Bob Moesta
48 statements across 3 episodes · 11 bullish · 8 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Aug 24, 2023 by Bob Moesta · said 13 times in 4 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Bob Moesta's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ryan Singer (5), Paul Adams (3), Georgiana Laudi (Gia) (2), April Dunford (2), Lenny Rachitsky (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 6 mentions in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Bob Moesta, oldest first
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Interviewers should avoid discussion guides to uncover meaningful information
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023 negative
Moesta: Deep Habits Obscure JTBD Insights Until Consumers Switch
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: JTBD research is based on criminal and intelligence interrogation
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Catering to power users destroys product simplicity and broad appeal
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: JTBD identifies competition from demand-side context rather than product category
“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.”
Aug 24, 2023 positive
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Presenting false options pushes interviewees past the edge of language
“When they run out of, I usually get them to what I call the edge of language where they have no more language. And what I do is I literally then bracket it. So was it more about this or more about that? And I know it's neither one of those and it forces them t…”
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Most products fail because creators make trade-offs customers reject
“Choose what to suck at and figure out the trade-offs that you need to make and make sure that your trade-offs map The trade-offs of the customer because nine times out of 10, most products that fail is because they made a trade-off that, that the customer didn…”
Aug 24, 2023 positive
Moesta: JTBD patterns repeat after 7-8 interviews; cap rounds at 10-12
“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.”
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Product roadmaps beyond 120 days should focus on struggling moments
“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.”
Aug 24, 2023
Downsizing home buyers often stalled moves without space for their dining tables
“What we realized is people, if they didn't know where the dining room table was going to go, they weren't going to move. And so it wasn't, and it turns out that the dining table was the emotional bank account for their entire life. And so if they, if you weren…”
Aug 24, 2023 positive
Moesta: Churning Customers Are Still Pursuing Progress and Reveal Struggling Moments
“In churn, what's interesting is when somebody leaves your product, they're still making progress. We think it's bad for us, which it probably is, but in their mind, it's like, yeah, this was too hard and complicated, or you know what? It didn't do enough for u…”
Aug 24, 2023
Moesta: Customer Value Is Driven by Context and Outcomes, Not Pain Points
“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?”
Aug 24, 2023
Struggling moments cause customer demand, not the creation of products
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023 negative
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 negative
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 negative
Moesta: Aggregate Probability and Randomness Are Lazy Substitutes for Contextual Knowledge
“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.”
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 positive
Moesta: Jobs to be Done research builds hypotheses rather than testing them
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023
93% of surveyed buyers wanted Energy Star homes, but nobody bought them
“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…”
Aug 24, 2023 bullish
Moesta: Staging demos cut Autobooks' sales cycle in half and 4x'd conversions
“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.”
Aug 24, 2023 positive
Aug 24, 2023
Aug 24, 2023 neutral
Moesta: Core customer jobs do not change over decades, only technologies evolve
“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 …”
Oct 22, 2023 positive
Dunford: B2B champions need help making decisions without getting fired
“Normally when we come at this, we're like, well, how can we convince the customer that we do the job that they need to have done? And obviously we need to do that. But there is this kind of secondary job that the champion of the deal is, and that's how do I ma…”
Feb 23, 2025 negative
Job descriptions are fabricated lists of tasks managers want to avoid doing
“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.”
Feb 23, 2025 negative
Arbitrary years-of-experience requirements on job postings are lazy and counterproductive
“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…”
Feb 23, 2025 negative
Feb 23, 2025 positive
Dyslexia forces many into entrepreneurship because traditional jobs refuse to hire them
“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.”
Feb 23, 2025 neutral
Feb 23, 2025 neutral
Feb 23, 2025 neutral
Feb 23, 2025
Moesta: All career transitions categorize into one of four distinct quests
“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…”
Feb 23, 2025
Feb 23, 2025 positive
Feb 23, 2025 bullish
Moesta predicts his new book Job Moves will outshine Jobs-to-be-Done
“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…”
Feb 23, 2025 negative
Overpaying employees causes them to become risk-averse, fearful, and dangerously passive
“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…”
Feb 23, 2025 positive
Feb 23, 2025
Energy drains typically stem from a person's bottom five StrengthsFinder themes
“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…”