Arkaro Insights

Innovation Insights: How Jobs to Be Done Transforms Product Development with Scott Burleson

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 34

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Your customers aren’t loyal to you; they’re loyal to the outcome after hiring your product. That single shift powers this deep dive with Scott Burleson, veteran product leader, author of The Jobs to Be Done Pyramid, and former John Deere innovator who helped turn a “don’t add anything” brief into a premium launch that outsold the economy model. We unpack how to find the real struggle in the work—like a mid‑mower deck change that wrecked knuckles and weekends—and design relief people will pay more for.

We walk through the JTBD Pyramid in plain language. At the base are product jobs—the gritty tasks of buying, learning, maintaining, and storing that often block adoption. Above that are core jobs—the solution‑agnostic outcomes such as mow grass, beautify property, or prevent plant shutdowns that remain stable even as technology changes around them. Then come identity layers, where B2B finally gets honest about emotion: the engineer who becomes the protector of uptime, the buyer who guards the P&L. At the top sit emotional states—confidence, relief, pride—that guide messaging and onboarding. Along the way, we dig into importance vs satisfaction scoring to focus investment, how to compare against alternatives outside your category, and the danger of over‑engineering when customers are already “past acceptable.”

We also get practical about AI. Today, it shines at compressing secondary research, drafting comprehensive need lists, and supporting analysis. It’s not yet a safe replacement for customer prioritisation, where context and trade‑offs rule—but that day may inch closer with well‑trained synthetic panels. The edge will belong to experts who pair domain judgement with smart AI workflows. If you’re ready to move beyond features and spec sheets and build products people actually “hire”—and become the kind of marketer or product leader customers trust—this conversation is your map.

If this helped sharpen your roadmap, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review—what job should we tackle next?

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Mark:

Welcome back to the Arcaro Insights Podcast. It's great to have you again. Thank you for joining us. So, our mission is to help business leaders and executives navigate the journey to a more adaptive world in the face of complexity. And let's face it, whilst we're all looking at a world where we see it to be curved uncertain, businesses really struggle to understand what tools and techniques to be applied. And so they end up doing what they used to do beforehand, which may not be so successful. So this is what I want to bring out of these podcast series and introduce you to some of the best people in the world who are coming up with ideas to help us navigate. Many of the ideas that I think about in my business career. And what's really an indicator of them is just how simple the root idea is, whether it be Goldrat's theory of constraints, think about Compose rules-based strategy. We think about, you know, Kinevin work of David Snowden and how to understand what context we're in that's really powerful in the adaptive world. I love a lot of the Derek Cabrera systems thinking. I find neuroscience really powerful. And of course, there's tools like Ostervalder's Valley Proposition Canvas. But just as a reminder, the real roots of the Ostervalder Valley Proposition Canvas find themselves in jobs to be done theory. And jobs to be done really was a bit of a breakthrough. Because the fundamental idea is people don't buy products, they hire products to get jobs done. And it's a beautifully simple idea, but has immense power. And that's why I'm so proud to have on today's podcast Scott Belson. Right from the start, he's been a pioneer of this work, working with another pioneer at Ulwick at StrategyN, and then moved to become the chief product officer at the AIM Institute. And he's written not one but two books. And I think today we might reference it first, but give more to the second, which is the Jobs to be done pyramid, where he's tackled some of the core challenges that existed, nuances around product jobs and consumption jobs, but really gone headfirst into thinking about how to unpack and organize emotional jobs to be done. Scott's not just a theorist. He used to work at John Deere. He applied all of these techniques to what became the Series 1 tractor launch, which is maybe one of the most successful tractor launches of all time. So welcome, Scott. Really happy to have you on board. How are you doing?

Scott:

I'm doing great, Mark. It's great to be here. I don't know all of those frameworks you mentioned. One, I tell you though, the um the theory of constraints, I remember reading that as a manufacturing engineer. My boss handed it to me, the book, the goal, I should mention. And I was like just completely blown away. And um, it's funny. I think you know, we think a lot of these new ideas and frameworks and stuff, but a lot of these ideas, if you if you know enough about them, you'll see they're actually a lot of times pretty old ideas with some newer labels. But the theory of constraints, that was that was uh that was huge. Because that was, I would say it's before my I had entered into an innovation type career, you know, as manufacturing engineering, but but at the same time, a lot of the things I learned about how to make manufacturing work better, more efficient, you know, a lot of those rolled right over. And some of your listeners may or may not know this, but you mentioned I've worked for Tony Olwick, and a lot of you know outcome-driven innovation was built on a lot of the quality of movement and Six Sigma methods from the 1980s. So every everything old is new again.

Mark:

Well, as Goldwright would say, it's standing on the shoulder of giants. It's just getting an incremental gain. That's what you have to do just to be that little bit better. Yeah. Anyway, we're here today to talk about jobs to be done. So there may well be some listeners for whom this is a pretty new idea. So can we just take a step back before we delve into your recent work and bring everyone up to speed about why it was such a pioneering idea in product innovation?

Scott:

Great question. You know, I ran across Jobs to be done when I was a product manager with John Deere, going on over two decades ago now, and getting it's getting further in the past. But the great thing about working for a company like John Deere, and I honestly did not even fully appreciate it at the time, is they had lots of resources. So if you're on a tractor project, you've got mechanical engineers, you've got electrical engineers, you've got material engineers, you even have computer engineers. Now it's not that novel, but 20 years ago it seemed interesting to me that these tractors had computers on them. But you've got all these resources, and also for market research, et cetera. But you know, you but but so as a product manager, it puts a lot of pressure on you because they're looking at you saying, hey, what conditions should this tractor be used in? Or or even something like more specific. What tire option should this have, or should it have cruise control, this or that? And it's like, oh boy, some product managers they just answer the questions, they just sort of use their, but I was like, man, we we don't need to go with what I think. And but also somebody, somebody's figured this out before now. I can't be the first person that's wrestled with this. And that led me to the writings of Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor at the time, who unfortunately passed away about five years ago. But but you know, he really brought jobs we've done to the forefront, and just began with this metaphor. A customer hires a product to accomplish a job. And with that phrasing, there's just so much there. It's like immediately we think our customers are our friends. We think we've got these great relationships, we think they love us, but it's really that we're really fooling ourselves. It is a transactional relationship. I mean, otherwise, think of all the technologies that have gone by the wayside. I'm sure Kodak thought it had good friends, and uh Blockbuster thought they had good Blockbuster video. I'm not sure if that's a global, uh name.

Mark:

Yeah, we understood.

Scott:

Yes, okay. In the US, there's a big chain of uh VHS and DVD rentals. But anyway, but those customers, did they stay loyal as in you know, product uh forms changed? No, it's a transaction relationship. And with a company like John Deere, you could really be fooled into thinking that they loved you because customers had shirts with your brand on it and light switches and all sorts of things. But it's really with this simple phrase, the customer hires a product to accomplish the job. Really, we re-established that no, our product is to help a customer to accomplish something, a goal, an objective, or to solve some problem. And we, as we began to bring that into John Deere, I ran across a gentleman whose name you mentioned, Tony Olwick, who had written a book around this same time called What Customers Want. And actually, a friend of mine was getting an MBA and he handed me the book and said, Man, you have to read this. And boy, did I not know what I was getting into when I picked up that book and read it, because it really my life has never been the same. But but the book was called What Customers Want. And it was really a very thorough description of how to execute an applied job to be done process where you begin with what a customer wants to accomplish and you break it down into the criteria and it had a research process and really lots of details for how to execute. And so I brought, we uh brought Tony and Stratogen into John Deere. And uh it, well, first of all, it clearly changed the way we did market research. But then beyond that, it changed the way we did product development. But beyond that, it changed the way we did marketing, it changed the way we spoke with our distributors, it changed, it really changed everything. And let me share this one last little anecdote uh to sort of close the loop on that. After I'd some years after I'd left John Deere, they asked me to come back in, and it was a sort of a very targeted type consulting project, but they asked me to look, go through all their past research and sort of bring together some conclusions. But when I did that, I could I looked at the research prior to bringing in jobs to be done, and then the research after bringing in jobs to be done. And research prior to jobs to be done, it was just all over the place. They were looking at attributes and desires and features, and it was just there was nothing common to any of it. After bringing in jobs to be done, the method was it was so standardized. You could compare across product groups and eras, and you could compare about customers and segments, and it really added a lot of clarification. But anyway, but I became so enthusiastic about it, I ended up actually joining Tony. I was privileged to do that at Stratagen, and which is really where I it was almost like getting a PhD or something. It was a great education for me to work with Tony and the incredible people at Stratigen.

Mark:

Fabulous so bring it real to our listeners. Can you tell me something? What was different about the valley proposition for the Series One tractor that came out as a result of?

Scott:

Yeah, so the one the one series tractor, well, it's a it's a great story. Actually, I think sometimes the stories of things that go badly are more interesting, but this one went well. But you know, we but the direction given to our product team was this. There was a previous tractor called the 2305. It was made in Japan by a company called Yanmar. Myanmar made the entire tractor and they shipped it and we sold it. And this was the instructions given to our product team. And it was very successful. It was the number two in market share. It was very successful. Kaboto's number one. Anyway, so the instructions were said, hey, take that tractor and let's build it in the U.S. Don't do anything else, don't add to it, don't mess it up. It's simple. And also, as part of those instructions, we were told this is the bottom end of the market, the smallest tractors, and nobody will pay for anything. All they want is a cheaper price. That is all they want. These are your instructions. Bring the tractor here, don't add any costs, make it cheap. You know, those were our instructions. But we took advantage of a little loophole because there were two factories in the U.S. who were fighting over who was going to build it. One was in Georgia, one was in Wisconsin. And so we had this massive matrix of executives having oversight into what we were doing because it was between these two factories. Well, that oversight meant that we had the opportunity to sort of make a bunch of decisions, just do a bunch of stuff, because it wasn't entirely clear who was in charge, because you had to go way up the ladder. We took advantage of that. We did not follow our instructions. We looked at this market and we studied it and we looked at, we we realized there were lots of jobs customers wanted to do, especially, well, when you look at jobs for it's not just the jobs you perform with your tractor. There's another category of jobs that people perform at as they actually use the product. And I will give one very specific example. They had to change their mower deck or remove the mower deck. This is the mower deck is underneath the tractor. Sometimes it's called a belly mower or a mid mower. And it was very cumbersome to, it was very difficult to take that out. You had to pull these pins, you get grease on you, you might cut your hands. There are lots of jobs like this. I just mentioned this one for illustration. But so what we decided, well, we we we found all these unmet needs, all these um all these outcomes that were unsatisfied. And this was a big one. It was it was people were having a lot of trouble performing this job of changing this mower. And there were a lot of others too. But so what we decided to do is we were gonna come out with an economy model and a premium model. Now, the economy model would stay very close to our instructions given. It was gonna be bare bones. In fact, it was going to be less, it was gonna be even more economical than the model replaced. But the premium model, we were going to we added lots of features. We added this premium air ride seat. We had this cool function that to change that mower deck, you could drive on the deck, and there's all this mechanical stuff that had to happen, and it would connect itself and disconnect itself more or less automatically. Now, one of the reasons that one of the reasons to even do research is if you're tackling a difficult problem, such as change the mid-mower deck, it's difficult for a reason. So we ran into major technical challenges to make that happen. So what we had to do was go back to management and we had to say, we need more time, we need more money, here's our data using jobs to be done, here's our data. If we solve this problem, it will be it will be a huge deal, but it's going to be hard. And I can't give you a date of when we're going to solve it. It's like there's this ongoing joke, you know, let's schedule a technical breakthrough. We'll have it next Friday. You can't, you can't do that. And so we really spent a lot of money. In fact, we had two parallel teams working on the problem at the same time. And ultimately we did solve it. But so when we came out with these mow with these tractors, I just gave that one example, this mid-mower deck that attaches itself, but also we with this premium C cruise control. We added lots of lots of features to the high end. And we were absolutely, when we were showing this to leadership, just ridiculed, just absolutely ridiculed for this, for for ignoring, ignoring our instructions. I mean, I guess you have to give them credit. They were trying to host the fire. We just, we literally just did it anyway. And when the tractor came out, so we the economy and the premium, but the premium was quite a bit more expensive. And guess what? The premium outsold the economy. Now, the premium had substantially higher margins, but but so it was just a massive success, not only in volume, but in profitability. But really, we didn't do anything fancy or crazy. We started out our conversation talking about, hey, the most proven methods are really basic. They go well back, way back. We looked at what jobs the customers wanted to accomplish. We looked at what was difficult, we looked at the competition, and also this was something they weren't doing very well. So we we really didn't do anything fancy other than, I mean, we definitely took a risk in not following instructions. But but but then of course, what happens? When it's a big success, there's no shortage of people taking credit for it. I can tell you that.

Mark:

Brilliant. Well done. So you became an expert with Ulwick on uh jobs to be done. But I think you stood on the shoulders of giant in the last book that you put together. And I think as I read it, you picked up a couple of frustrations and then you've taken them forward. You know, there's the issue of um a product job versus the consumption job. But also tell me more about the emotional jobs piece, why you felt that needed unpacking and developing.

Scott:

Yeah, you know, one great benefit of teaching jobs to be done is you really learn what people struggle with. You learn what's difficult, certain concepts. And there were really four areas that that uh new product managers and innovators had difficulty with. One was honestly just the language of jobs to be done was some sort of could be a bit academic. And as an one example, which I believe you mentioned, there's this term called consumption job. Well, consumption job dates back to an article by Rita McGrath in the 1990s that predated jobs to be done. It just means something like when you use a product, you maintain a product, you buy you purchase a product. These are put this way, let's go back to my tractor. So people purchase the tractor to say to mow their grass or maintain their properties or mow their grass or whatever. Nobody buys a tractor because they want to maintain it, or they don't buy it for the joy of buying it, or they don't buy it because they want to store the tractor. There's a this category of jobs around usage of a product, and that's what consumption jobs are. But the term was not well understood, so I renamed those to be product jobs, which to me is more intuitive. Another thing that was a challenge, though, is that jobs to be done, it's a verbal language-based way. You know, we describe the markets using words, which I mean that makes sense. But but the vast majority of people are more visually minded. So that was another part of the jobs we've done, pyramid. Calcanomic, a visual structure that sort of contains these different types of jobs. And so at the base of the pyramid, we have product jobs, which are the jobs. So these are buy a tractor, maintain a tractor, store a tractor. It's all about using the tractor, you know, all these things. Now, the next level up, uh, core jobs, level two, these are the jobs you prefer. This is the reason you purchase a tractor. This is mow the grass or maintain your property. And by the way, there, so now we're independent of the solution, because you could also hire a service to mow the grass, or you could buy some other product type, or you could hire a robotic mower. So now you're with level two, you can see your your competition a bit more accurately. And now I think this was the really the essence of your question. What about emotional jobs? Well, traditionally with jobs we've done, we had this category of emotional jobs, sort of a catch-all, how you want to be perceived or how you want to feel. But in practice, nobody really used them. Not much. And but it occurred to me something that was really missing was this concept of identity. And and so I've got my level three and four, I'll just we'll just we'll just keep those in one bucket for simplicity. Levels three and four are about the identity. So when you bought that tractor, how does that help you to become the person you want to become? Clearly, that could differ for different people, but I mean, if you're a person that wants to maintain this beautiful yard, I mean, maybe part of the reason you purchased that tractor is because you want you you're creative and you see yourself as an artist or something, you know, or maybe it's just very minimal and and like very Spartan, but you see yourself as a minimalist. So this either way, the pert you bought this thing, this tractor, and then you have to, there's things you have to do, you have to buy it, you have to maintain it, whether you bought it to accomplish certain things, mow the grass or whatever, but it helps you to become a minimalist or it helps you to become an artist or a creator. And so those are that's your level three and four. And that seems like a really big miss in jobs we've done. So these level three and fours are about when you purchase this product, and I encourage anybody, the next time you go buy something, for any anything, ask yourself the question how does this thing I bought, this vacation I took, this hotel I booked, this, I don't know, this necklace, this jewelry, this this smartphone, this computer, this Mac. Why did you buy a Mac versus PC or whatever? Or why did you buy the expensive, you know, the super expensive mug versus the cheap one? How is that consistent with who you see yourself as and how that helps you to become who you aspire to become? And I think you I think you'll have an answer to that. And then finally, the top of the pyramid is emotional jobs, which is literally just the emotions that you have throughout the rest of the process.

Mark:

Brilliant. Now you've got no idea how excited I was when I heard that you're gonna be putting this book into the greater world. Just listen to me because most of my world is B2B.

Scott:

Yes. Yes.

Mark:

You know, as if people interested in marketing and innovation, we get it that it's people by products. And just because it's B2B, it's still emotional. It's part of the whole value proposition. But that message has been a battle. I remember giving a training session with a team on commercial excellence, and we were talking about value propositions. And the client was thumbing through my deck just before, and he saw a slide which is a triangle, a little bit like your pyramid, and the word Maslow, you know, and emotional needs. And he just said, you can rip that out. That has got nothing to do with today's session. This is B2B, Mark. I don't know what you're doing, but get it out. So I held my nerve, kept it in, and we delivered, and we found a way of making it at work. But I'd love you, just if you can, maybe recount an example from the book or an example or otherwise, of a B2B example, which helps bring home why the emotional jobs, the three types of emotional jobs, are just not meaningful, but create value and create revenue and create profits. You got something to say?

Scott:

100%. People are still people. So I'll I'll see if I can rec if I can describe an example and be and be sort of uh hide the characters if I can. So there was there was a person uh in in a factory situation, and uh they were an engineer, like a like um an industrial type engineer, and they were um in this particular factory, um, they had lots of older equipment, lots of older equipment. It worked fine, but part of what this person was choosing to do is he was looking across all this equipment and saying, well, if this piece fails, then our production shut down. So, you know, maybe we should have a bunch of inventory. But if you're an industrial engineer, you don't like that as a solution, right? You so what the person was targeted with is hey, let me create, let me uh bring in some more machinery, maybe it's some sort of smaller in scope, but that can also, you know, so when this goes down, we've got a backup plan. So there's the they've got all the product. So I don't think anybody disputes the this. So I said that we've got to purchase it, maintain it. So the thing is the level two job is to, you know, ensure redundancy or prevent a plant shutdown. But but but are we finished? Why did that how when that person said, hey, I want to have these redundant systems that completely says something about who they see themselves as. They're a person that keeps the plant running. They're a person that can be depended on. They're a person that when this other machinery goes down and they would have had to send employees home, they're a person that protected the rest of the enterprise from that. These are elements of their identity. So I Mark, I hear this all the time about you know, B2B, you know, not having this. And at this point, I mean, I work for the AIM Institute, and our specialty is uh B2B innovation. Our clients are B2B. So I feel like I have I have some, you know, some standing with this market. And but anyway, but it's very common to overlook that. But ask a question when a person's, I mean, it could be anything. If they're buying a, so let's go back to the tractor. Say you're, you know, you're a purchasing agent, you're buying a hose, you know, you're buying a hydraulic hose for this tractor, and you're going, you're really beating up on your supplier and getting something cheap. Is that, you know, you really want the cheapest hose, you know? Well, that says something like your identity too. You're a person that protects the bottom line. You're the protector of the profits that has that is completely identity related. And when we can make these connections, we can be better marketers. How one thing that's so funny about B2B, for all the claims of, you know, emotional jobs don't work. I can I get that you don't believe that because when I look at your websites, they're completely boring. And it's a big list of products and specs and stuff, and it's just like complete. Talk about, talk to that purchasing agent. You know, with our stuff, you really protect the profitability. Talk to that industrial engineer, you know, with this equipment, you keep the plant running. You know, you you keep you protect the livelihoods of others. Speak to speak to the. And I'm just coming up with these examples off the top of my head. But um, with just a little bit, a small thought experiment. I mean, I think it's very clear that you know the decisions we make are in support of who we believe we are, and it there's lots of room for that in product development, market and marketing, and sales, too.

Mark:

Thank you. With you on that one completely. So I just go back to the idea that we started with that we're really here to help people who feel like the word's becoming a lot more complex and uncertain. Yeah, and they're moving in from the Kinevin world of the, you know, the complicated to the complex domain. But it surely is a bit of a relief when you hear like Ulwicks describe the phrase is that jobs are stable over time. It seems like everything else is uncertain, but jobs are stable. Can you just expand on that to help people have a little bit more confidence?

Scott:

Yeah, jobs are stable over time. Just take travel, travel from A to B. And I sort of pick that, you know, I'll take I picked that particular reason because we've heard most people have heard the Henry Ford quote, or see if I can say it without butchering it, you know, nobody, oh golly, you know, nobody, if I'd asked customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse. That's it. If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse, seeming to imply that they couldn't have said they wanted this. Of course they couldn't have said they wanted a car. They didn't know what a car was because that's a solution, that's a product. But could they have told you that they wanted to travel from one place to another? And could they have told you they want to get there safely? And could they have told you they want to be entertained? And could they have told you they want to take people with them and stuff with them and they want to be, you know, comfortable temperature-wise? They could have told you all of that. And that's in the like 1910s, but let's back up. How early, how far back do we go when that's not true, when people wanted to travel from one place to another? I think you got to break out your Bible. And uh, I think there were wanderers from the very first book. So I think for all of all of time, people have traveled from A to B. There will always be solutions for that. And all future people will also travel from A to B. Now, that's not to say that new jobs are not created, but new jobs are created really, it's their product jobs. So, like um, there was there was no job to update the software before we had computers, for example. But certainly, uh, and technically speaking, but that's a product job. So jobs that relate to products or product jobs, you know, they can change as solutions go away. There's no job anymore around VHS tapes or whatever. But level two core jobs, the things we want to accomplish, travel from A to B, take a vacation, prepare a meal, those are going, those have been around and will be around. So we don't say they we say the the terminology we always use is that they're stable. They're stable over time. So we don't we stop a bit short of saying nothing changed. They don't change, but stable.

Mark:

But I guess the thing that is changing is potentially more new solutions coming in, so you've got more competitive space. I want to move now from you know, understanding what people want to do a bit to start figuring out how do you understand where you sit versus the competition and and what you need to do to get ahead of the competition to have a more successful innovation. How do you use jobs to be done to achieve that?

Scott:

Yeah. So let's just go back to the tractor example. So that we had this product job of, you know, of you know, we we well, I'll just pick an outcome. Let's say, let's say minimize the physical effort to change the mower deck. Let's say that. Now, just so that's the criteria you use to compare yourself to your competition. And at that point in time, basically everybody was the same in that it was just very hard, physical, dirty, difficult job uh or task to perform. And so, so that's what that's one of the criteria you use to compare yours versus another. And so once you that's the beauty of it. So if you begin with the higher level job, maybe you beautify your property or whatever, you break it down into the criteria that you're using, you get into the product jobs, you know, minimize the physical effort to change your mower deck, and you'd have uh, you know, another list of them, then that's the then there you have your problem to be solved. And of course, you have to solve it in a somewhat of a meaningful way versus what what's uh what's what else is out there. I don't know how you quantify that. I've heard people say it's got to be 15% better. I don't know what I don't really know how to do that, but it definitely has to be something substantial better than what a customer's other alternatives are. And by the way, something else jobs to be done to get you out of is so we should stick with the tractor example, looking beyond just tractors, but hey, what are the other options? Maybe you hire a service, maybe you hire something else to do it. And for beautiful for beautifying your property, you know, then that helps you to really see now you're seeing things the way your customers see it. Because we'll we will all we would always be drawn to seeing the world through our own technologies and the stuff we build, but that's not how customers think about it for the most part.

Mark:

I mean, I it may be a bit old-fashioned to you, but I still have great value with clients just talking them on to 10 scale. Five is, yeah, this just just solves the problem. I can actually do what I you know, plow the field with this tractor.

Scott:

Yeah.

Mark:

But uh, if you could get it to X and I define what 10 would be, this would be, you blow my mind. You can then start, especially with a group of people having a debate about the specifications just come out of the room if you just stop and open your ears once you give them that two-point framing, you know, from my experience.

Scott:

I agree. And that's one of things I will so I I should mention this. I work with the AIM Institute, and so Dan Adams has created his methodology called New Product Blueprinting. And I I bring this up because of just what you said. It's more common in jobs you've done to have a five point scale, but Dan uses a ten point scale for satisfaction. So, how satisfied are you from one to ten? But what I Love about it is that five, the number five is barely acceptable. That's that's the scale point, it's barely acceptable. So if somebody's rating their ability to change their mower deck or reduce the effort to change the mower deck, if it's lower than five, barely acceptable, they are definitely looking for uh some improvement. If it's higher than that, then there's somewhat, then it's somewhat acceptable, and they might not be as drawn to the purchase uh another another product.

Mark:

And of course, the other great thing I've got out of this type of discussion is it stops you over engineering solutions.

Scott:

Yeah, for sure. Because he's so that's a big one, Mark. You used to work in engineering for John Deere. Um, you know, I'll this is an example I like to give with that. And by the way, I have to if I I guess I'll plug my first book. That I'll I go into that in my first book, The Statue in the Stone, on that, because I I'll give a very concrete example uh since we're talking about John Deere. So the cat the cab engineers at John Deere, every morning they would get up, and there was a group of them, these acoustic engineers, they've got one job to make that cab tractor quieter. Because by the by the nature of the machine, it tends to be very loud. And you can imagine it'd be nice to be quiet and also be nice to play a podcast or music inside, and it'd also be nice to not damage your hearing. And so these engineers that get up every day, how do I make this cab quieter? And so there's all sorts of engineering that goes into surfaces and you know, and fancy models and foams and just all kinds of crazy stuff I don't know anything about. But the question is, how do these engineers know when, if that's getting quieter and quieter, how do they know when it's by the way, when things when you're improving that performance, usually, well, what happens? With technology, there's usually a few pretty big gains you can get just by being smart using engineering. Then it gets actually, oh, it's a little bit more difficult and it gets it gets progressively more difficult. And at some point, it's getting to where it costs like lots, it costs a little bit of money for those first gains. Now it costs a lot of money for that final little bits of making it quieter. And you could apply this to making something stronger, you can apply it to making something lighter. There's several other examples. But the point is, when have the engineers gone past the point of where customers are not looking at for it to be quieter? They're not looking for it to be lighter, they're not looking for it to be any more stronger, and yet if the engineers continue, they're making it more expensive and they're made they're literally damaging, uh, damaging value. I mean, the it's funny, there's there's lots of markets that are trying to make their products quieter. I mean, sorry, not quieter, but but lighter, especially like automotive, uh, where you're wanting to lighter means better fuel efficiency. And so you go from steel to aluminum, that gets it. So that's sort of the you've done the easy work when you go from steel to aluminum, because you can still have aluminum pretty strong and it's a lot substantially lighter. But now, if you go from aluminum aluminum to titanium, now you've you've gotten something that's that's worth its cost like 50, 70% more. And so, you know, you got to know where that those thresholds are. And I don't think that's hand that question's handled very much. I'll just plug my first book, Statue and the Stone. I do, I do go through some models of how how you know where those points are.

Mark:

Yeah, I mean, I think the risk of overnight engineering, I came from DuPont. That was a company that had that risk of doing and uh, you know. And the other thing I like about Dan Adams, and I'm sure you you're involved, is it's not just how satisfied you are with a job, but how important it is. Because that stops you innovating things that you might have a potential to have a big gap on your competition, but frankly, customers don't care.

Scott:

Not important in the years.

Mark:

You know, there are better things to worry about. So, and you know, that's for me, as I can see I'm hinting at the importance of really getting into customer psychology and what means to them. Sort of teeing up, maybe my next question for you as we're heading towards the end. And I have to ask this question, and for the record, we are now October 2025, and pretty much everything you read in the press at the moment is AI. Yeah, so yeah. So if you're listening, and let's see how you're good at predicting and how we think the significances are for people in the future listening to this podcast. As you look at you, the work that you do in um jobs to be done helping innovators, where is it that AI can be impactful and where is it it may be overhyped?

Scott:

Yeah, so I'll give the current state and then I'll I'll play a fool's game and I'll speculate about the future a bit. So prior to AI, so I'll I'll speak about my own experiences as a practitioner. So, in other words, I'm interviewing customers, I'm gathering customer needs, we're doing surveys, et cetera. So prior to OD, prior to AI, it was always a big step to do a lot of secondary research. So there's I've got there's lots of things I would do, but I would read customer forums, I've got uh, but I would just like me take an example. If you're studying a med tech field, a great thing about med tech, if you're studying a surgery, for example, is there's lots published on that surgery. You've got lots of academics and physicians, there's lots of information. Before I go talk, before I pay, you know, $500 an hour or whatever for a surgeon's time and my time, frankly, I'm gonna spend a lot of time reading, doing all this background work, reading all these medical journals. I'll go ahead and I actually reveal one of my secrets here. I usually say it's one of my secrets, but for MedTech, should I say this? I'll go ahead and say it. They are there are there's YouTube videos of surgeons teaching procedures to other surgeons, telling them what to watch out for. It's a wealth of information. But for each, so that's just one, but for each market, you may maybe you find a maybe for one forum, or I mean for one market, there's a forum that's used. But anyway, point is you do lots of secondary research. And so as I first started using AI, that was the first thing is I can do that a whole lot faster with AI. I can just instead of reading, you know, two going through two dozen highly technical journals, I can just get a lot of those results with AI. So it replaces secondary research for me. Now, so, but then as you get used to it, it's like, hey, I could just sort of program in the job and just ask it for a complete set of needs, a complete set of outcomes. And you can do that. You can do that. And so here's so here's the the current state. You know, even with with um, you know, jobs who done no outcome-driven innovation research follows the common market research practice, also uh is well published in design thinking as well, where you have these two phases, also just brainstorming or problem solving. Where the first phase is, hey, what are all the possible customer needs? What's the complete list? And again, I mentioned it's from brainstorming because if you're problem solving, one of the first things you define the problem, and then you come up with all the possible solutions. So AI is great. There's zero risk at coming up with all the possible customer needs in a market before you go talk to anybody or even after you talk to anybody. Get that complete list. Now, as you're interviewing customers, you'll hear some phrases that you might not quite understand. So you can further use AI to sort of, hey, let me get some understanding and greater context about this. Um, and the reason, and of course, it will give you um hallucinations periodically, but you're not making any assumptions about what's important. You're not making any assumptions, so it's still safe. And so at this point in time in in late 2025, that's really where it pretty much it basically sort of ends, in that now you still need to do surveys and get real customers to prioritize things. Because this when you also go to to prioritize, you got to be real clear about what who you're targeting. When you throw the net a bit wider during the divergent phase of gathering all the needs, now you got to be really focused. And so at this point, you still need to use real customers to prioritize. Now, I will say, once you've got your data back, you can use AI to help analyze the data in ways you could not do before. So I think that's where we are today. The speculation, though, is where would that go to? It would it be possible you could populate a database and then have these synthetic users to prioritize them for you. And I'm gonna say at some point that probably will be possible. It's just, but but uh I but it's not but today I feel like that would be too too high of a risk. But eventually, I feel like I mean if you if you educate the system well enough, it should be able to give you the answer. Uh so I think that's where it'll ultimately go.

Mark:

But it's gotta be something that's based on real human behavioral science.

Scott:

That's what I mean. It's gonna be give it the inputs first. You're gonna have to train it first, right? And even again, I'm not even I'm not saying that's now. I'm just saying, I mean, one of the things, and actually this was a chapter in my first book. I forget the name of the chapter, but it was essentially about the fool's errand of predicting what's gonna happen with the technology. It's just like people are notoriously bad at it. I mean, no matter what, it no matter actually, it almost seems like the more expertise you have at a technology, it's almost like the worse you are. And I think that's because you're in you're so embedded in the stuff you know. And honestly, you probably you attach some maybe some identity to the to your expertise. Let's just take a very concrete example I just brought up. Just imagine you're a data analyst and like you're a statistical whiz, and you've spent 20 years of your life being the like the best at statistics ever. And now potentially, you know, some a college kid could ask a few props, could take your data set and could and replace your 20 years of knowledge of then that's that's um maybe that's an extreme example, but you can see where if you have entrenched expertise, you you might be a little blinded to the possibility of how much it could change things.

Mark:

Totally. I mean, any good book on innovation within the first or second chapters talks about something like being curious, having a child-like mindset, a beginner's mindset, because without that, you can't be open to change.

Scott:

With one last little thing. You know, when digital photography, the first people to use digital photography were um at any scale were insurance adjusters because they could take quick pictures, the resolution didn't matter, none of that mattered, but high-end photographers did not go away as digital photography got better, right? And so my suspicion is that 20-year pro in statistics, he'll just need to get good at using AI, and the 20-year expert using AI will outperform the novice at AI. So I think expertise, I don't I think the value of that will still be well, they'll still be there, but they'll just they cannot, they have to adopt AI as part of their tool set.

Mark:

Well, Scott, it should become as no surprise to say, I've got a lot of questions up my sleeve, but I haven't gotten the time. So I'm gonna ask you if you would think about coming back again, because there's many more things. You know, just as a little teaser, maybe for next time. I loved the emphasis you were giving on your book to try and bring jobs to be done and expand its usefulness. Uh, and that it comes up several places because it's traditionally had the domain of product innovation, but you have a pretty good stab at teasing us into thinking of other applications for jobs to be done. So if we could discuss that another time, amongst many other things, I'd love to do that. So thank you for doing that. But there is one last question. I really hope the listeners have enjoyed this, and I do hope they're desperate for more. Where can they find you? Where can they get more? And where can they build their expertise?

Scott:

Yeah, so if you go to jobstobedonepyramid.com, you'll you'll find my latest on that. Uh, my blog is at learnpm.pro. That's learnpm as in product management, learnpm.pro. And I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. I think that's how we connected, Mark. And that's you, you can actually go to W. Scott Burleson, B-U-R-L-E-S-O-N, and that directs to my LinkedIn page.

Mark:

Fabulous, Scott. Really thank you for your time. Well done. Really great show. Thank you. Hope you appreciate it. Bye-bye.

Scott:

Thank you.

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Mark Blackwell

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Scott Burleson

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