Striking an Interview from the Record
Interviewing the person actually making the purchase decision is critical to uncovering the job to be done. Here we'll explore how to handle it when things go wrong.
To understand the causal factors behind a purchase and uncover the job to be done we need to make sure that we’re talking to the person actually making the purchase decision.
In most business-to-consumer (B2C) situations this is easy to do, but things often get tricky in business-to-business (B2B) purchases. The shopping and purchase process can be long and complex, with many different people playing important roles. Despite our best efforts to always recruit the person with the job to be done at the organization, sometimes we get it wrong.
This interview dives into the details of purchasing a tool used by product development teams called ProductBoard.
In sharing out the interview I’m hoping that you’ll be able to spot a bad interview when you conduct one so that you can strike it from the record. I’ll also share some tips for how to recruit in a way that minimizes the chances of this happening.
This post is broken up into three sections:
A director’s cut that contains highlights from the interview along with comments from Ryan and I about red flags helped us realize that we weren’t going to get to causality.
A video on how to manage it when this happens. I review the recruit that I used for this interview, as well as some new tips to help you avoid this.
The full interview, so that you can watch it and make sure that you’d spot the red flags and strike the interview from the record.
If you’re using jobs to be done in a business to business context, contrasting how this interview feels with the CRM Purchase interview is a great exercise. Being able to tell when you’re getting good insights and when you need to strike the interview from the record is a key skill to have.
The Director’s Cut
How to Manage This When It Happens
When this happens it’s critical that we don’t accidentally use aspects from the interview in our analysis. In these cases there was someone else at the company driving the decision with an entirely different set of causal factors.
Here we’ll explore how to keep this from happening as much as possible, as well as tips for how to handle it when it does happen.