more creative, to solve problems, can I use the phrase, “to innovate” by using something inside that many of us have lost touch with… the power of play.
A self-described “researcher at heart,” Jane has worked with entrepreneurs, corporations and even the Irish government. She has a PhD in Entrepreneurship Management and is author of “Women in the Modern Workplace.”
Ronan is a true student of innovation, with experience in agile methods, design thinking, systems thinking, and something that we like here, Jobs-to-be-Done. He’s a highly experienced facilitator, advisor, consultant and teacher.
In this episode, we welcome a most special guest, Dr. Lance Bettencourt. Without question, Lance is on the Mount Rushmore of JTBD contributors. He’s currently a professor of marketing at TCU. He’s the author of “Service Innovation”, and well-published - including MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review. Most notably, along with Tony Ulwick, he authored “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” in HBR one of the most important JTBD publications, and it has the distinction of the single resource that I recommend more than any other.
Lance is an appreciator of ice cream, has been known to do crazy things like hike down and back the Grand Canyon, and is an all-around great person.
You're in for a treat!
In this episode we take a deep dive with special guest Ruth Hartt into Jobs-to-be-done and how she applies it in the arts.
Ruth regularly blogs at https://www.cultureforhire.com , be sure to follow her on Twitter @ruth_hartt or find her on LinkedIn for constant insights and surprises for JTBD marketing in the artworld.
In this inaugural episode Scott, Jonathan and Yann go deeply into the Jobs-to-be-done philosophy exploring what Jobs-to-be-done is, why it is so powerful and share valuable insights from real Jobs-to-be-done practice.