The Ledger, every show

“When you overpay people, what happens is that, that they actually become more and more scared that they they'll lose it. And then they become more and more conservative because they don't want to rock the boat and they actually don't work. They do what they're…”

“I believe that innovation or product is, is a conflict sport. It's like a, it's where you have to have arguments in order to be better. And every time you have an argument, it gets better.”

“There's a, there's an amazing amount of entrepreneurs who are dyslexic. And I attribute it back to the fact is it's because we couldn't get jobs. We just went to create our own thing. Cause we couldn't like, we had to figure out our own way to work.”

“What's interesting is that at least for me, the thing is what I learned was that supply and demand are not as connected as everybody thinks. Most people think they create a product and that creates demand. But the real thing that if you start to study causalit…”

“So instead of just talking about features, it's typically talking about features for the first 90 to a 120 days. But after that, we just talk about struggling moments. Because that's the seed for real innovation and basically where new products come from.”

“And most people say, if I just add more features, create more pull, people will buy. It's not true. More features create actually anxiety. Can it do all those things? And what you start to realize is if I reduce friction, which is the bottom part, I actually d…”

“Over 50% of the people who got new jobs didn't get more money.”

“The pat, the interesting part is from a causal mechanism perspective and from us from a set theory perspective, meaning the sets of pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits, it starts to repeat around seven or eight. And I usually do 10, no more than 12.”

“There are really no new jobs. Right. It's just the fact is that they, we get better at them. And so the higher fire criteria get better, but the context and outcome, most jobs, I can look back 10 years and the job existed and I can look ahead 20 years and the …”

“Basically only people have jobs. Products don't have jobs. People have jobs. Organizations don't have jobs. People in organizations have jobs because that's the irrational part.”

“If you go to something that's just too, like it doesn't register, it's so deep of a habit that they don't really know what they're doing. You'll never going to be able to get that information out of it's again, the habitual stuff is very hard to see the job. I…”

“I think that ultimately I'll be remembered more for this book than jobs to be done, because I think There's a billion people a year who switch jobs and ultimately most of them end up with a job that's worse than the one they were at, but they don't know how to…”

“Job descriptions are made up. They're literally just made up and there are a list of stuff that the manager will say, all right, we want them to do this. And then they'll think of all the stuff they don't want to do. And they put that in there.”

“What I've realized in, and this is another kind of insight is I can actually, and this is kind of a bad way to look at it, but I can actually pay people less if I give them better experiences.”

“If you think HR is there to help you navigate this, it's, I would tell you that they're not. Their job is to manage risk and to fill seats.”

“I tell people, especially like people who have exited a company, I tell them like, you gotta take a year off and you gotta actually get comfortable doing nothing. Because the moment you are comfortable doing nothing, you know who you are again, and you can act…”

“And so the resume writers know how all this works and they know how to like, they're the people who know how to hack the system. And if you don't have a resume writer, I would strongly suggest you find one. Because they know which ones work and don't work and …”

“Improving my weakness actually, you know ruins my superpower.”

“They'll say five years experience. What I will tell you is that's one of the worst statements you can put on any job, like recruiting thing, because why five years? What is it about what this to me is a sign that you're lazy because you're saying, oh, you need…”

“It's not that I'm in pain, but it's the context that makes me value this in the moment that much more than something else. And so part of this is it's not just about, you know, pain and gain. It's about context and outcomes, right?”

“And you start to realize that at some point in time, it's about meeting customers where they are, not trying to wow them and not trying to convince them. They convinced themselves to make the progress.”

“And what you start to realize, and I call that F four and as if F one and F two are not greater than F three and F four, they're not gonna move. They're not gonna do anything.”

“And you'd think that it would take the, make the sales process longer. It actually made the sales process almost half. And at four X basically conversion, because now we meet them where they are, as opposed to where we want them to be.”

“Most, most companies or most products are hired to do three, four, five different jobs. And they're in conflict with each other. One person wants to go faster and one person wants to go be more thorough.”

“Intercom realized that people hired it for four very, very different reasons. And then instead of building four different products, they literally took their product and turned off the features that were not relevant to the pathway that people wanted to take.”

“The other tip I have is to not have a discussion guide. It drives people crazy because everybody wants to ask the same set of questions. But the problem happens is when you ask the same set of questions, you actually don't follow the ones that actually have th…”

“We just seem to literally not want to go deep enough. And we use the lazy word of random and probability as pseudo for knowledge. And it's not knowledge. It's literally just if context is the same, if outcomes is the same, then I can do it.”

“And if you follow, this is the other part, if you follow your best users, they'll take you up to this world that then actually destroys the lower end of the world of why people are there. And so if Basecamp would have added all those things, one of the reasons…”

“In larger organizations, it's very difficult because at some point the dominant market research is, is about hypothesis testing. Right. I'm going to go build a hypothesis and go basically then go build a research project to prove or disprove that hypothesis. B…”

“One of the most dangerous things you can do is sit in a room and hypothesize what the jobs are. Cause I will guarantee you, you're 100% wrong.”

“That employees hire companies more than companies hire employees. That's really the big thing.”

“What you start to realize is it's the experiences that keep you at your job and the good experiences and bad experiences are the things that actually pull it together, which is how attributes work through time and space.”

“When you start to look at all thousand interviews, they fall into one of four buckets. Two of them really kind of are the standard thing. One is, is this bucket of get out. ... Another quest is help me take the next step ... Help me regain control. ... The fou…”

“Like, 53% of the people who basically said they got more money did not get more money. They told the company they had more money because they knew they couldn't argue with having them come back because they got more money.”

“I always talk about strength finders and I tell people to say, I want to know the bottom five. And they're like, why is because those are the five things you really suck at. That you don't even know you suck at. And that's typically where the energy drains com…”

“What I've learned is if I wrap a process around something I love to do, I actually ruin it. But if I wrap a process about something I really hate to do and actually, and gamify it, I can actually get through it.”

“If you actually reframe this and say, how do I get the job to fit the person? And you start to realize, like, I can change the design of the job and now they love what they do. They're never going to leave.”

“Because here's the thing is job descriptions should really be, here's the context we're in. Here's what this role is about. Here's what progress means in this role. And here's where, here's, here's how we will actually reward you for actually doing this work. …”

“And so this is the, this is part of the problem with AI is AI is literally creating all these filters to help people make it easier to sift through the interview or the resumes, but it's not actually helping you find job fit.”

“Ultimately if we've got to align the company's progress with their progress, because if they don't make progress, they will leave.”

“Jobs to be done is this whole premise is that people hire products, right? They don't buy them. They hire them to make progress in their life.”

“Jobs helps you see the true competitive set from what we call the demand side of the world. As opposed to the competitive set from the supply side of the world, which is the technology or the underlying business model by how which we're making it.”

“So what did I do? I actually raised the price of the condo included moving in two years of storage in the, you know, in the, is part of the deal with the condo because it's the frictional coefficient and I increased sales over.”

“Instead of trying to base the sales process on how we want to sell, we need to actually design the sales process on how they want to buy.”

“Everybody I would survey before buying a house, I had 93% say they wanted an Energy Star compliant house. It cost 30 grand to make it Energy Star compliant at the time. And the reality is, is like nobody bought it. They all bought the finished basement. And so…”

“The method itself is not based on traditional research or market research, asking people what it is. It's actually based on criminal and intelligence interrogation about telling me the story about how you decided today's the day I bought a house or today's the…”

“I can't read and write. So, so I can, so the thing is, is, is I cannot read the words that I write and I cannot read like, so if somebody reads it to me, I can actually play it back.”

“Employees actually hire companies more than companies hire employees.”