Learn, Make, Learn
Learn, Make, Learn is two product geeks sharing qualitative & quantitative perspectives to help you make, better. Hosted by Ernest Kim and Joachim Groeger.
Learn, Make, Learn
Toolbox: How “Jobs To Be Done” Can Help You Make, Better
Ernest & Joachim share a deep-dive on the jobs to be done approach to customer-centric product & service innovation. They explain what it is & why it matters, share real world examples of jobs-to-be-done in action, and highlight situations where it might not apply.
FOLLOW-UPS – 01:11
Apple Vision Pros & Cons
Disconnect Blog & Newsletter
Tech Won't Save Us: Will AR Glasses Die Like Google Glass?
SNL Weekend Update: Randall Meeks
JOBS TO BE DONE: CONTEXT – 04:53
Steve Jobs on “speeds and feeds” marketing
Theodore Levitt
Samsung Electronics Launches Global Rollout of The Frame TV (2017)
Samsung Frame 4K TV: The Gizmodo Review
It’s hard to believe Samsung’s new, matte The Frame is actually a TV
Samsung Electronics Sold One Million Units of ‘The Frame’ in 2021
JOBS TO BE DONE: DEFINITION – 09:03
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”
Clayton Christensen: Increasing sales of milkshakes (2013)
Nate Silver: The Signal and the Noise
JOBS TO BE DONE: REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS – 15:39
Coca-Cola “Polar Bowl”
PR/FAQ: the Amazon Working Backwards Framework for Product Innovation
JOBS TO BE DONE: WATCH OUTS & BEST PRACTICES – 26:31
WEEKLY RECS – 30:39
Her Story
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Schumpeter: The Prophet of Bust and Boom (paywall)
Cautionary Tales Ep 6 – How Britain Invented, Then Ignored, Blitzkrieg
CLOSING & PREVIEW – 39:07
(Image credit: Samsung)
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CREDITS
Theme: Vendla / Today Is a Good Day / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Drum hit: PREL / Musical Element 85 / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Hello and welcome to Learn Make Learn where we share qualitative and quantitative perspectives on products to help you, make, better. My name is Ernest Kim, and I'm joined by my friend and co-host, Joachim Groeger. Hey Joachim, how's it going?
Joachim:I am good, Ernest. I'm good. We had a cold snap up here in Seattle, but everything's okay. I suspect you had the same thing as well in Oregon, or was it a little worse?
Ernest:Oh yeah, we had our, uh, snowpocalypse 2024. It was, In the 15 or so years that I've been living in this region, it's by far the worst that I ever experienced. But, fortunately, uh, outside of losing power for a few days, uh, we've managed to make it through okay.
Joachim:That's the main thing. You've got power again, and we're able to record this.
Ernest:Exactly, that's what matters. Well, uh, this is episode three and it's the first of what's going to be an ongoing series of what we're calling toolbox episodes, where we'll periodically highlight tools that we hope will help you in your day-to-day work of making products. Today our focus is the jobs to be done theory for customer-centric, outcome-focused product and service innovation. But before we dive into jobs to be done, we wanted to share a bit of follow up to our previous episode, Apple Vision Pros and Cons. Joachim, you wanna start?
Joachim:Yeah, sure thing. It was a funny coincidence because when I checked my email a few days after we had done the podcast, I had a Disconnect newsletter from Paris Marx came into my inbox and he was discussing the Vision Pro. Paris Marx runs, um, a podcast as well as a newsletter that is very tech critical and, uh, he singled out the Vision Pro for this week's, newsletter. And he mainly is, operating under the assumption that this product will be successful and that the Apple, quote unquote, hype machine, as he calls it, is gonna be in full force. But he still wants us to make fun of people that are wearing the headsets because that's the only sure fire way of making sure that it doesn't become, ubiquitous and leads to total isolationism. And in fact, he has an earlier episode of his podcast, which is called, uh, Tech Won't Save Us, which is about Google Glass. and that was a very interesting and insightful episode where he's discussing how Google Glass started off with great promise and then it became a punchline in a Saturday Night Live sketch. And then that was that, and it kind of killed the product, rightly or wrongly. But it, it kind of died of death because of comedy. The, the one thing I would say that I really appreciate about his approach is he doesn't fall into, what some people have dubbed criti-hype, which is where, your criticism actually serves to hype up the power of the product. And so he is just very incisive about his criticisms without imbuing technology with too much power. So, he's a really great counterpoint to have in these conversations and, and definitely worth a checkout. So the podcast is called, Tech Won't Save Us, and the newsletter that he runs is called Disconnect.
Ernest:That's a great follow up. I did take a look at that after you suggested it and I thought it was a good, balance to, you know, some of the perspectives I shared in the episode. You know, I think maybe I can be a little, sometimes too willing to accept, um, uh, the tech at, um, face value. So it was great to get a little bit of a reality check on it. On my end, I actually have two corrections to share, uh, from our last episode. First, in our discussion of potential alternatives to Apple Vision Pro, I referenced the rabbit r1 device that a lot of people are excited about, and I noted that, unlike the Vision Pro or the latest generation of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, the r1 does not feature vision or the ability to see what you're looking at in the world. In fact, the r1 does have what the company calls a"rabbit eye" camera that rotates and can be used as a still or video camera. But more interestingly, it can be used as an input for the r1's AI. Um, that said, because the r1 is something you hold in your hand, I don't think it's vision capabilities will be quite as seamless as something like Apple Vision Pro or the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, where the cameras are always gonna be pointed in the same direction as the wearer's eyes. But I wanted to make sure I corrected the record on this: the rabbit r1 does indeed feature a built-in camera. And second, in my recommendation for the week, I highlighted a documentary titled Steve Jobs the Lost Interview, and I mispronounced the name of the presenter behind the film. I referred to him as Robert X Cringely, but the correct pronunciation is Robert X Cringe-ly. So my apologies for that one.
Joachim:I mean, there is a cringe joke waiting to be made there, but we'll leave that to everyone to fill in the gap there.
Ernest:That's why I just assumed it wasn't pronounced that way, but it turns out it is. Okay. Well. Now let's get into jobs to be done. We'll dive more deeply into our own personal experiences and perspectives on jobs to be done in just a few minutes. But let's start with some background. First. What inspired this episode was the recent CES 2024 that took place in early January. TVs are a staple of CES, and the show was awash with new sets with each vendor claiming that their devices offered more nits or more dimming zones or more hertz. This specifications based approach to product marketing, which Steve Jobs derisively described as speeds-and-feeds, is very much the norm across just about every industry. Pick a specification that you think is important and make it X percent better for next year's model. That's what most of the TV vendors at CES do, what most car makers do, what most packaged goods makers do, and even what most AI model developers do. Our model has more parameters, faster processing, higher token limits, et cetera. And speeds and feeds can lead to good outcomes. But the risk is that it's very easy to fall into the trap of believing that your job as a product maker is to meet a specification rather than the truth of the matter, which is that your job is to enable your customer to fulfill an underlying goal. As the famed economist and Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt observed, people don't wanna buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. And yet, if you were to visit the booths of the TV makers at CES, you'd see a lot of people in the quarter inch drill business. But not all. While Samsung does do plenty of speeds-and-feeds-based product creation, they occasionally manage to break out of that paradigm. And one of the most striking examples is their"The Frame" lineup of TVs. We'll include a link to Samsung's Frame TVs in the show notes, but for anyone who hasn't seen one, they're TVs that as their name suggest, mimic the look of a picture frame, particularly when they're not being used as televisions. When the Frame line launched in 2017, the reaction from the tech and TV press was mostly lukewarm with the consensus being that there were pretty good TVs sold at an unwarranted premium. As Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes concluded in his review of the original of the Frame,"would I encourage you to spend an extra thousand bucks to get a TV that promises to be a work of art? I would not." But jump ahead and as Chris Welch observed in a 2022 piece for The Verge, and I'm quoting him here, not everyone cares about having the absolute best TV specs or pristine picture quality. It turns out there are a lot of people who hate having a traditional tv, this ugly black rectangle disrupting the vibe and decor of their living room. Those are the same people who have turned Samsung's, the Frame TV into such a big hit unquote. Quantifying that point about the frame being a hit, Samsung disclosed that it, it had sold over a million units of the Frame in 2021, which is the most recent year that I was able to find this data broken out. That's over 10% of their total QLED sales for that year in a line that sells at a significant premium. Now, the reason I've shared all of this is because this sort of solution, a TV that looks as good, if not better when it's off, would never arise from a speeds-and-feeds approach to product marketing. To paraphrase the infinite monkey theorem, you could let a speeds-and-feeds marketer hit the keys on their laptop at random an infinite number of times, but they'd never come up with a brief for the Frame because it just has nothing to do with specifications and everything to do with serving that truth of the customer's underlying goal I mentioned just a minute ago. And that's why we wanted to talk about jobs to be done on this first toolbox episode. Because it's a tool that can help you break out of the speeds-and-feeds paradigm and get closer to the truth of your customer's underlying needs. I don't think either of us would say it's foolproof or universal in its applicability, but I do think it's absolutely worth being aware of as someone in the business of making products. Okay, but enough set up from me. Joachim, could you explain what jobs to be done is?
Joachim:So, the quote unquote inventor of the Jobs to Be Done framework is Clayton Christensen, who is of course famous for the disruptive innovation framework From Harvard Business School. And he develops the Jobs to Be Done framework in his book Competing Against Luck. So that is a book length discussion that combines, the teaching that he's been doing at Harvard Business School, but also plenty of anecdotes from his own consulting experiences. And so the simplest way to summarize the method is to really focus all of your thinking on the customer. Forget about thinking about product features, or asking what features a customer wants, or how you can make a product more up to date. Instead, pivot to the perspective of, why are they hiring your product to complete a job? And in Christensen's definition, a job is, a thing that helps a customer make progress towards a desired outcome, right? So that's very, very broad and very, very generic. But the key piece there is that it's centering the customer journey as opposed to the features of the product. So now you're not actually asking about, like you were pointing out Ernest, a quarter inch drill, it's more about the quarter inch hole. And then what Clayton Christensen will advocate for is asking, well, why are you drilling that hole? And what is happening in that moment that you need that hole? And if you think about that broader context, uh, does that unlock other pieces of the puzzle of the customer journey? So, put simply in Christensen's thinking, a successful innovation enables a customer to make progress, resolve a struggle, or fulfill unmet aspirations. And as I just pointed out, they're context relevant. So you could be drilling a hole because you want to hang something, or you could be trying to drill a hole because you need to put something through that hole. So as a result, you're looking at the customer journey, you're focusing on the context in which they're operating, and now, kind of as a side effect, you are not really gonna be focusing on the traditional ways people do market research. Meaning you're not gonna start partitioning the product attributes. You're not gonna be partitioning your customer base into their demographics or other features, their age groups and things like that. You're really focusing on the need that the person has and the journey that they're on. So Christensen starts off his book with a very, interesting example that involves milkshakes. And he is being asked by two people how they can innovate on the milkshake front. So. I don't wanna go through the whole story, but the key conclusions are pretty straightforward to describe in a few sentences. So there are essentially two types of customers. The first type of milkshake customer is someone who is using the milkshake on their morning commute to entertain themselves while they're driving. And so what they want to have is a drink that lasts for the whole commute. It gives them some nourishment, but also provides them with some surprises. And so having little bits in the milkshake give you those moments of, Ooh, what was that? And that is exactly what a commuter would like to have in the morning. So morning milkshakes, although maybe an odd choice for most people, actually fulfill the job of entertain me during my commute. Now there's a second context in which a milkshakes also gets sold, which is later in the day, usually involving small children and families. And so Clayton points out that one of the things that he has encountered is when he's in the line to order fast food, he will have said no to his child on many, many, wishes. And when they finally hit the line at the fast food place and the child asks for a milkshake, he buckles, and he lets him get a milkshake because it's a small thing, but it will lead to infinite happiness for that child in that moment. So totally different context. Still milkshake, same product, same product features, but now it's fulfilling a very different role. So that gets to the heart of what Christensen's trying to do is put yourself in the shoes of the customer. And so as a result, everything is about pulling these anecdotes together so you understand what is the customer journey. And now of course, jobs to be done is just the phrase that Christensen has come up with to describe this. But I think we've all encountered versions of this. It's, it is really customer-centric thinking. So I, I'm sure many people listening have conducted those types of exercises and that have gone beyond just the generic, did you like this? Did you not like this? So I think one of the things that's really crisp about Christensen's description is that he really is taking a strong perspective on what I'll call data-driven decision making actually. And he says quite forcefully that, you really shouldn't be just looking at the data of the customers that are out there. And that's because those things are just correlants to the final decision. What he's trying to get at is the causal chain of events that leads to a transaction. And so, in the book, he actually quotes someone else, Nate Silver, who is the author of The Signal and the Noise. He has this dinky little example, he says that ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat, but there is no causation. You don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs. So that, that little pithy example, gives you a sense of why looking at historical data of what your customer base has been doing doesn't really capture the essence of what the customer journey is. And it really pushes on the idea that, data-driven thinking is kind of inherently conservative because it's backward looking as opposed to looking to the future. So I think that's quite useful to have in our environment right now where we're really getting excited about all of the innovations in AI and machine learning, which fundamentally build on historical data and are not thinking about non-existent data. So Christensen points out as well that when you're thinking about a customer's journey, there are a lot of people that are not in your data. That those are the people that have not bought your product or engaged with your product or service. And if you look at the data, you will ignore those people because you're not thinking about the customer journey, you're not even considering the possibility that someone starts off the journey wanting to engage with your product, and then decides to abandon. That will not feature in your data. So it's a very nicely written book with plenty of anecdotes. Enough, stories there to get you started and thinking But it's incredibly difficult, of course, to do in practice, right, because you have to put yourself into someone else's feet and it's tricky. So I think this is where our own experiences might also help pad that out a bit more. And I know Ernest, you have encountered this type of thinking in your own work. Is that right?
Ernest:Yeah. And, and first, thanks for the explanation. That was awesome. Um, I remember when I first encountered this idea of jobs to be done, I think it was in the like 2006, 2007. A colleague of mine turned me onto it and it kind of blew me away.'cause at the time I was a product line manager, at, Nike and running footwear, and it was so relevant to the work I was doing on a day-to-day basis. That example you shared of the milkshakes. I thought that was so powerful in that, you know, the, for example, you were talking about just looking at correlative data. You might look at the data and see, oh, our fruit milkshakes, sell better in the morning, so let's do more of that. The problem with that is it might lead you down a blind alley. You might just assume that people are choosing fruit and so you decide to put more fruit in, or you decide to focus on nutrition because you associate nutrition with fruit. And then you see that your sales actually, um, you know, plateau or actually decline. And if you dig into this using jobs to be done, like Christiansen talked about, you come to realize it's actually not about the nutrition, it's about the entertainment. So that's really what you need to focus on. And you know, as a product manager, that sort of insight was, you know, just, it seems so straightforward, but I'd never been exposed to it, and it just kind of blew my mind. And, and then I, once I became aware of it, I realized I had been part of projects in the past where we did take just this more speeds-and-feeds sort of approach and, you know, sometimes they would succeed, but oftentimes they wouldn't. And I came to understand that that was why, because that specification, we decided to focus on turned out to actually not be that important to our customers, you know, when all was said and done. So then once I became, exposed to, jobs to be done, it really helped me think about this kind of business of making products differently. And one example I can share, typically we're not able to share examples from our previous work because, all of it's proprietary, but in this case, this was a project I did while I was at, Weiden and Kennedy. I mentioned, in our first episode, I spent about a year and a half at Weiden, and it was an amazing experience, absolutely loved it. I worked on the Coca-Cola and Diet Coke North America accounts, and the reason I can share this is that we had submitted this project to the Cannes, Gold Lion Awards, the Ad Awards, and, we ended up winning a Gold Lion for this, campaign. And so a lot of this information was made public, so I'll share the bits that are public. This was for Coca-Cola's Super Bowl ad in 2012. So, you know, as you might imagine, the Super Bowl is a huge marketing event where, marketers spend millions of dollars for, you know, just 30 seconds of airtime. And for Coca-Cola, like for many others, it's their kind of premier ad event of the year, so that Super Bowl spot is always a huge deal. And typically if you think about advertising, the way marketers think about advertising is that their goal is to try to interrupt you, the viewer. You know, you're, you decided to watch this game, but we, the advertiser, are going to try to interrupt that experience and to do it so effectively that even though you didn't tune in into watch us, you remember us. You know, that's oftentimes the goal of advertisers and that's what leads to these very, you know, over the top type ads where everyone's trying to one up each other. In this case, we took a different tack. We said, Hey, there's this really interesting, remember this is 2012, so kind of early days still, and we saw this, what was then an emergent behavior of co viewing where you would be watching TV and texting or on Twitter or you know, on social media with friends at the same time. And we thought, this could be a really interesting thing. Could this allow us to engage with viewers in a way that, gets them excited about Coca-Cola without interrupting that experience? You know?'cause the job to be done for them is to watch the game, socialize around the game and have a good time. And essentially that was the brief. To tap into this emergent behavior of co-viewing. We called it, to make Coke part of the experience of watching the Super Bowl instead of interrupting people's experience. And, um, for me, the, the most exciting moment, what makes product marketing, product management worth doing are those moments when you share a brief and then you get back something that you just never could have imagined yourself. You know, that's just so much better than anything you could have dreamt up yourself. And this was one of those cases where, you know, based on that brief, the creative team came back with this concept of, what if we allowed you to watch the Coca-Cola polar bears, watch the game. I mean, it sounds kind of crazy, but this was part of the brief from Coca-Cola was to kind of pull the polar bears into it. So that was sort of a, a, a requirement. But beyond that, it was very much open-ended. And so they had this idea of, all right, let's build on this co-viewing behavior. And the way it worked was, in real time, CG, real time animated, polar bears would be watching the game as well. And one polar bear would be wearing gear that would, you know, show that he's aligned with the Giants. It was the New York Giants versus the, uh, new England Patriots. The other Bear would be wearing gear to show that he was aligned with the New England Patriots. And our creative team was actually animating the bears in real time, so if something great happened for the Giants, the Giants bear would cheer and the Patriots bear would mope and vice versa. The bears watched, the game, the whole game, you could interact with'em, you could even tweet at them and they would tweet back and you would see that they were doing that as it was happening. I. We had a pe, a few people asked for pizzas, and we actually had the bears deliver, order and deliver, pizzas to them. And so over the course of the game, we had, I think something like, I forget exactly, it was like somewhere between nine and 12 million people actually engaging with the bears, in real time. And, ended up getting a lot of accolades, you know, right after the game and then ended up getting this, gold lion. So, uh, you know, that was something that very much came out of this approach of instead of taking a typical specification led or more marketer led approach, let's take a jobs to be done approach, thinking about, what are customers looking for, and build around that instead, and it led to a really successful outcome. I think, you know, in this case this was a marketing program, but I, you know, I think it can apply very powerfully to product based programs as well.
Joachim:I think that's a really great story because of the fact that the product that you are pushing is the exact opposite of what the job to be done is, right? as you said it, this is an interruption and by pivoting it back into, well, what is the customer journey, you ask the simple question, is there a way to not make this an interruption and something that is part of the experience it's very clever So I, I think that's really, that's a really great example of, the framework in action. Thanks for sharing that, Ernest, and I'm glad that it's in the public domain so that you are able to provide lots and lots of details.
Ernest:Yeah. And we'll, share a link to the, I think there's a, still a reel online that explains the concept that was submitted, uh, as part of the Cannes submission, so we'll share that as well if it's still available. But, so kind of building on this, I was curious to hear, Joachim, what your thoughts are in terms of, you know, we talked about some of the ways that it could be, beneficial, but maybe what might be some, some cons to this approach.
Joachim:So as I was alluding to in the beginning of my description of jobs to be done, I was saying that many people have versions of this thing and they just don't call it jobs to be done. And in my past I worked at Amazon and there is a version of that that exists there, which is known as the P-R-F-A-Q document. For background, Amazon is a heavy document driven company. There are no PowerPoint presentations. Everything is, communicated in the form of six page, maximum six page documents. reading time is set aside for every meeting. So meetings are scheduled and about 15, 20 minutes of reading time is there so that everyone is literally on the same page and then a discussion can take place. The jobs to be done framework that Amazon adopted is a very specific format, so P-R-F-A-Q means press release and frequently asked questions. So this document generally has two components to it. The first piece is, imagining what the press release for a new product launch would look like or a new service. And so it usually starts off with Amazon is proud to announce the launch of X, Y, Z, and they will write fake quotes. They will write fake customer experiences, all in the service of trying to tell the story of what this product is gonna feel like when it shows up in the world. And then following that is the FAQ section, which is supposed to help get a little bit deeper into the weeds on how this is all supposed to work. And this is usually where a lot of the, the nitty gritty details of, what infrastructure is required to do something? Like what are the technological solutions that are required for this? You know, how does this launch interact with other things that are already inside of the Amazon system? And it's also a place where as a document gets circulated through various teams, people start adding questions that they're getting asked in those meetings to somewhat preempt those questions, so the next meeting will have people focusing on the next thing. So you're always operating on, you're trying to be pretty exhaustive on the questions. Not too much obviously, but'cause it then gets ridiculous. But you want to be able to hit the main big questions that keep coming up so that the next time you have a discussion, it's very focused around the next set of questions that are actually gonna come around. So, that's the kind of structure to the jobs to be done document that, that Amazon's been relying on for a very long time. So I think the P-R-F-A-Q and all of these frameworks are incredibly useful tools for getting people coordinated around the goal. And they give you the tools to be able to tell a story and have some structure around this very complicated and unstructured process in general of trying to innovate and create something new, because as Clayton Christensen points out, the data isn't there to back up what's already happened in the past. Now, what I've observed in general across many organizations is that when you have a framework like this, after a while, it stops being about actually doing the work to illuminate the customer journey, and it becomes a way of reverse engineering consensus from people. So. I saw a lot of occasions in other organizations and across the board where people would try and shoehorn these types of frameworks into problems that did not lend themselves to that at all, including things that I was involved in, such as data science type projects, which are really measurement problems and infrastructure problems that are not gonna be public facing. The other piece that I think is maybe even more critical, is the organizational structure has to be open to innovation. So it doesn't matter if you have this great template of how to write these documents and so on. The organization has to be willing to take risks, and I think that's the good thing about jobs to be done. It's kind of telling you, you have license to take risks now. you're gonna tell a convincing story, and then it's up to the organization to take that on board and say, we understand that this is not fully data-driven. There's no way to look at what's happened in the past, and we just have to go for it. And that comes with a good organization that allows you to take risks. And so I think that interplay between an organization's innovative capabilities and these frameworks is the main thing. You know, if your organization doesn't wanna take risks, it doesn't matter if you use this framework and you have a compelling narrative, right? It's always gonna require the safety of a good organization to say to you, Hey, take a risk now and let's just see where it goes.
Ernest:Those are great call outs. I, I definitely recognize the first point about sometimes people, organizations just learning to use these sorts of frameworks to just turning them into checkbox exercises, uh, you know, following the letter of the concept versus the spirit. and that's something I've definitely seen as well. On my end, I guess I'd say something that. at least in my personal experience in applying this sort of jobs to be done framework is I found it to be very effective in cases where I'm working on, iterating an existing product, trying to figure out where to take it, but less effective in cases where we're trying to create a whole new product category, new segment where maybe there's just less existing, you know, knowledge base on the consumer side of things to even know what job, you know, this thing that I've never used before could fulfill in my life. So, I guess that would just be one thing to highlight, from my end is, don't be dogmatic about this. You know, we're, we're highlighting this as something we think could be useful, but it's just one tool in the toolbox. You know, if you find that you're trying to apply it and it's not helping you in a given project, you know, don't try to force it. But I think the principles that you talked about, Joachim, are very relevant. So if you could find other ways to, bring those to life, that's really fundamentally, the point of this versus just trying to stick to the instructions of how to do jobs to be done. I'd say that would be maybe one call out from my end.
Joachim:Yeah, I agree. I think it. Really comes back to what I found the most compelling piece of Christensen's writing was. Essentially I want to get at the causal chain of events that leads to a successful customer outcome That's exactly what Christensen really wants to emphasize. In the book he never really says it needs to look this way. He just says, it needs to get you to the point to understand that a person is on a journey and they want to achieve something. So tell someone a convincing story of how that chain takes place.
Ernest:I think that's a great point to end this part of the conversation on. And it's been a great conversation and I really hope it's been useful for our listeners. And we do wanna hear from you too. You know, have you applied jobs to be done in your work making products? Do you agree or disagree with our takes? Let us know at LearnMakeLearn@gmail.com. Now let's move on to our recommendations of the week. Joachim, what has you excited this week?
Joachim:I've been talking a lot with my wife about video games this week. We went on a long excursion into the way people code these things up, the aesthetic of games. And I kept coming back to this game as a prime example of the power of video games. The game is called Her Story. This is gonna sound like a callback to Tele Hack, but it involves you sitting in front of your screen and it looks like a Windows 95 terminal. Okay, so a little bit like Tele Hack, and all you are told in, contained in two readme files that are on the desktop. So I should have said, actually, you're a police investigator, it seems like, All we know is that the computer is from the Police of some British location. And you know that there's video footage that you have to troll through. So you just start with a word and that will then identify. a video clip where that word is used in the text, and then as you start exploring, that video might contain other words that you could then use as such terms to continue your journey of investigation into this thing. There is no point system. There is no linear narrative arc. You are just exploring, and As you watch videos, find keywords, enter them into the search bar, you just start unlocking this archive bit by bit. And from that you construct the story of this person that's being interviewed, in this game.
Ernest:it sounds, it sounds amazing.
Joachim:Yeah, so it's a really, it's very compelling. The gameplay is ridiculously straightforward. It's a game of listening and interpreting the information that's coming from these video clips and piecing together some sort of narrative structure that makes sense of what has happened to this person. There's no obvious end to it. To put it another way, let's go back to our framework, jobs to be done. You know, the video game's job is to help you see a different perspective and go on a journey and unlock a mystery and get immersed in another world and another storyline that's not yours. and this just does it so well without any fancy graphics. It's the prime example of why potentially video games are actually the medium for the future for everyone. If there were more games like this,
Ernest:That's awesome. So it's Her Story. is
Joachim:Her Story, that's right. But what about you, Ernest? what's on your mind? I'm, I'm sure you're gonna mix it up for us.
Ernest:Well, actually I thought that based on, today's topic and, the centrality of Clayton Christensen to the topic that I'd highlight another one of his books, a different book, in this case, the Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, which was published in 1997 by Harvard Business Review Press, and I'll just give you a quick, bit of the description from the publisher. So quote, through this compelling multi-industry study, Christensen introduces his seminal theory of disruptive innovation that has changed the way managers and CEOs around the world think about innovation. While decades of researchers have, struggled to understand why even the best companies almost inevitably fail, Christensen shows how most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. His answer is surprising and almost paradoxic. It is actually the same practices that lead the businesses to be successful in the first place, that eventually can also result in their eventual demise. This breakthrough insight has made the innovator's dilemma a must read for managers, CEOs, innovators, and entrepreneurs alike, unquote. Uh, I think, if I remember right, I read this when I was in university and, you know, I was just a babe in the woods and it just completely blew my mind in many different ways. It introduced this idea of disruptive innovation, which, you know, went on to become this huge thing in Silicon Valley. But he talked about things that were just so counter to my preconceptions that, initially when I read it, I really fought against it. I thought, oh, this must be wrong. For example, he noted that disruptive innovation typically comes from small companies. And, you know, as a youngster, wet behind the ears kid, I just thought, oh no, all the big innovations come from the big companies. And then he also noted that these disruptive innovations tend to come at the low end of the market. And I thought, no, no, you know, these things always come at the top, you know, it's the fancy stuff and then it works its way down. But then as you read through, he gives these case studies that show that no, it's actually true. One of the primary case studies, he. He builds the text around his, hard drives and how, for example, these very small capacity but very thin, hard drives were, you know, at the low end of the market because there were such small capacities. But they ended up completely disrupting that whole market because they enabled a new market, to be created around them. So I think it's still very relevant. I do think it suffers from an issue that I think is, pretty common to most business books, which is that it takes something that could be very compellingly articulated in about a magazine, article's length, text, and that expands it out to a book, you know. So there is some padding, but I, I still think it's a worthwhile read. So, we'll include a link to that in the show notes as well. Have you ever read it Joachim?
Joachim:I haven't read it. I've encountered, versions of this story of, of disruptive innovation from Christensen. And, there's of course the, the old fashioned. Economics idea of creative destruction, which is also a version of that where someone comes along and destroys an old industry by creating a new one and that's good old Schumpeter from way back when.
Ernest:Hmm.
Joachim:Actually on the topic of specifically of disruptive innovations, another podcast recommendation that's closely related to Christensen's disruptive innovation idea is, the Economist Tim Harford's podcast called Cautionary Tales. And in one of his very, very early episodes called How Britain Invented Then Ignored Blitzkrieg, he discusses large corporations' abilities to innovate and then to kind of forget that they'd innovated or not be ready to use, take that innovation to the next level. And so he, I don't wanna say debunks some of the disruptive, uh, disruptive innovation ideas, but he adds a little bit more color and nuance that suggests maybe it's not such a obvious thing. And as you said, big companies. have many reasons for failing to take on a disruptive innovation. And sometimes it's not just laziness. Sometimes it's fact that their whole business model relies on a very specific way of working and this new form of business just doesn't lend itself to that and would require them to essentially become a totally different company. Actually, that makes me want to live in a world where we're a little bit more willing to let a company wind down. I. You know, maybe we just need to be a little bit more fluid. The way motion pictures get made, motion picture, people come together, they form a company around the movie, and then when the movie is done and it's released, the company is dissolved. And those people go about the merry way and then that's that. And I feel like maybe in these disruptive innovation circles, it's okay to sometimes say. Okay, we're all gonna have jobs tomorrow, but not at this company anymore. And we're ready to just wind this thing down and it's time to spin up the next thing where we're gonna take this IP and we're going to build that out and, you know, here's your severance packages and all of that stuff. But, maybe there's a way to. allow that innovative process to flow through the market system as well, where you allow companies to just dissolve quickly and then come back together. Of course, with the stock market, that's really hard to do publicly traded companies, but, um, maybe another reason not to have so many publicly traded companies who knows. Controversial Point thrown out there right at the end of the podcast.
Ernest:No, I love it. I think, you know, that's something that I think a lot of people are thinking about, you know, what is next? It doesn't seem like we can continue down this path of, infinite growth being the be all, end all. So, I think that's a fascinating idea that you, you know, plan for obsolescence
Joachim:Yeah.
Ernest:of the company, not the product.
Joachim:Yes. I like that.
Ernest:This has been a fantastic conversation, but I think that does it for us. Thanks so much for joining us here at Learn, Make, Learn. As I mentioned, we want to hear from you, so please send any questions or feedback to LearnMakeLearn@gmail.com. And tell your friends about us. In our next episode, we're gonna discuss what happens when values and opportunity collide. This topic was actually sparked by a suggestion, uh, shared by a friend and former colleague, Jamie, via Threads. Side note, you can find us on threads@LearnMakeLearnShow, all one word. Okay. In response to our previous episode, Apple Vision Pros and Cons, Jamie wrote, quote, one thing that you didn't touch on is Apple's privacy stance. I think the stance is good, but it might deter apple from advancing capabilities in the future, as in the more sophisticated AI stuff you were alluding to, unquote. So what can you do as a person in the business of making products if a significant new opportunity arises that conflicts with your values as an individual or an organization? We'll share our own experiences and perspectives on this on the next Learn, Make, Learn.
