Jobs to be done interviews: how to run a switch interview

Who should use it, and when not to

Use switch interviews when you need to know why customers chose you, chose a rival, or left. They fit positioning work, a homepage rewrite, onboarding fixes, and win-loss reviews where every lost deal is filed under "price". They work for consumer products and for B2B, as long as you can reach the person who made the decision.

They are a poor fit when nobody has switched yet, as with a brand-new category, or when you want to test a specific design. For open problem discovery, a general user interview guide fits better. For a large pile of mixed research notes, use interview synthesis instead.

The core concepts

The job. Clayton Christensen and his co-authors argue that customers don't buy products; they hire them to get a job done. The Christensen Institute describes a job as the progress a person is trying to make in a given set of circumstances. A job has functional, social, and emotional sides. The circumstance matters more than the customer's age or company size: the same person can hire different products in different situations.

The timeline. Bob Moesta, co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, describes buying as a sequence. There is a first thought that something isn't working. Then comes passive looking, when the person notices options but does nothing. An event then starts active looking, when they put time into finding a solution. Next is deciding, where trade-offs are made. Last come the purchase, first use, and ongoing use. Events push people from one stage to the next, and those events are what you are hunting for.

The four forces. Moesta and Chris Spiek draw a diagram of the forces behind every switch:

Teams usually spend all their effort on pull, which means more features. Moesta and Spiek's diagram puts anxiety and habit on the other side of the scale, and you only see them by asking about them.

A worked mini example

Illustration, made up for this page. DocuNest sells a client document portal to small bookkeeping firms. The team interviews 4 firms that moved off email and shared spreadsheets in the last two months, including one that trialed and stopped.

Three of the four stories start the same way: a filing deadline, a week lost to chasing PDFs, documents sent to the wrong person. That is the push, and the week after the June deadline is the event that started active looking. The pull they describe is "one list of what each client still owes". Two anxieties come up: older clients refusing another app, and re-entering every client. The firm that stopped did so for the second reason, just as its busy season began.

The fourth firm switched for another reason. A new client had said emailing tax documents felt unsafe, so the firm wanted to look professional. That is a second job, kept apart rather than averaged in.

The job statement across three interviews: when a filing deadline is close and client documents are scattered, I want one list of what each client owes and one place for it to arrive, so I can file on time, without making clients learn an app or re-entering every client. The decisions follow from it. The homepage leads with deadline-week chasing. "Clients upload without a login" and client import sit next to the sign-up button. Outreach goes out in the weeks after a tax deadline.

Common mistakes

• Asking "why did you buy?" You get a tidy story made up afterwards. Ask what happened, where, and with whom, and the reasons show up in the events.
• Interviewing only fans. Near-switchers and people who left show you the anxiety and habit that stop most buyers.
• Waiting too long. After a few months, details fade and people fill gaps with what sounds sensible.
• Writing the job as a feature. "I want an upload portal" is a solution. The job is the progress in the person's circumstance.
• Merging different circumstances. Two different triggers usually mean two jobs and two messages.
• Stopping at the diagram. The point is what to say, what anxiety to remove, and when to show up.

How to run a switch interview

1. Define the switch. Write it as "from X to Y", for example from spreadsheets to your tool or from your tool to a rival, and name the decision the interviews should inform.
2. Recruit recent switchers. Find people who made that switch in the last 30 to 90 days and made the decision themselves, and include a few who nearly switched and stopped. Plan for 5 to 8 interviews per switch.
3. Frame the interview as a documentary. Tell the person you are rebuilding what happened, like a film, that small details matter, and that there are no wrong answers. Plan 45 to 90 minutes.
4. Start at the first thought and move forward. Pin down when and where they bought as a memory anchor. Then ask when they first thought the old way wasn't working, and walk forward in order through passive looking, active looking, deciding, and first use.
5. Probe for events and the four forces. Ask what happened that made them start looking, what they pictured life would be like after, what almost stopped them, and what they liked about the old way. Write down their exact words.
6. Summarize each interview the same day. Fill a timeline with dates, events and quotes. Sort what you heard into push, pull, anxiety and habit, and mark any stage you didn't cover.
7. Write the job across interviews. Group interviews with the same circumstance and progress. Write one job statement per group with the number of interviews behind it, and keep outliers as possible separate jobs.
8. Turn the job into decisions. Decide what to say, in the customers' words, what anxiety to remove, which trigger event to watch for, and what to stop building. Give each decision an owner.

Where it comes from

Jobs to be done is set out most fully in Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan's HBR article "Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done" (September 2016) and their book Competing Against Luck (2016). The switch interview, the timeline, and the forces diagram come from Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek's work at The Re-Wired Group and their site jobstobedone.org. In Demand-Side Sales 101, Moesta treats selling as the buyer's timeline rather than a funnel. This page is an independent summary in our own words. It isn't written, reviewed, or endorsed by the authors or their publishers. More frameworks are in the strategy books index, and for picking a first market from these jobs, see the beachhead segment guide.

Questions

What is a switch interview?

A one-on-one interview with someone who recently switched to a product, to a competitor, or away from one. You replay the decision in order, from the first thought that the old way wasn't working to first use, and collect events rather than opinions.

How many jobs-to-be-done interviews do I need?

The Moesta and Spiek guidance is that patterns for one job often show within 5 to 8 interviews. Recruit people who switched in the last 30 to 90 days, and include some who nearly switched and stopped.

What are the four forces of progress?

The push of the current situation and the pull of the new solution move a person toward a switch. The anxiety of the new solution and the habit of the present hold them back. A switch happens when the first two outweigh the last two.