How Would You Beat?

How would you beat Zoom Using Jobs-to-be-Done?

March 31, 2020 thrv Season 1 Episode 5
How Would You Beat?
How would you beat Zoom Using Jobs-to-be-Done?
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In this episode, we look at how to use Jobs-to-be-Done innovation methods to beat Zoom. Zoom has a great video conferencing product that is helping a lot of people and companies in this anxious, pandemic time. We thought it would be interesting to apply JTBD to Zoom to get insights on how to beat this leading company. In this episode, we have a special guest, Audrey Crane, a partner with Design Map. Audrey is a Zoom customer, and we interview her to demonstrate JTBD techniques to identify customer needs.

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Key moments from today's topic on how you would beat Zoom with Jobs-to-be-Done:

00:00 Jay Haynes and Jared Ranere cover the effect the pandemic has had on Zoom and discuss how to apply Jobs-to-be-Done theory.

10:20 Jay and Jared are joined by Audrey Crane to discuss her job needs.

17:46 Audrey talks about how she uses video conferencing to acquire customers as a JTBD.

23:00 Jay , Jared and Audrey explore the value of a product that could help acquire customers and build trust in a better way.

36:13 Jay and Jared summarize the discussion on Zoom and the future of JTBD post Covid.

Be sure to subscribe to learn more about JTBD!

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Learn more about JTBD: https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done
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Follow Jay Haynes on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/
Follow Jared Ranere on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredranere/

Jay Haynes :

Welcome to our podcast, How Would You Beat? In each episode we pick a company and talk about how you could use jobs-to-be-done innovation methods to beat that company's product. We'll discuss innovation theory and explain the methods so you can put the theory into practice at your company. I'm Jay Haynes, the founder and CEO of thrv, that's thrv without the vowels thrv.com. We help product marketing and sales teams use jobs-to-be-done innovation methods to build market and sell great products. I'm here with my colleague, Jared Ranere. So in this episode with everyone having to work from home remotely, and now using video conferencing systems more than ever today, we thought we would focus on Zoom. So how would you beat Zoom now that there's a big boom in video conferencing and of course we're not telling anybody not to use video conferencing, everybody should be safe and stay home. But it does seem like every company is going down in value due to the pandemic. But Zoom is actually doing well It now has a market cap of approaching $40 billion, depending on what's happening in the market today. And they have a great product, they do have a really great product in what was a fairly crowded market. There were definitely other competitors, big competitors. And Zoom has done exceptionally well. And of course, we use it for our customers, we like it. So what we want to look at today is if you were trying to compete with Zoom, how would you do it? Is there a market for video conferencing? And will video conferencing become a commodity? So how are you going to compete with a company like Zoom that's clearly growing fast and likely to see a lot of increased demand for their products and services. And we'll look at jobs-to-be-done innovation theory and how you could apply that to beating a big competitor like zoom.

Jared Ranere :

And if you recall, the way we look at building a competitive product strategy using jobs-to-be-done is we're trying to answer five key questions. Who is the key customer that you're going to target? In other words, who's benefiting from the job getting done? Who's benefiting from the use of your product? You need to know who that is. And you need to know what the market is. In other words, what is the job to be done? What are those customers trying to do? What is their goal? And so that's why it's so important to ask the question of is the market video conferencing? If you are focused on video conferencing, can you win and can you beat Zoom? Or is the market some other goal that customers are trying to achieve? And making that decision as a team when you're going after a competitor that's as fierce as Zoom is incredibly important to align What you're going to do next? And once you define what that market is, you need to know the size of that market. Can you generate enough revenue to warrant the investment to go head to head with a competitor like Zoom? Is there an opportunity to make money there and how much money? And then you need to know what problems you're going to solve? What are the unmet needs, and as you recall, the unmet needs are the factors that are could go wrong, the actions plus the variables that are going slowly and inaccurately, when you're trying to get a job done. It's the obstacles to achieving your goal and jobs theory, we think that the struggle to get a job done causes the purchase. And so if we're going to create a switch between how somebody is getting the job done today, and using our new product, we're going to take market share, then we need to know what that struggle is and we need to help customers overcome it. And our ability to overcome it is the customer value we can generate in the market. That's the fifth question, what is the value we're going to generate? What are the features, we're going to develop the products we're going to develop that's going to help people get the job done better than the existing solutions in the market. So to start with, if we're going to put together this product strategy, the first question is who is Zooms customer? Well, it seems like everybody's starting to use Zoom. Right? I got an invitation the other day from my aunts and uncles and all my cousins to do a family's Zoom meeting. I have never had a meeting before with my aunts, uncles and cousins. But we're in a new environment now. And people are using video conferencing in a new way. So Zooms customer you know, their their true target is likely professionals. You might call them knowledge workers, but it's growing more and more people are starting to use Zoom. So we can define the customer very broadly as professionals, knowledge workers and in general consumers. So the next question is, what is the job? Is it have a video conference? Is his video or is it just video conference like video conference as a verb? Is that a job to be done? Jay, what do you think about this?

Jay Haynes :

Yeah, it's a great question. And it is interesting to watch the demand just absolutely explode. My eight year old daughter had a Zoom video conference with her friends. So it's, it seems that video conferencing is a market for everyone. So is Is that true? And is that the right way to approach this from a product strategy standpoint? If you're gonna try it in beat Zoom? So it's a great question. Jared, you asked, is have a video conference, a market? Is it actually a job to be done? And what's interesting is right now, it seemed like the answer to that is yes, because there's just an enormous explosion in everybody having to use video conferencing. But remember, video conferencing is a solution. It's a solution to the jobs that we're trying to for now, it's just that what's happened is there's this big, almost external force, this virus that came in and said everybody now needs to get on video conferencing in order to get their jobs done. Right. So what you would normally do is use another solution. But now video conferencing since we're all sheltering in place in our homes, and on the internet, video conferencing is is going to explode. We don't want to say, hey, videoconferencing isn't an interesting thing. It's certainly there's going to be demand for it. But if you were looking at this as an executive, excuse me making a product roadmap investment decision, would you want just video conferencing? Would you want to start competing with Zoom head to head just on video conferencing? Now, in this environment, this would be a situation where to be in the game. You obviously you're going to have to have some sort of videoconferencing. It's a component of solutions because in the environment where right now people absolutely need to communicate remotely with each other. So getting in the game, having video conferencing elements is obviously a good thing because people are looking for all sorts of solutions to be able to video conference. But in the long term strategy and making that investment in the roadmap, the way to differentiate is really to figure out what are the jobs that video conferencing is being hired for? And so when we think about this, of course, we think of all jobs have an action verb and an object. It's a goal and it doesn't have any solutions. So if we run those tests on video conferencing, it yes, it has an action verb. Yes, it has an object. Yes, it is a goal, but it does contain a solution. Video conferencing is a solution to getting jobs done. So we want to look underlying those jobs. Underlying that statement about having a video conference that and figure out really what are the goals that different people are Trying to use it for obviously, having a bunch of eight year old, get together and have a video conferences is very different than having a bunch of executives or the G 20 have a video conferencing, they have very, very different goals. I love my daughter, but she's not yet in a position to save the world. So you know, she's using the platform for a different job. And that's really what gonna help companies figure out where to focus is which job and which customers are they are they going to focus on?

Jared Ranere :

Yeah, and I think the really obvious answer to why are people having a video conference is they're they're communicating they're trying to communicate. And so we can run the litmus test on that, too, that that as a job to be done right. So is communicate a job? Well, it certainly doesn't have any solutions, right. Communicating has no technology mentioned in that statement. There's no product mentioned that that statement, communicate is a verb. Now, there is no direct object there. It's kind of like communicate what? Is a really important question there? And then the fourth question that you have to ask is, is communicate a goal? And that's kind of an interesting, almost philosophical question that can be hard to answer, right? And you can imagine, teams debating this for a very long time, right? I could easily imagine sitting in a conference room or now sitting on a video conference and having two groups of people debating whether or not communication is a goal. And part of what we're trying to do with jobs-to-be-done is gain agreement with our team on what we're trying to do. So when we have a debate like that, we turn to research. So we can interview people who use Zoom to figure out is communication actually their goal? Is it what they're trying to do when they use Zoom? Or are there more specific things we can go after? And to demonstrate how we would do an interview like this? We brought a special guest on today. So we have Audery Crane who is a partner at a design agency called Design Map, and she's also the author of a new book called What CEOs Need To Know About Design. Audrey's an extremely frequent user of Zoom, and many other video conferencing platforms. And we're going to talk to her today to figure out can we identify what jobs she's trying to get done with video conferencing? So, Audrey, let's start this interview. Can you tell us a little bit about your company, your role, and what you've been using Zoom for?

Audery Crane :

Yeah. So as you said, My company is Design Map. We do design and strategy for digital products, mostly focused in the b2b space or some consumer plays as well for companies like eBay. So we work with a lot of different clients on a project basis. We don't do any software for ourselves. And I'm a partner there so I'm one of I'm one of 4 partners. So I have 3 partners. And we have about 30 designers working at design map right now. It's great.

Jared Ranere :

So what have you been doing with Zoom and video, other video conferencing platforms right now?

Audery Crane :

I mean, it's almost hard to say, it'll be easier to say what I haven't been doing. I've been doing really everything. So obviously, as a small business owner, having a lot of conversations with my partners about how we think about this current situation, what we're going to do about it, working with clients on projects, so that work continues happily. I'm also a manager. So working with with mentees and other staff at design, map, and of course, doing doing business development as well. So, kind of all of those things and then I would throw in, as Jay mentioned, the personal stuff. So I have two kids. With me, their father's in a different state under lockdown. So they are talking with him over Zoom. I'm trying to help the teachers of my kids preschool and middle school and high school figure out how to use technology. Because they weren't teachers because they wanted to spend all day sitting in front of a computer. They're not early adopters, necessarily. So almost doing everything.

Jay Haynes :

Yeah, that's that is that is a lot. And what's fascinating about that, just hearing Audrey hear you talk just a little bit about what you're doing with Zoom. There are a ton of different markets that you just talked about, from working with your colleagues to get through this situation. So that would be the job there, of course, would be optimizing cash flow, right, trying to figure out what's happening with your operations would happen with your cash flow, you know, where's the where the funds coming in, you know, all those kind of considerations about keeping a business growing in, you know, very, very tumultuous pandemic times. Then, of course, on the business development side, you know, the job there, of course is acquire new customers and generate new business, which is, you know, incredibly important and obviously relates to optimizing cash flow. And then just the communication elements. So back to Jared's earlier question. It is interesting, you know, is communication a job in and of itself a goal in and of itself? It is incredibly important because we're humans, but really, there's the connection, you know, you're trying to maintain those connections, and connect with other humans and maintain those relationships. And I know this gets into the subtle language of jobs-to-be-done. But this is why we do spend a lot of time in this in this kind of setting, interviewing customers like you when we're trying to figure out what is the underlying market because we want to really get those goals correctly. Because if you just said, Hey, we just want to communicate, that's where you might just say, Oh, well, then everybody just needs a video conferencing platform and then they communicate, it's fine and you work on video quality. audio quality. But that's not really the goal. I mean, it's very different if you're, you know, a parent talking to a child or child, children talking to each other, or, you know, business professionals working together or, you know, biz dev team talking to customers, those are very, very different experiences. And the power of jobs-to-be-done is to say, Okay, well, we all need a video conference now, because we can't get on planes, for example, to acquire customers, we have to do it, you know, virtually in the age of pandemics. But this is a great example where we, we've used this example for a long time and companies and people we've worked with, you know, have heard us talk about this a lot. And in fact, we've, we've said this before, that the airlines are in the same markets as video conferencing companies. We've even recommended before this pandemic, that airlines like United Airlines should be buying these web conferencing systems. One of the reasons is, is exactly what you mentioned, Audrey, which is the job is to acquire customers. And there are lots of different platforms that help salespeople and business development people and executives, you know, acquire customers. And one platform is an airline and an airport in a hotel, and you go visit the actual customer and you talk to them. And that is a process of acquiring customers. That way you're hiring the airline to help you acquire customers. But Zoom and video conferencing platforms help you do that as well. And they help you do it in a way that is obviously more scalable. You don't have to spend as much money. So it lowers your cost. And it's clearly helping you get that job done. It might not be as good as getting on a plane and getting into a face to face meetings. But that's just a momentary look at time. So if we wanted to look at acquiring customers using new technologies, which would include video conferencing, that's an opportunity for new companies who want to get into video conferencing to say, okay, instead of trying to make a platform where everybody can use it, my eight year old daughter and her friends, as well, as you know, business executives, let's focus on one of those markets. And let's focus, for example on salespeople who need to acquire customers. And that job, like all jobs is extremely complex, acquiring customers is is the goal. But if you break it down, as Jared was mentioning earlier, into all the steps and all the actions and variables that you need to get information on, you need to make decisions about that data is changing in real time, etc. that job of acquiring customers is incredibly complex. And this is where if you were to Okay, let's go back to our product strategy example of answering these five questions. What market are we going to target? Well, the first question is, you wouldn't target video conferencing, right? You'd want to target acquiring salespeople. And this is really, really where you could take share from Zoom over the long term. In the short term, people are just going to use whatever video conferencing because this is this, this unnatural, you know, crazy time of a pandemic. But if you really wanted to invest in a product roadmap, to beat Zoom, you're gonna have to do something different than just video conferencing. And it starts starts with that market definition. So we'll take it from there and see if we can figure out a product strategy.

Jared Ranere :

Yeah. So Audrey, have you used Zoom in video conferencing in order to acquire customers? Is that one of the jobs you're trying to get done?

Audery Crane :

Yes. Yeah.

Jared Ranere :

Okay. Okay. Great. And so So, how did you do that? Before Zoom came on? What were some of the solutions you use to acquire cars? Well,

Audery Crane :

I mean, I, I like the, the verb that Jay use before the connecting verb. I think that there's a reason that salespeople say you should always travel 1000 miles for a 5 minute meeting, because it's it's communication covers some of it, but you're kind of building a connection. And so certainly you can accomplish some things on a video conference, but people will and people will make decisions based on the information that they receive, whether that's in a video conference, or an email or presentation deck or whatever. But there's also a feeling that you need to have when you're deciding to hire someone else that you want to interact with this person for their interation or the project that they understand you that they actually are genuine only interested in a challenge that's in front of you and excited about helping you tackle it. And these feelings, it's incredibly difficult to establish those feelings. And and frankly, for me to like, is this a client that's going to be good for us? Are we gonna enjoy working with them? Are they insightful and excited and empowered and all these things? And so that's the reason why, for me, at least certainly, doing business development always meant whenever possible, being there in person, because making that connection is really, really difficult on a video conference,

Jared Ranere :

Yeah, that's interesting that it makes me think that the job could be even more specific than just acquire customers because you're trying to acquire customers for a services business in which you need to work with With your potential customer over a period of time, which may have different needs than somebody who's trying to acquire customers, for like a software business, right, if you were just selling a piece of software, you might not need to feel that connection with your customer. So it sounds like we could make the job even more specific by focusing on acquiring customers for a service business.

Jay Haynes :

Yeah, I would agree with that as well. I think that's a good way to look at it and define it. And Audrey just listened to you talk. Of course, we we love listening and talking with customers. And there was just so much there to unpack. And this is what I think people listening and hearing us do an interview with a customer using, you know, jumpsuit on techniques is that ability to unpack what you just said into very specific actions that you're trying to take, you know, with variables in order to achieve your goal. That is the process to go through to really understand the customers in the market. And so what I mean by that is let's just take it at a high level you're talking about very functional things which relate to your potential new customer and, and the working relationship and their goals and what they're trying to achieve and can you meet their needs, you know, all that stuff is I would, we would categorize very, very functional. Then there's also the the emotional side of it, which is very emotional, there's anxiety, there's stress, just about like the relationship and how it's going to work going forward. So incredibly important to factor in, you know, those emotional elements is as well. And then there's just using a lot of different products, because you were just talking about presentations and email and video conferencing and in person meetings, those are all different products that you're using in that fluid cloud categorizes consumption jobs, you're using those products to achieve this goal of acquiring a new customer for a service business. So that's what's really interesting. So if you were to say, okay, we want to create a new video conferencing platform to compete with Zoom, you would want to think about it more in the context of that job. So video is one part of it. And then what could your system do? Now that we're competing, again, Zoom to help people acquire customers? If that's the job, what are the other elements? Well, you will you talked about all these other platforms to like email and presentations. Okay, so can we start to build something into the system that's going to satisfy needs, across all of those different elements of the job? And that's how we start to think about it is okay, there's a market there's there's clearly willingness to pay in this market. I don't think we have a market sizing problem because people are, you know, paying to acquire customers every day. Since acquiring customers is a profitable thing to do, people are certainly willing to pay for it. So I don't think we have, we definitely have a market sizing problem.

Jared Ranere :

I actually want to ask an interesting question about that. Because it's interesting when you think about the job as acquire customers for a service business, like just off the top of your head, you would go well, the number of people who are trying to acquire customers for a service business is probably way smaller than the everyone who could take advantage of video conferencing platform. So if you're thinking about just like acquiring as many users as you can, it almost sounds like a terrible idea to just go after people that are trying to acquire customers for a service business. So I think we need to interrogate that a little bit. So, Audrey, I have a question for you. How much do you spend on Zoom per month or any other video conferencing platform roughly? I have no idea.

Audery Crane :

Actually.

Jared Ranere :

Do you know like order of magnitude? Is it like less than $100 a month?

Audery Crane :

Yeah, no, I think it's about that.

Jared Ranere :

About $100 a month. Okay. And would you say acquiring a customer, you'd be willing to spend more or less than that to acquire a new customer for your business?

Audery Crane :

More, like a lot more? Yes.

Jared Ranere :

A little bit more like 10% more like double or 10 times that, you know, how much is a new customer worth?

Audery Crane :

I mean, I would say we would spend 100 times that, partially because the and this is interesting. I don't know if it goes anywhere, but because if the tool if we introduce a potential client to a tool that is the the BMW of video conferencing, maybe they've never even heard of it or experienced it before. And their experience with the tool that we're introducing them to is really wonderful, then that's a that's a great little news, boosh. You know, it's a great it's a great indication of what it might be like to work with designers. app that it's this wonderful, thoughtful, effortless, delightful experience that I didn't even know is possible,

Jared Ranere :

Right. And I think that going head to head with Zoom on that it's gonna be very difficult, right, you have to pick dimensions that you can potentially win on very quickly. So for example, Zoom has a famously terrific codec, which is, which enables them to provide high quality video and audio even for people who have very low bandwidth, which is why you're seeing residential users be able to use Zoom effectively now, and many people would argue that was its competitive advantage in the video conferencing market. So if you try to beat them on that on just quality of video and audio, it's going to be very, very difficult. And so if you think about the needs, though, that Audrey was talking about, there might be other ways to design a system that can help her satisfy those needs. So Audrey, to go back to what you're saying. When you're trying to acquire a new customer for your service business, you've got to have a connection with them. I think he started to unpack that in terms of saying, Do you have trust with them? Can you determine if you're interested in the same kind of challenges? Do you see eye to eye on how you would approach that project? So those are some needs that are hard to satisfy on video conferencing as it is today that you felt like you could satisfy better on an in person meeting. So you're a designer, you think of new solutions all the time. So can you think of ways to enhance the the virtual conversation experience, right? How could you build trust with somebody? How could you do what do all the things that the connection would enable you to do in a solution that is either video conferencing plus or like how would you do it? How do we solve that problem, right? This is how we generate an idea and create value we pick up pick a very specific unmet need and try to solve that faster, more. accurately then the solutions that people are using today. So Audrey, do you have any ideas on how to solve those problems for yourself?

Audery Crane :

Well, I have a couple of categories of ideas, I guess. One is that maybe the category of humanity. So it's it, it's human to make eye contact, when you talk to somebody else, these tools inherently put the person that you're talking to their eyeballs are somewhere else on the screen, from where your camera is. So when you're looking at them when they're talking, you appear to be looking away from them. And I think that there's something to be done there. I mean, it would be interesting to talk about actual physical devices as solutions, but I don't think that that has to be true for them to just for a solution to happen where basically, you're the person that you're talking to his eyes appear closer to the camera so that you can start to have eye contact. I also think it would be really valuable if there is some kind of automated switching of audio, especially but but video as well for people who have more than one video option to optimize that because the the quality of the sound, often the speaker doesn't even know the quality of the sound isn't good unless somebody is willing to interrupt them and say I can't really understand too. And so these, these friction points of the most basic things when you're in person, being able to look in someone's eyes, being able to hear them and see them are much greater. And they're almost like we've accepted it as an inherent part of video conferencing. And I don't think that we have to do that.

Jay Haynes :

Yeah, great. I love having you here. Audrey. By the way, just being able to show how we do these kind of interviews is nice. And let me let me pause just there for a sec because what you said again, has so much information in it. That what we try and do is is up pack this so that teams can get very specific about what they're trying to innovate on. So what I heard you say there, just to do this little bit of this unpacking is there's there's a need about determining. I just say there's a group of needs around determining what the other person is like. So determining the potential trustworthiness of the client determining the the, the way the relationship is going to go, determining if they're going to have unreasonable demands, you know, those kind of things, right? So we could we could break that down into your you are really trying to figure out something. Let's just take, you know, determine the trustworthiness of a potential client, right? Are they gonna not pay you on time, you know, whatever, all sorts of things like that. So, if you were to take that as a need, which is a great need statement, right? determine the trustworthiness of a potential client because that's a need that you need to solve, you know, along the way to acquiring customers. So That's where we get very specific about, okay, what solutions are there for that? So how do you do it today? Well, this is where speed and accuracy comes in. It's, it's obviously very slow to do it, because you have to make all these assessments. It's kind of a manual process, you know, maybe you Google around about them, you know, and you try and figure out, you know, do they have lawsuits against them? You know, were they a jerk and their divorce or, you know, who knows, right? There could be like, 1000 different.

Jared Ranere :

Yeah. And you fly to their office and look them in the eye and shake their hand and we have a some kind of way of using that to synthesize trust, but we can't do that right now.

Jay Haynes :

Yeah. And so that's our baseline. So we always take these needs and we say, Okay, first of all, what's the speed and accuracy of satisfying that native need today because there's an action and a variable determined trustworthiness. And, and that's a great needs that because it's independent of any solution. There's like 1000 different solutions to that need, and what you did there in this last little conversation, I have with you came up with a very interesting solution, which is, okay, if I'm going to use video conferencing, what I really need is to be able to see their, their look them in the face and make those judgments better. And one solution to determining trustworthiness, if you were competing with Zune would be a different way to have their eyesight and your eyesight Connect, because we're all looking, you know, kind of to the right or left or up or down, like not directly at the camera, of course. And that actually could be a solution for platform providers. So you know, if you're building a computer screen, why not build a camera into the middle of it? Alright, so you're just like always looking, or maybe there's software that could move people's eyesight to make it look like they're always looking at you. Those are interesting solutions, right? Very, very interesting solutions. But just to just to explore this and we help teams come up with with different ideas for the same need as well, which is a good exercise. So determining trustworthiness could also be something that doesn't relate to video conferencing at all right? It could be Okay, you know, you're having a meeting with Jay Haynes next week, and who is this, you know, Jay Haynes guy. And what we're going to do is we're going to search the web for everything we can find out about this person, Jay Haynes, obviously, like your LinkedIn or Google or whatever. And you're going to determine using, you know, algorithms like what, what's the probability that this person's trustworthy? And those are, that's a great example of where you've got two radically different ideas that are both satisfying the same unmet need in the market. So if you were working with a team, and it's deciding, Okay, which one of those do we want to pursue? You can factor in what's the risk and can we do it on our platform? Do we need to have some sort of breakthrough invention that doesn't exist yet? Or is there a lower risk way we can get into the market to help determine trustworthiness today? It's not 100% accurate, but it does a better job of you know what video comments He's doing today,

Jared Ranere :

it'd be really interesting to take that information that you're scraping off the web, as Jay mentioned in his idea, and pair that with a video conference, so while I'm talking to you, if I had that information synthesized on there, and then we could get, you know, really deep tech, and we could look, we could have a, some kind of AI understanding your what you're saying some, some natural language processing, comparing that to the facts that have been picked up on the web. And when there's a conflict between what you say, and what the facts are that we know from the web. That's like a, that's like a ding moment, right? You might not be trustworthy, you just conflicted, like some information out there about yourself. You might be potentially lying, right? And you could do that, not only with information that's out there in the web, but information that was said in previous meetings. So if every meeting was transcribed, and then later you say something that conflicts with something you said in a previous meeting, well now I'm starting to on And if you're trustworthy on a regular basis or not, and it tells me a moment where I don't have to trust it all the way. But now I can interrogate you about that, right? And I can do it in a nice way. Just find out maybe there's a good reason why you say something that conflicts with the information we found out about you. And then you can imagine that that's a solution that could be useful to other circumstances where people need to determine trustworthiness on a video conferencing situation, so if you're a journalist, and you're now using video conferencing, to interview a source, and you need to know if what they're saying might be accurate, and are there signals that they lie, sometimes this could be very useful to you as well. So you can take that same solution and start to apply it to other jobs and other unmet needs.

Audery Crane :

If, if I could just riff on this for a moment. I think we're, I think that's a really interesting direction this women and I, and if we pair that job with the, you know, kind of understanding how much we can trust the potential client that we're talking to, but we pair that with also conveying trustworthiness. And so there's a quid pro quo. We've actually never had a client not pay us on time. So I'm not super worried about that. But it'd be interesting to and going back a little bit to building connection to scrape the web for what you have in common. So LinkedIn, you know, is obvious, but there may be other things like, we're both fans of the same sports team. And you know, we can tell that because we both comment or subscribe to the same or there's there, I have seen some products out there that actually even try to do a personality assessment based on what you've written in your LinkedIn profile, and then what else you've written across the web. And that tell you how you what you have in common with this person and ways that you might be careful. I feel a little bit uncomfortable about that as a one sided thing, because again, if what we're trying do is build trust both directions, right, assess whether or not we would like to work together? Do I feel like I can trust you and I want to work with you? Do you feel like you can trust me? And do you want to work with me? Some kind of a solution like that, that looks for connection?

Jay Haynes :

Yep. No, I think that's exactly right. And it's, you know, it's essentially a matching algorithm, and trustworthiness, just one dimension. But what we what we would do in this case is we'd break down all of those dimensions, and then see where new algorithms or new video or you know, technologies, or whatever it is, that's going to contribute to helping you achieve that goal. And the main point is, we've we've we've gone a long way from just video conferencing. And this is how you build up a product strategy because again, the market is actually not just to video conferencing. Why do you want a video conference and now we've started to explore, you know, Audrey with you, you're trying to achieve these goals that are very difficult. And that's that's actually what We look for is where is there difficulty in achieving that goal. And, and and people get fooled, I think by new technologies and they think that it's solving the technology problem that enabled the company to succeed. And that's true in Zoom's case, because as Derek mentioned, their codec, their technology for compressing and decompressing audio and video was very good. So you can you can start in when there's new opportunities, like enough bandwidth in the world to be able to do video conferencing. Remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember the dial up internet. I mean, no one was going to video conference in the age of AOL, right? You couldn't even email a photo let alone like real time audio video, but but when that emerges, it does seem like a company is going to win just based on what would be considered consumption jobs because they did a better job of making it It's easy to video conference. And that's great. That's the way a lot of times, you know, new technologies will start to be adopted and Zoom clearly did a better job. I mean, I don't know if anybody out there is use Skype business, but oh, my God is literally the worst product ever like, but it just doesn't work most of the time. So Zoom act definitely did a better job on that. But in, in our example here, if you were to enter this market, one, you would you would you would be incorrect and saying, well, the game's over Zoom one, you know, that's it, you know, everybody's just going to use Zoom forever. That's not true at all. The market opportunity is now to have video conference be a part of a platform that helps these different markets, these different groups of customers get the job done better. And that's why you want to separate the customers. And then within those you want to segment who are the customers that are struggling the most what unmet needs that they have that they're really struggling with. And what we've been talking about here is essentially product roadmapping for the short, medium and long term, I mean, this idea of like the AI that's going to interpret your eye movements and combined with all the stuff we know about you online. I mean, that's, that's not happening tomorrow. But that is you can make progress along that in your product roadmap, that's where we would want to look at the short term, what can we do in the very short term, it's going to satisfy these needs better? And then what can we do in the longer term, and then, if there are stuff that we need to do, that's r&d, like, you know, invent new ways to interpret AI movements combined with, you know, your online profile, that stuff can go into the r&d department. But the key is that we know the job won't change. So it's stable, the needs are stable, we can invest our short, medium and long term product roadmap in likely taking share from leaders like Zoom.

Jared Ranere :

Yeah, and there's a really simple thought experiment you can run if you're skeptical about this. So if you're thinking No, I think people actually love to video conference and I and if you're thinking, you know, Zoom is nailed All those metrics about time spent in video conferencing, you know, like, if they are, they're addicting people to video conferencing, and they're totally winning on that metric. So, Audrey, if you could acquire terrific customers who were trustworthy, wonderful to work with paid on time and deliver these super interesting projects without ever video conferencing them with them, would you?

Audery Crane :

Absolutely. Right.

Jared Ranere :

So that's how you know that video conferencing is not the job and that you need to measure something other than how much time people are spending in video conferencing, to to beat Zoom, right? Because if you could do everything that enabled acquiring great service customers, and made the video conferencing 90 seconds long, because maybe you just had to like see somebody It was like a human and existed. People would love you, right? You're you're winning all this business with you know, with fewer meetings that are much shorter. I think everybody would love

Audery Crane :

that. Yeah, there's there's So much about it that's so painful. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface in terms of being stuck in your chair and the pain of trying to share something with someone else and feeling like a neophyte when you're supposed to be an expert. It, it just goes on and on.

Jay Haynes :

Yeah. And I think what's interesting about that, too, is what happens when we return to the, you know, post Coronavirus world, is everybody just gonna, like jump right back on to you know, to aircraft and start going to see customers actually, I think it's going to have this profound kind of echo that's gonna stay with us and people are really going to contemplate, you know, are there different ways to achieve my goals that don't require me getting on a plane. And of course, salespeople and business people and executives are an incredibly profitable part of the airline industry. So the risk also to the airlines isn't just that video conferences is going to get better. It's the At some of their most profitable customers are going to go away. And they're just going to rethink using in an airline as a platform to acquire customers. They probably still do it. But could you do it a lot less frequently than you did in the past. And that's, that means there's opportunity. It just means that we're going to have new technologies and new solutions and new platforms that are going to help get these jobs done in very different ways. But what's interesting as well is the jobs are the same. Nothing has changed about the jobs even in the crazy world of Coronavirus. Well, let me just wrap up here first, I definitely want to say thank you, Audrey, for coming along with on with us on this, you know, trying to figure this stuff out in this crazy anxious pandemic world we live in. And I think we we did a pretty good job of coming up with a product strategy that might actually meet Audrey's needs. We know that customers, you know, executives and People like Audrey, the market is you know, in our example here to acquire customers the size of the market based on, you know, Audrey, your willingness to pay to get this job done better. And there's clearly unmet needs around this, you know, theme of connecting and building trustworthiness and evaluating and assessing you know, potential clients. And clearly solutions that could get this job done better, which would include video conferencing and or the other stuff we talked about would be valuable in the market. So thank you, Audrey. Really appreciate you being here.

Audery Crane :

Yeah, it was so much fun. I am thrilled to have been able to join you guys and anytime I could pitch in and hang out and talk about crazy ideas like this. I will be happy to come back.

Jay Haynes :

Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to our How would you beat podcast visit us at thrv.com, that thrv.com to get our free how to guides and try our jobs to be done software for free.

Jay Haynes and Jared Ranere cover the effect the pandemic has had on Zoom and discuss how to apply Jobs-to-be-Done theory.
Jay and Jared are joined by Audrey Crane to discuss her job needs.
Audrey talks about how she uses video conferencing to acquire customers as a JTBD.
Jay, Jared and Audrey explore the value of a product that could help acquire customers and build trust in a better way.
Jay and Jared summarize the discussion on Zoom and the future of JTBD post Covid.