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Find out if your prospect undertook this project to gain wider recognition, or for any other ...
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Listen for the outcomes that were expected from this project. What other stakeholders are involved in the decision-making? This will tell us who inside the business owns the project and its results. What does success look like from the business with a client’s perspective? Listen for emotional outcomes. Functional outcomes such as price or convenience often mask deeper needs. I...
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Listen for alternative solutions. Look beyond your direct competitors. Often in B2B, you’re competing with internal resources or workarounds, fu...
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Finally, at the end of each interview, ask: “Based on the sorts of questions I’ve asked so far, is there anything I should have asked but haven’t?”
Debrief on each interview with your interviewing partner while it’s all still fresh. Compare notes and jot down answers to the following questions: What were your big takeaways? Anything we wish we’d asked? What should we do differently next time? What surprised us?
Surprises are critical. If you heard nothing surprising… I’m sorry, but you’ve just wasted an interview.
highlight quotes from the transcript that answer any of our 12 questions
Copy them out of the transcript and group them in a separate document under the 12 questions.
If you find segments of customers with different goals, then draft different customer journeys for each use case based on their goals (desired outcomes).
Once you have several quotes from different customers for each of the 12 boxes, start to consolidate them into a few that best express the sentiment.
Most of our clients’ big wins came from Jobs Interview insights.
Your growth model is your guide to choosing which work to do.
You’ll map your growth model in 4 steps.
Find your North Star Metric (NSM): the number that ultimately tracks value delivered to customers and causes revenue. This expresses your ultimate goal tangibly.
value delivered to customers
Find the key drivers that increase the North Star: from when people first encounter your business to the point where they’re happy, loyal, revenue-generating customers.
Identify your growth levers: the activities that could have the greatest impa...
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Identify your rate-limiting step (RLS): where you can focus to have...
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Customer value is what your NSM tracks.
We deliver value to customers when we help them make progress in a particular situation. [ 1 ]
But a second order indicates that the first order went okay—that the product is helping the customer make progress in some way.
since 1997, Amazon’s NSM has been “repeat purchases.”
For SaaS businesses and apps, it’s often a number of active users per day, week, or month, whichever is norma...
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To find your NSM, ask: “If customers absolutely loved our product, how would they naturally behave? How many of them are behaving like this?”
You can stress test your NSM with this checklist:
Aligned incentives: Does it increment when you deliver value to your customer? And if you succeed in moving it, will your company earn money and grow?
Full funnel: Does it represent the results of optimizing your entire customer journey from first contact through retention / churn? Or ...
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Absolute number: Can it keep increasing forever? Avoid ratios and percen...
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Simple and memorable: Will everybody in the company be able to understand and remember it and...
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If your revenue is highly concentrated, as I learned at PayPal, the total number of customers matters less than the value of each customer. In that case, align the team around usage with a North Star (and pricing) that tracks usage. If your customers are all worth similar amounts, like users of a meditation app, small business accounting software, or direct-to-consumer ecommerce, you want to focus on increasing the total number of customers. In that case, you’d want a “number of active users” North Star. Is
Before you find product-market fit: If you’re still figuring out who your customer is, how you get them, and what value you’re providing… it’s hard to pick an indelible North Star. You can use a hypothesized North Star and update it with each pivot until you have enough evidence (traction) for a definitive metric.
When you add a new business line: Amazon’s North Star has been “repeat purchases” since 1997. But when they added Amazon Web Services, an application hosting platform for developers, it was a different business that needed a different North Star. It’s probably one that tracks server usage. A new business line that delivers different value to different customers requires a new North Star. This is rare at startups.
When you’re wrong: You might revisit your North Star if you think it’s leading people in the wrong direction or your business model has fundamentally changed. For example, HubSpot changed their NSM from weekly active users to weekly active teams—because they re...
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Key drivers represent the results of the work people do to move the North Star, but not the work itself.
For a SaaS or eCommerce business, the key drivers might be your funnel metrics like traffic, conversion rate, activation rate, and retention. Each key driver gets a metric and an owner, a single accountable person.
Useful key driver metrics often track patterns of behavior that indicate a shift in the user’s beliefs about your product.
Key drivers change as the business matures.
Once you agree on two or three key drivers, direct your attention to the work needed to move each one. We’ll call that work a “lever.”
Work with your key-driver owners to identify the most promising work and give each lever a metric.
For levers, it’s important to set targets around results rather than work units. (Rememb...
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Here are a few questions to help you decide which key drivers to prioritize: If it works, can it be really big? Or will it only ever cause incremental growth? How good or bad is your metric compared to relevant benchmarks? Will working on it help us learn something important? Does it cause growth or merely correlate with it? Does it take advantage of your strengths as a team? Is it part of a positive feedback loop? Can it become self-sustaining? Is it a bottleneck that slows down other parts of the system? (If you improve it, will the whole system run faster?)
