Jim Kalbach
Leading Design with Big Ears
In this episode of Brave UX, Jim Kalbach shares insights from jazz into collaboration 🎺, how experience maps help us navigate design 🗺️, and why Jobs To Be Done deserves our attention 👀.
Highlights include:
- Why do we confuse ideas with innovation?
- What does it mean to have ‘big ears’ and how is that useful?
- How do you manage challenges to your recommendations?
- What gets in the way of effective collaboration?
- How can Jobs To Be Done help to find the right problems to fix?
Who is Jim Kalbach?
Jim is the Chief Evangelist and VP of Customer Experience at MURAL, the world’s leading digital whiteboard 📝.
Prior to joining MURAL, Jim was a Principal UX Consultant at Citrix Online ☁, and he has also worked in numerous consulting roles for other large companies such, as eBay, SONY, LexisNexis and Razorfish Germany 🐟.
Somehow, on top of all this, Jim found the time to write three critically acclaimed books: The first, 📗 Designing Web Navigation, was published in 2007, followed by 📘 Mapping Experiences in 2016 and, most recently, 📙 The Jobs To Be Done Playbook in 2020.
While working in Europe, where he spent the first 15 years of his career, Jim co-founded the popular European Information Architecture conferences ↵ as well as the leading UX event in Germany - the IA Konferenz ↳.
He has also previously served on the advisory board of the Information Architecture Institute and as an editor for Boxes and Arrows 📦, the popular online journal for user experience, and has graced the stage at TedX, UX Brighton, Enterprise UX, and UX STRAT.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello Brave UXers and a very happy new year to each and every one of you. I hope you have been enjoying some special, uninterrupted time with your loved ones this holiday season.
- When I recorded the 100th episode of Brave UX back in November of 2022, a conversation with Don Norman, I wasn’t certain what the future of the podcast would be. Or if it even had a future.
- Well, having taken some time to consider how Brave UX and the other aspects of my life fit together, I’m pleased to let you know that the show will go on - albeit at a reduced frequency. In 2023, new episodes will be lovingly delivered to you every two weeks. And there are some wonderful conversations already recorded and many amazing guests lined up! We’ll be getting to the first of those shortly. But, before we do that.
- If you’re feeling generous and you’ve been finding Brave UX valuable, please take a moment now and leave a review on the podcast, so that others know why. And, if you’re feeling even more generous, extend that moment a little longer and share a post about the show with your LinkedIn community. If you’re listening to this, there’s bound to be people in that community that would also find these conversations useful.
- Well, that’s enough from me. I wish you all the very best for the year ahead. Don’t forget to focus on what you can control and try to forget what you can’t. Stay curious. Be willing to be wrong (and mean it!). And, most importantly, keep being brave!
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
- My guest today is Jim Kalbach. Jim is the Chief Evangelist and VP of Customer Experience at MURAL, the world's leading digital whiteboard. At MURAL, Jim is a globally visible and eloquent advocate for creative collaboration. He also serves on the company's executive leadership team and is responsible for not one, but three of the company's functions, customer success, customer support, and pro services.
- Prior to joining MURAL, Jim was a principal UX consultant at Citrix Online, and he has also worked in numerous consulting roles for other large companies such as eBay, Sony, Lexus, nexus, and Razorfish Germany.
- Somehow on top of all of this, Jim found the time to write three critically acclaimed books. The first designing web navigation was published in 2007, followed by mapping experiences in 2016, of which a new edition has just been released. And most recently, the jobs to be Done Playbook in 2020.
- While working in Europe, where he spent the first 15 years of his career, Jim co-founded the popular European Information Architecture conferences, as well as the leading UX event in Germany, the IA conference.
- He has also previously served on the advisory board of the Information Architecture Institute and as an editor for Boxes and Arrows, the popular online journal for user experience that was started by Christina Vodka and is now run back by Amy Jimenez Marquez, both previous guests of the show, an excellent and thoughtful speaker.
- Jim has graced the stage at events such as TEDx UX Brighton, enterprise UX, UX Lisbon, and UX Strat. That's a lot of UXs, as well as being a guest on numerous podcasts, webinars, and at meetups.
- When he's not leading customer experience or contributing to the global design community in some meaningful way, Jim can be found playing jazz bass jamming with local musicians at local festivals, but now he's here to jam with me in this conversation on Brave UX. Jim, welcome to the show.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Hey, great to be here, Brendan. Thanks for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here, Jim. I have really thoroughly enjoyed looking at the wide range of talks and interviews that you've given in the past. There's definitely heaps for us to cover today. I actually want to start by winding back the clock a little bit to 1997, which is the time after you graduated Rutgers University with a masters in library and Information Science, and you moved to Germany, and as I mentioned in your introduction, you stayed there for the first 15 years of your career. That is not an inconsequential amount of time. Why Germany?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah good question. At the time when I was at Rutgers doing my graduate degree I was studying German. One of the requirements for getting the graduate degree was to pass a language proficient proficiency course. It was basically just translating. You didn't even have to speak, just translate from German into English. But I started getting into it and I actually went over to Germany and I did an exchange program with the Rutgers group. They go over every summer for six weeks and it was immersive and I loved it over there. And then I went back the next year with the immersion, with the immersion program as well too. So I'd gone over for two extended periods of time and had been learning the language. And then after I got my degree, I thought, well, I could do this for a year before I got a real job in the us and that turned into 15 years.
- So it was quite unplanned, but as doors open in your life, you know, take those opportunities and I found that I was getting a lot of opportunities. Of course that was during the.com boom and the.com bus, but during do.com boom, following people like Jacob Nielsen and just what was happening around the year 2000 in terms of awareness of usability, awareness of UX, the UX started to be called a thing. And when I got to razor fish in 2003, we had a UX department and people in the company who were thought leaders in the field. So there were a lot of opportunities that happened and kept me there for 15 years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned that when you got over there, doors started to open. Is there someone in particular or was there a door that was open for you that comes to mind that you are particularly grateful of or in retrospect has been one of those for fortuitous moments that you didn't quite recognize at the time?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, I think there were two things. I don't know if it was a person, it was more of circumstances and events that happened from my remote location here in the us. I was checking out companies at the time, agencies and web consultancies, and I found a small shop called ID Media. I don't think they exist anymore actually. And that was in the south of Germany. And I went over there for about eight months. I lived just outside of Stuttgart in the middle of nowhere in farm country. And then they opened up an office in Hamburg and it was going from that rural southern German setting to then a big city hamburger's, the second biggest city in Germany. And that kind of opened both personally and professionally. That opened a lot of doors. There were other agencies in town. There wasn't anything else in the small town that I was in the south of German.
- But then suddenly there's other agencies and there's events and there was a scene kind of a web agency scene there as well too. So that kind of opened up a lot of doors there. And then I left ID media and went to Razor Fish, and I think that was the real big event. So it, it's kind of ID media kind of got me over there, but it was when I started at Razorfish that I really, in my mind, that's when I really began a career in UX and I came in through the IA side of it because they had an IA function and having studied information science and had a couple years of usability exposure from people like Jacob Nielsen and I did a couple of usability tests early on. IA just seemed like the right place for me to be in 2003 with Razorfish to be an information architect.
- I felt like I was at home and I just dug my heels in. I was all in on everything that was going on in the scene, reading about it attending events, that whole thing. Of course, that kind of morphed into UX for me. And there's semantic differences between IA and usability and UX, but UX is being a slightly bigger kind of umbrella. That attracted me as well too. But I think it was moving the Razorfish, it was moving the Razorfish that really kind of set me off. And then personally, it was moving to the big city.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This investment that you did make in Europe and then coming back to the States when you did after 15 years, was it difficult for you to say goodbye and to close that chapter on all of the relationships and the energy that you'd put into that region?
- Jim Kalbach:
- To some degree, but not really. I never thought about that. I think it was time to move on, and it was right for lots of other reasons in my life personally and professionally. And one of the very satisfying things with the European Information Architecture Conference, for instance, by the time I left Europe, it had been going for over a decade and it was self-sustaining, right? There were other people that kind of took that over. Same with the Information architecture conference in Germany. That's with a German word for conference and it kind of had a life of its own. Another thing that I actually didn't put on my resume that you didn't mention was in Hamburg where I was, I actually was the founder of the local, we called it a usability round table, I think is what we called it in English. We used the word round table usability round table.
- And the same thing happened there. I think it's still going to this day. I think there's still a group in Hamburg, Germany, I think they renamed it, but it's essentially that same continuum of professionals coming together in a very informal meetup kind of way. So at that time I just saw all of these motions that got started, and I did it because I wanted to give back to the community, and I wanted to be part of the community, and I didn't have any ulterior motive. Certainly was, wasn't making money from it or anything like that, but it was just very satisfying to see that those things had enough momentum that they were self-sustaining. And I think at the time it was a good time to say goodbye to it all, I think. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This idea of major career changes or transitions or points in our lives where it's maybe patently evident or maybe not, that it's time to make it a change and go on a different direction, is this, when you reflect on your career and where you are now from the position that you hold now, were these always obvious to you and easy for you to navigate? Or has this been something that was murky at best at the time in particular, maybe this transition back to the US and that you've had to feel your way through? What sort of insight or advice or self-reflections have you had about these significant shifts for you?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah. Well, first of all, I like a lot of certainty with my job and my career. And I think the one thing, particularly in the time period that we're talking about, right, 2000 something until 2015 or whatever was kind of a heyday for UX and usability and IA and all these things were flourishing. So even though I enjoy a lot of security in my own career and my own job, being in that field at that time provided a certain comfort and safety net just because it was so hot in so many people were hiring, you literally felt like you could go out on a limb and try something new, which I didn't do too often actually, but I probably could have done it even more. That is switch jobs or something like that. But I tended to stay put fairly long not forever, but I did stay put, but you still had this feeling like your skills were marketable and there would always be something else coming around the corner.
- And there always was as well too. So as uncertain as I was to make changes, career changes, moving from ID media to Razorfish, and then I moved from Razorfish to Alexis Nexus, as uncertain as you are in those moments, it was bound to work out just because there was so much, the whole field was growing and there was a lot of attention on it. And of course at that time I started writing and speaking as well too. So I started to get attention. So you start building up a little bit of confidence as well too through that. At least I did. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Almost sounds like you are referring to the field and the past tense in terms of its heyday now it's obvious to anyone in the sector at the moment that there are massive layoffs going on at very significant employers of the talent that is in our field. Is this something in your perspective that is just a blip and we are going to go through another resurgence, or is this a marked change in the way in which particularly the tech industry views the talent, not just in UX, but also engineering and other disciplines, right, and what we've got to look forward to or not look forward to in the future? I
- Jim Kalbach:
- Think a lot of what's going on right now is actually rather driven by the macroeconomic conditions, and I don't think it's a reflection, certainly not an indictment on those fields that you just mentioned. So I don't see those fields diminishing or dwindling. They might start plateauing though, because there was a time where hiring somebody with senior UX skills in Silicon Valley was almost impossible. And if you had those skills, you could pretty much work anywhere that you wanted. So it might not be those conditions, but I still think if you have marketable skills may a degree these days, we didn't have degrees back in those days, but now that you can actually go study UX and interaction design and things like that, if you're armed with a diploma and you have some experience, you will be able to find your way. I'm confident of that. You might not be able to pick and choose and demand a higher salary and all that kind of thing, but you'll definitely find your way. So I don't think it's diminishing to the point where you know, won't be able to make it or that you won't be able to find a job. So maybe there's a plateau, maybe the economic macroeconomic conditions and the layoffs that you just mentioned, maybe that marks a plateau, but I don't see things diminishing per se, or at least the demand for those skills. Let's put it that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How critical has your public speaking in the three books that you've written, been to your ability to stand head and shoulders over other candidates?
- Jim Kalbach:
- That's a good question. I don't know actually, because I've never hired me. So I dunno know what my resume looks like next to other folks' resumes at least when I was, I don't really practice UX anymore, I have to admit, I'm not on a UX team right now. I kind of shifted when I came to MURAL. So I haven't really been a designer in the design field since almost a decade now since 2013. But let me think. So then when I was at Lexus Nexus, so I was at Lexus Nexus for nine years and that's when I wrote my first book. And then my second and third books actually came out when I was here at MURAL, now that I think about it. So I got my other jobs, I think based on my qualifications more, rather more on my qualifications and credentials. The speaking though was always there.
- I can only assume from an employer's perspective depends on what you're trying to do though. But I can only assume that that would made me stand out. And I did work for an agency in Berlin, and that was probably attractive to them because they were small. And having somebody who was outwardly facing was important for a small shop. If I had worked for IBM or something, some big shop that might have been less important comparing me to another candidate, let's say, right? But in a smaller situation that could make a difference. But it's hard for me to answer your question because I've never compared me to other candidates.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's probably an unfair question and a poorly framed question. So let's think about it another way. What I heard there was that you didn't really do it for the pursuit of your next job. It wasn't sound like it was intrinsically the reason why you did it. Writing books and giving speeches, these are not easy things. They take a huge investment in time. They're often from having spoken to other authors, very torturous at points in the process. They're certainly seem to me, at least from the outside, looking in to be a labor of love. Yeah. Why on earth would you put yourself through it three times?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I think it is a labor of love. I think that's the only way to put it, but I hate writing. People think, oh, you wrote three books, you must love it. It's like, no, I'd rather pull all the teeth outta my head without Nova game than then write a book. Yet I've done that to myself three times. I think there is a labor of love. I think it kind of goes hand in hand with starting conferences, which is all about conversations, but it's also about contributing back to the field as well too. Like I said, I was just ravenous in terms of reading and absorbing everything that I could. And what I like to do is fill in the gaps or point out myths or offer a perspective that nobody offered. And when I felt I had that that's when I sat down and actually wrote a book or a longer paper or something like that.
- But I think it really was a combination of labor love one, and wanting to contribute back to the community. Particularly my last two books I say that they're basically the sum of all my mistakes working with jobs to be done or mapping experiences. It was like I was working with mapping and I made all the mistakes now. And it occurred to me as like, well, other people could learn from my mistakes, put it in a book so people can learn from your mistakes. And the thinking that I had to do in my own head to straighten things out, I basically just put that on paper to share with the world. And then there are royalties, so there's a little bit of money from the book. The other big thing, the other big component though, is less about my career and my job and my marketability in terms of getting hired. It was more about another source of income through things like workshops, and particularly at conferences. So I'd submit a talk to a conference. If they didn't take my stage talk, I would submit a workshop or sometimes both in parallel, and then I would be earning a little bit of money through the workshops as well
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Too. Yeah, it's a mutually beneficial investment. I suppose. There's a generosity of sharing those learnings with the community. And there's also the reciprocity, I imagine, of the income that you can generate from that. I wanna talk about another labor of love of yours, and that's at Rutgers. You didn't only study information science, you graduated with the BA in Communications and music, and you also went on to do a master of Arts and music theory and composition, which is a fairly involved degree as far as music goes. And outside of work, as I mentioned in your introduction, you are an active jazz musician now, famous jazz musician. Art Blakey once said that jazz washes away the dust of everyday life. What is jazz to you?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, that's a great question. Here at MURAL, we talk a lot about collaboration and relationships and relational intelligence and things like that. And for me, jazz is, it's another perspective on how humans can interact. Obviously it's in the context of music, which is a shared human experience through sound and time. But within that platform, for me, jazz is really about a new or an alternative, let's put it that way, an alternative way that human beings can interact. And I'm just totally fascinated by that from a musical standpoint. Like you said, I have a master's in music theory, so I can understand fairly complex concepts within music itself. But then there's also this big social component. And that's one thing I love about jazz is it's very, very social. Something like a jam session, but even a jazz concert I find to be more social than classical concert, let's say in terms of the involvement of the audience as well too.
- And really thinking about that whole, how do we experience music? It's not just the performer and the artist and the work of art. There's also the listener and there's also the venue and the people that are around that too. And there's this whole human platform that has to come together to have both music performance at music listening and I'm really interested in that. And I think the jazz experience I think is very, very unique. And I think it gives us life lessons. So I love the Art Blakey code quote that you just mentioned there as well too, because then the thought is, well, if command and control organizations are no longer the style of management moving forward, we've heard that many, many times. What else do you do? And it's like, well, there are other things that can be inspirational to us. There's other models of how we can interact and still make progress and still have a common goal and still drive towards the same outcomes.
- There are other models, and jazz offers another model, one that's based on improvisation, which we don't think about a lot, but well, people in improvs do to some degree. Brendan, this conversation is improvised as well too. So we kind of do this all the time. This idea of take, here's how I describe jazz, taking something, making it your own and giving it back. That's what Jazz's improvisation is. Somebody you have a melody or somebody plays a line, you then take that and make it your own and you give it back. And it's through the interlocking of that, making your own, giving it back. And if everybody's doing that, you can have this amazing conversation and go places every time. And that's the interesting thing about jazz, unlike rock music or classical music where you try to be as true as possible to either the score or the recording and you were going to repeat what you did exactly the same the next night. Jazz musicians try to do it different every time they played to, and they wanted to be as different, as different if possible. That's what they're striving for. And that I find that exciting.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've suggested that there are three things that we can borrow from jazz, which will help us to collaborate more effectively. So if we are thinking about outside of the top-down command and control style of interacting, that jazz is an antidote perhaps, or an answer to that. And one of those things is, the way I'm framing it anyway, is a highly practical form of empathy. What do jazz musicians mean when they talk about having big ears?
- Jim Kalbach:
- So bigger ears is a term, particularly when you're studying and learning jazz, you can get wrapped up in your own instrument very, very easily and very, very quickly. No, my fingering's, right, is that the cool line that I rehearsed and you're kind of inside of your own little bubble thinking about your own music. And then the teacher, the instructors expert that's in the room will say Biggie ears, which means you're not listening to other people. And really Biggie Ears is listening to others more than you're listening yourself, which means on the one hand, you have to have a complete command of what you're trying to say and what you're trying to do that that has to be so fluid, you kind of forget about what you're doing and you're really responding to what the other people are doing. So what you're doing isn't my statement, and it's conceived of in my head, and I'm expressing that it's what I'm saying.
- My statement is a reaction to what I'm hearing because I'm constantly listening. And it's also listening to all, everything at once. So very often you be like, Hey, let's listen to the drummer. Let's listen to the piano player. When you're up on stage performing jazz, jazz, you're trying to hear all of that at the same time because it's the interaction of those things that is actually the interesting part. It's not the keyboard or the drums or the bass, it's how those three things are interacting. So the question is, when you talk about Big Ears is how do you listen to all of that as one sound right, coming and then be able to react to it?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It strikes me as an ability to be presents and to almost be practicing an active form of meditation in some respects.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, you talk to jazz guys and they're like, they talk about being on autopilot or in the flow, and it would be akin to probably skydiving or whitewater rafting or something where the only, you're just in that moment. And that's the other thing I love about jazz. It is hyper real time. Even listening, in my opinion, even listening to jazz is hyper real time. But when you're playing jazz it, it's this, it happens, it's a moment and then it passes and it's gone forever. And that moment, unless you record it, but even if you record it, that moment as it was experienced is gone. So it, it's really about being in the moment. So there is almost a zen light quality to it about being here now, be here now in the moment and listen to everything going on. The advantage I think that music has and jazz has is that the transparency, if we were collaborating in a team, Brendan, let's say there's five UX people collaborating, I would have to stop at what I'm doing and go over and look at their wire frames or their sketches and talk to them about that, or go over and talk to the user researcher about that.
- And I can get a lot of transparency by doing that. But in jazz, you can hear, imagine hearing everybody's work or being able to see everybody's work at the same time. That's the level of transparency that you have. And that's really what Big Ears is all about as well too. So that's a pretty cool situation. It might be unique to jazz, but it brings up the question, how can we do that in our work lives? How can we do that in our everyday interactions in real time and listening more than we're listening to others more than we're listening to ourselves?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have you found any way to turn that on when you need to turn that on?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I don't know if it's a switch. I think it's a sensibility or mean, that would be my hope, particularly as an author and somebody who instructs and things like that would be to exam. That's what I'm doing right now, by the way. I'm trying to examine that and being able to give it as a switch to folks so that they could A, understand it, but then B, turn it on. I think for me though, it's just the sensibility that I have. And if you ever work with me, I think you'll find that I embody a lot of those characteristics of just being very willing to contribute and respectful of the other information that's coming back at me in with a big ears kind of way. I think that just affects the way that I collaborate with teams, or even in my personal life as well too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like a form of self modulation or something that's happening behind the scenes as you are engaging with people. Now in your 2014 Ted X Talk, you actually, which was about jazz and what we could learn from jazz and the way in which we communicate in our organizations, you assembled a group of jazz musicians, some of which, or maybe all of which, who had never met before and had never played together. And you also started that talk with a reference back to a very famous jazz album called Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. And Miles did a similar thing with his band where they recorded that album, which he talked about on the day. Every song except for one, was the first full take of that song. It was pressed onto the record. And that is what made it out into people's ears. There's a huge degree in both of those situations on stage at TEDx and what Miles was doing. There's a huge comfort that you need to have with uncertainty in order to be able to pull that off. What is the shared mindset or the unspoken agreement that enables jazz musicians to do this successfully?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, that's an amazing question. Before I answer that, though, wasn't the only album that Miles did that on. There were other albums where he wanted the first take didn't go back over that, didn't give the musicians the music until they came in the studio and that kind of thing. So he actually planned that spontaneity. I also know, I also just heard a interview with Ron Carter, a very famous jazz bass, and he was like, I don't like rehearsals. He doesn't like to go to the rehearsals cuz he wants everything to happen live on stage. He doesn't wanna spoil that spontaneous moment. So it's very common for that to happen. And the fact that I was able to do that, now I'm, cuz I'm not really a professional musician, that I was able to do that with musicians that never rehearse together or even met together, that that's what any jazz musician around the world, regardless of where you can be in Kuala Lumpur and get some jazz musicians and as long as they know the rules of engagement and the underlying structure.
- So that's the answer to your question as well too, that to the uninitiated or the unknowing there's this kind of assumption or myth out there that jazz musicians are just making up [laugh] what they play on the spot. That's that the further couldn't be from the truth, which is there's actually a layer, there's a platform of greed, a knowledge around the rhythm, the beat, there's a steady pulse, there's a melody that everybody orients themselves to. There are fixed harmonies, they call them changes that everybody's orienting or orient themselves to. And that's all contained in a form, a fixed set of durations. And then there's also rules of engagements between the instruments that you kind of learn. And that's what you learn as a jazz musician. That's the sensibility that I was talking about that I think I bring into my work life. But that's what jazz musicians learn when they go out and play.
- And it's really through a mastery, a mastery of your own instrument, a mastery of the notes in the music, but also a mastery of these rules of engagement is how am I expected to behave with this piece of music and this group that I'm in front of? What's the expectations from them of me? And you learn that intuitively so that you can walk on stage with any group of musicians and play a piece of music like we did in that talk. So I think on the, so what that brings up for me is this, there's this interesting duality in jazz of structure, yet complete fl, it's very flexible on the other, the surface of it is very flexible, but underneath is this very, very rigid structure as well too. And this idea of mastery, as I mentioned, but jazz also embraces imperfection because if you make a mistake, you just keep going and you make the mistake part of what you, it's make it sound right and that kind of thing as well too. So there's all these seemingly paradoxes, how can it be structured and completely flexible at the same time that jazz has harmonized? And that's what I think, that's the lesson I think we can get from jazz, right, is this idea of being two things at once, being super structured and super flexible. And I think that's the challenge of management in the future. And then there's the challenges of being an employee or running a company is how can I be multiple things at once? And it's possible. And I think that's the lesson from jazz.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it fair or unfair to suggest that at the root of some of the problems that we experience in our communication with others in the workplace is the relative opaque nature of what those rules or patterns or structures should be or are that enable us to actually play with each other in a way that keeps us on the same page but with enough creativity that we're able to be who we each need to be in that moment.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, absolutely. And I think the lesson from jazz is don't improvise the structure and the surface level conversation at the same time because they don't, well, free jazz does, I should qualify that in free jazz. They actually improvise. Everything is completely improvised and it's really hard to listen to free, I dunno if you've ever listened to free jazz before, but you probably won't like it if you do cause everything's improvised. But you know, go out and listen to Miles Davis or wins or something, somebody like that. And you're going to hear a lot of structure and it's actually that structure and the tension of the structure underneath and the surface level improvisation that makes it interesting for most folks. And I think that's what you actually, I mean if I think back to 2003 when I got the Razorfish, we were improvising everything. It was free jazz because we were improvising the rules of engagement and the surface level at the same time.
- And I think that's what agile is, right? So what agile brought to development in engineering was a rules, a set of rules, the rules of engagement. So you don't have to improvise how you're going to be working together. What you improvise is what are you going to fill those things with? What's a sprint, what's a retrospective on more of the design side of things. I think that's why design sprints are so popular because design sprints give us those rules of engagement. Five days, we're going to go from this point to that point. It's going to be filled with these activities and exactly, and you don't have to argue that. You don't have to argue what's going to be on day one and day five because that's all kind of taken care of. So you can focus then on the surface with that under the structure. It's interesting because it's the structure that gives rise to the flexibility and the freedom structure gives rise to freedom without structure. It's just freedom with nothing tethering it to the ground. So you want the structure and the freedom. That's what a design sprint does. It gives us that container within which we can work and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The structure. So the structure seems to remove some of the taxation of completely free styling something, it removes the added cognitive load of having to think through what we are doing as we are doing it. And I think you're a hundred percent right that that's one of the reasons why some of these popular workshop methods have been so popular is because we don't have to do that anymore. You are also clearly given the book that you've written a big fan of mapping experiences and that's just come out in its second edition, I think last year, which is correct.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yep. Which 20, 20 20 and end of 2020 it came out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This book in effect to me says that words alone are not enough to achieve alignment between people on what a great experience should be. Why or how do words fail us and why do we need maps to fill in those blanks?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I think a map is a structure, it's a type of structure, it's a visual structure. In music there, there's sonic structures, there's a rhythm and pulse and those types of sonic structures that undergird the freedom of jazz improvisation. And similarly, I think a map is a way to structure a common snapshot of experience. The word experience, like customer experience, user experience. We wanna be more experience centric. Well, what the heck is an experience, a human experience? That's a big fuzzy thing, Brendan, how do we get our arms around it? Let's create a structure of it. Let's put some structure around it so that we're not arguing about what is the experience, what does it begin, what are the things you have? The conversation is, okay, so what does this mean to us? And I think what a map does is similar to what you were talking about, is it there's a cognitive offloading of instead of fighting about what is an experience and when does it begin and end and all those things, you're okay at the next level of creativity. Where are opportunities, where are the gaps that we need to address? And things like that as well too. So it does provide that same structure so that you can have freedom type of effect I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Believe. And you've out outline outlined four stages in a process of mapping experience. And I'll just recap these briefly. The first is to start to initiate, to actually make the map relevant. So set some context. The second is to investigate, to research to make that real for people. The third is to illustrate, to design, to make it visual so that people can see and understand it. And the fourth and final is to align, to get people on the same page so that we can actually do something with the exercise that we've just been through. Now that all sounds very easy when I describe it that way. It makes a lot of sense. What stage though, do people typically struggle with the most?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I think it's that last one A and the end of that last one, by the way is make it actionable as well too, is how do you keep the momentum going? Because a mapping effort is only a point in time and it's what happens before that, but more importantly, what happens after that and how do you make it actionable, the big point in all of that. So first of all, before I make that point, I just wanna mention that in the book I embrace lots of different types of mapping, customer journey, map, service blueprint, mental model diagrams, experience map. There's a whole bunch that I actually bring together, and that was the point of the book was to bring all of that together, but then also point to some differences between those. At the same time though, I wanted to give folks a general process.
- How do I approach this? And the four phases that you just mentioned, I believe are generic enough that you could take any mapping effort and they would apply to it. So I wanted to cover a range of different mapping types without being prescri prescriptive. So that's why I did that. But the point that I wanted to make is, the important thing is the mapping. It's the verb, it's not the map. So one of the biggest mistakes that I see is folks putting way too much attention in the artifact and the diagram and the deliverable itself. There are no magical answers that pop off of the map. You don't make a customer journey map or service blueprint and then your answers just pop off and go hit you over the head like a frying pan and go, oh no, we know exactly what to do. There's a layer of conversation that has to happen on top of that.
- And that's that align phase that I'm talking about is you have to analyze and evaluate and find your opportunities and align around those. But I think more importantly is then how do you make that actionable as well too? So the align, it's not just align, it's align and make actionable I would say as well to or that's included in there. That's what I mean when I say a line, right, is how do we keep that momentum going? And I think you can keep the momentum going better is if you approach mapping as an activity as a verb rather than a map is a deliverable. I have to make
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Biggie. Ears are coming to mind here. And also something else that you've said, which as I've heard you describe maps as invitations for others to engage in conversation and that really what we are trying to design here is a lean forward experience. So the role of the designer is less of a map maker and becomes more of a facilitator of action the further we get into the process of creating the map. It sounds like from what you've described there previously, that you see maps as more of a means to an end as opposed to an end and of themselves.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Absolutely. It's a springboard into conversations. It's a springboard into further conclusions and decisions that you need to align around. And a lot of design work is AR is about that. A lot of design work is trying to get others around you, even other designers to kind of agree on the direction and the solution. And one thing that designers do is they create models of the world. A persona is not a person, it's a model of a persona. Why do you do that so that you have a common picture in your mind, you can get aligned around it and have a conversation. A map of an experience is not an experience, it's a model of an experience so that you can have a conversation around it. So for me, that was a big realization that I had. Not only is it an activity, but what that also means is that I think as designers or at least the better designers that I've worked with are also good facilitators. Not in terms of running a design sprint, but just being able to steer a conversation or get the conversation going in a direction, I don't wanna say in the right direction, but in get a direction that is the appropriate direction, getting that conversation to move forward. I think that's also part of it being a designer, to be honest with you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's making me recall a conversation ahead with Uday ga agenda about his framing of desire's role. And two of the three of them I can recall that are relevant here. One is that role of stagecraft that we play in terms of the way we facilitate, but also when you start to get into leadership territory, the role of statecraft and the design's toolkit and how we can actually have those conversations across the business. In your observations and perhaps in your own practice as a leader and a designer, how much of facilitating that almost high level conversation about what we are going to do with the outcomes of this mapping exercise is free jazz versus something that's perhaps a bit more structured and that there's actually thought that goes into the choreography of what that conversation looks like?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, I think it could be a lot more structured, let's just put it that way. And when I think about mapping experiences, the book that you were just talking about and all of that process that you just mentioned as even end jobs to be done, I mean for me how I approach jobs to be done was another structured language, particularly at the top. What is the human problem that we're trying to solve and how do we understand that structure and understanding around that? And then B, structure alignment around that as well too. That's what I think jobs to be done brings to the table. But what design thinking and design thinking methods also try to structure that. You know, look at the dschool, they have their five honeycombs what is it? Em, em empathize i D eight prototype test. I left one out of, there might be a research in there or something like that.
- And then there are methods within there as well too. So you come up with a point of view and you form a how might we statement. So there are things like that that you can grab onto that are structural. However, in practice I think I've observed, I've experienced myself and I've seen others rather improvise a lot of that as well rather than relying on those existing structures or they're making up the structure as they go. I think that's part of where we are in our maturity as a field that I think as in another two decades, let's say from now, I think a lot of the growing pains and the thrashing and the different methods and approaches that have been thrown into the mix, I think a lot of that'll be I don't wanna say standardized, but there'll be paths forward that you could follow and not worry so much about what's under the hood as we say in America, but rather what's on the surface and the creativity can come out even more. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It seems to me that the will start to fall off when some scrutiny starts to be applied to some of the methods and outcomes from the methods that we use. We're not in design, and I'm speaking broadly here, so this won't be representative of everybody, but we seem to be very uncomfortable when challenged about the findings or the recommendations that we have that fall out of the processes and methods that we use. And this seems to be huge disservice to design and I really wish that we could become more confident and comfortable in addressing those challenges. When you've experienced challenge to, mm-hmm particular recommendations that you've made, you know are on the executive leadership team of a fairly significant tech company here, how do you handle it? Yeah, where do you go to, what's your approach to taking on that challenge and working with it?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I think, well first of all, I just wanna say that a lot of folks go into UX because they're passionate about it and they want to help users and things like that. And that's a good thing and I think you should embrace that. But then it does come out in some of the ways that you mentioned this, people attached to their babies and things like that and not being able to bring the most rational argument to the table, which isn't necessarily always needed because sometimes a passionate argument is good as well too. But I think just being able to think through and talk through some of those things. I would and I hate to say data because I actually think we overuse data in business context too much, but evidence I think is what's needed. That if you can bring in logic that is in informed by evidence that that's always going to be rather than your own opinion.
- I think your own opinion matters though, and I think you have to be able to argue from an opinion standpoint, but you also have to think about evidence and the logic around that. Evidence as well too is important. And that's one of the differences I think between a junior and the senior designer because I see, I was mentioned before, you can go out and study basically UX design and when I was working at Citrix, the last company that I worked for, we would get these resumes in people from Carnegie Mellon and things like that. And I was like, holy crap, it took me 10 years to get all the skills that you have on your little checklist there. And I was like, oh my god, they're better than me. But then they would come in and they wouldn't be able to survive. And then when the going gets tough and they're challenged and things like that, it's like, oh, you need some scars first.
- So kind of getting those scars, but then being able to, it's not just confidence, it's it. I think there is an articulation of your opinion and maneuvering and working with the evidence and the logic that's around that evidence, whether it's quantitative or qualitative, because I'm a big fan of leveraging qualitative evidence in healthy conversations. So it might be that as well too. But being able to do that. But the other thing too, the other whole side of it is knowing these battles to pick, that's something else I saw with younger students coming right outta school into their first jobs. Everything was a battle. Oh no, that button has to be that color with that drop shadow on it. And he's like, Nope, that's not your battle. You got big battles to fry, bigger fish to fry than that one as well too. So also knowing when to back off is also a sensibility that I think comes with experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How much being an executive leader, how much of your sensibilities that you've developed to occupy that role, how much of that has been based on, and this is a very leading question, but how much, if at all, has it been based on understanding the incentives and what's at stake for people that are outside of your immediate function that you're responsible for?
- Jim Kalbach:
- You mean others like CU customers or others in the company?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In the company,
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah. It actually opened my eyes in many ways as an angry UX designer. I used to pound my fist on a desk and say they don't get it right, generic. But in reality I didn't get a lot about go to market in sales and things like that. So I learned a lot about that and have a different perspective and respect for a lot of things that were outside of my purview in the past, which was pretty much product and product design. But there's lots of other things that go on in the business around go-to-market motions and pressures that come from the top, from investors and things like that. So I got a much wider angle of things and a respect for other emotions. At the same time though, I'm also able to notice that other fields, let's just pick on sales for a moment or some degree even engineering, but they're also missing a user perspective as well too.
- Because there was a topic in front of us, I'd be like, yeah, but no, that's not how people experienced software. And I felt like I knew how people experienced software cause I did whatever, a thousand usability tests or whatever. And I know that people aren't going to experience the software where or they experience, they're not going to have the same experience that you think they're going to have when you're sitting there in a room dreaming up some strategy. I'm like, yeah, no, that's not going to work because humans have brains. You're not taking that into account that the people that we're trying to serve have brains and emotions and they're not rational. You're rational strategy doesn't match. Yeah, right, exactly. It does not mesh with the messy world out there. So I think I was able to embrace the mess as a UX designer and I brought that with me then when I went in some other directions, particularly here at MURAL and sometimes that opinion would come out and people would look at me like I was crazy and I was like, no, you need to hear more of this, not less of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's keep the hater or the hate on design here as something that you've previously said about design's role in innovation was really made my ears prick up, made me pay attention. And you are quite critical here for good reason, I feel you said ideas are overrated. If your goal is to generate more and more ideas, you are probably not going to get that far. There's no value in a sticky note. A sticky note with an idea doesn't have any business value. You've got to put some teeth on that in design. Why do we seem to confuse ideas with innovation?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I don't know. I don't know. But that was the revelation that I had that led me to, did I write that? I wrote, you were reading from something you said
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That I wrote.
- Jim Kalbach:
- You said that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Something spoke. Yeah.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Ok. Anyway, I spoke it. Ok. Cause I've written, I have an article out there called Ideas are Overrated and I don't, I dunno if you were reading that, but similar thought there as well too. This was a revelation I had cuz I was guilty of it. I was addicted to ideas and I would go into a room and say, here's a problem, here's a how might we statement, let's fill the wall with sticky notes. And the measure of success was how many sticky notes we used that day, right? And oh, the more the better. Right? And there was this kind of, what I realized is there was this kind kind of implicit Darwinism of ideas, the best will survive, right? That if we just get more ideas, the best will survive. But then what I realized is all these other forces going on in companies, like I said, I got exposed to sales motions, go to market motions and investors and all kinds of other concerns that a business has.
- And what I realized is there's actually antibodies in an organization working against the good ideas. Sometimes the best ideas will be squashed by the antibodies inherent in any organization. So the question isn't how do we get more ideas? Because to be honest with you, Brendan, I've never worked for a company that didn't have enough ideas. It was never the volume of ideas. In fact, I asked that question a lot of times when I do workshops, does anybody work for an organization that doesn't have enough ideas? And almost nobody raised their hand and they always laugh. It's like, no, we have tons of ideas. The bigger question is which ideas move forward? And the question under that is, how do they move forward? Right? Because the logic that you think is going to move an idea forward, it's a great idea, right? Right. We said it was a great idea.
- We had a workshop science sprint. Of course it's on the sticky note. Everybody thought this was a great idea. That's not the logic that others in your organization are going to use to invest in that idea and actually make it move forward. And this is where the facilitator comes back in, is that not only do you have to have conversations about your designs and your craft and conversations about ideation and innovation, but you also have to have conversations that are going to resonate with other folks, namely people who are going to invest in a business idea or give resources to it or decide to build it in the next product, feature release and things like that as well too. That it's being able to navigate that world, which is actually more important than generating more and more and more and more ideas. And I know that because I was guilty of it, as I said, I was addicted to generating ideas and I thought I was doing a company of service by generating more ideas and I realized I wasn't.
- And these days, I don't know about you Brendan, but when I do design sprints or ideation sessions, it's hard to come up with anything original these days with so many startups in Silicon Valley, sometimes you come up with an idea and you're like, oh yeah, that's a web service that's out there. Yeah. There's a startup that has already done that. It's like, oh, there's not actually not a lot that people haven't already kind of thought. And it's so easy to launch a service these days. It's probably been launched to in some form as well too. So it starts to become less and less valuable the more and more ideas that you generate. That's what I find at least.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we can't rely on the idea to stand on its own, to be self-evident and to be this amazing thing that all your executives in your organizations just fall over and want to go and throw their careers behind and risk it all, what is a idea with the appropriate degree of teeth look like? Yeah. What is the shepherding or the support or the cotton wool or how do we break down the brick wall? Whatever you want to, whatever analogy you wanna roll with here, what does that look like? How do we do that better?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, I think this is where lean and lean thinking come in around build, measure, learn, and there's this idea of an MVP out there, minimum viable product. I called it what did I call it? Minimum business viability. I changed it because it's, the problem with MVP is it focuses on the product itself and then people have bastardized that term to mean a cheap version of your product, which it's not actually supposed to prove out the value of your idea. So I came up with a new, I'm slipping my mind right now what I call the minimum, minimum business decision or something like that to be thinking in those terms. To be thinking in terms of what would it take for the organization to see not only that this is a great idea that came from a sticky note, but it actually can be represented as a prototype or it has technical viability and we've put it in front of customers and they're foaming at the mouth and it's going to get you eyeballs or dollars or whatever whatever.
- It's going to get literally going a lot further than at least I used to go. And I know folks that practice lean are like, Jim, you're talking about lean here now. And to some degree I am. But very often going from research all the way to proving out a business idea is a larger aperture than a lot of the UX that I practiced back in the day. And then even beyond championing that idea and even volunteering to build it out, which I did in my last company as well too, I was like, no, we'll build out this service thinking in a more service mindset as well too. So going further I think particularly in the other direction that is not generating the idea, but taking the idea further. That's my big recommendation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is that something that is, and not necessarily in a negative sense here, but is that something that practice of taking it further, of building it out, of trying to understand usefulness or value, something that can give the business confidence that this thing's worth while making a larger bet on, is that an inherently wasteful exercise?
- Jim Kalbach:
- No, I don't think so. It's not wasteful, it's transformative is how I would put it, right? Because something expressed on a sticky note is not the thing. It's not even the prototype of the thing. Cause I found if you take a sticky note and then make a prototype out of it, you're like, oh, that sticky note had not nearly enough detail. And the thing that we actually prototype is very, very, even just a sketch, you don't even have to go to prototype, just take that thing and make a wire frame of it, like it changes. And you take that and you make a photo, it changes. And then you take that and you put it in front of somebody else and it changes as well too. So I guess there's exhaust at each one of those points that you might call waste. I think waste is the wrong word though.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like you need to define the minimum. You were talking about the minimum business viability or whatever before it's being really clear on what that bar is.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Well you wanna do that so you're, you're not just wandering up and down and just shoot in the dark dark in dark. So you wanna have some constraints in confidence. But as you go from idea to service ultimately hopefully there will be transformations that take place and the exhaust, I wouldn't call the exhaust waste, I would call it. I mean learning is the first thing that comes to my mind. But I think it's more about transformation. It's just the fact that you neither nor anybody else in the world knows what that thing actually is based on the sticky note. Yeah, we think that's the case. It's like here's a sticky note, it's an innocent little sticky note. I'm going to bring this in the c e o and go here. I've invested in this. No, that's not how it works. There needs to be a transformation to go from sticky note to investing in and then even launching it after that. So I think it's focused on the transformation and also realize that it's going to transform. There is no way that your initial concept is going to end up that way on the street. And there's this transformation and the willingness to go through that transformation process. I wouldn't call it waste, I don't say I don't think it's waste. I think that's just how it is
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now. We've been pretty critical of design or UX here falling short on a couple of measures of what it might take to actually be more effective in the organization. But you've also previously asserted that UX is really useful in reducing the risk that an innovation won't be adopted and can actually also on top of that be useful in accelerating the rate of that innovation's adoption or that feature or that product, whatever level of aperture we're looking at here. And you suggested in the PR past that ethno ethnography, prototyping scenarios, personas, these types of methods can be useful in US achieving that. Now that was back in 2012, that was a previous gym that's going back a decade now. Do you still feel that those methods are the best for predicting and accelerating adoption?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I don't know if they're the best, but that's what they ultimately try to do. In my book. And I'm a little bit biased, I'm going to even go back 15 years before that, talk to my time at Rutgers University in Information School. And this was actually my introduction into kind of human-centered thinking, let's just put it that way, was Everett Rogers. Everett Rogers is probably the most famous author that nobody knows about. That's what I like. That's why I like to describe Everett Rogers. He wrote a book, very famous book called The Diffusions of Innovations that I read at least the initial chapters of it. And that was the moment in school in 1996 or whatever it was. And it kind of opened my eyes to a lot of the assumptions that we have about how humans work. Actually there's counter intuitiveness there. And he was talking about why things didn't get adopted, why innovations didn't get adopted.
- And we all know Everett Rogers from the adoption curve. So the innovators, the laggers, the bit wild, the innovators, the early majority, middle majority, late majority. And the laggers, he's the guy that came up with that theory of how innovations get adopted. And we all know his innovation adoption curve. And that had always been a part of me cuz that was literally my introduction into human-centered thinking was Everett Rodgers and the diffusions of in innovations. Then I had some practical experience with UX and writing and talking about it under my belt. I kind of returned to that thinking and I tried to put the two together and I said, so why are we doing all of this? And I think ultimately what we're striving for is the thing that we make a product service or otherwise we want people to adopt it, which is different than sales and it's different than demand generation.
- We're not trying to drum up hype or excitement around our new product with a campaign and a price point and a deal. We want that thing that we're making to ultimately benefit human beings so that they naturally go, I want this then thanks for making that for me. Brendan, how did you know I wanted that? And the answer is, cause you did ethnography and designed to end, you did all those things. What's the single best method? I don't think there's a single best method out there. And that's why I kind of embrace all of them. And even though I wrote a book on jobs to be done, I think that's pretty good way, particularly way upfront. And I described by the way I described jobs to be done as a way to predict adoption is why will people adopt your product, get their job done and fulfill their needs?
- If you can address their unmet needs, you increase your chances of adoption later on. So I see jobs to be done as one way to do it, but I'm still a fan of ethnography, I'm still a fan of Design Sprints, I'm still a fan of lean UX and all of those things. Cause I think we need a robust tool set to be able to navigate our modern organizations and complex business spaces that we're in as well too. And Jobs to Be Done is another tool. I think it does it pretty well actually predicts adoption maybe better than others. But you need those other things as well too. So in any event, going back to my exposure, my early exposure to Everett Rodgers Diffusion of Innovations and really looking at why do human beings adopt an in one innovation over another innovation? And I just really felt that that's what we're all about. That's what we're trying to do. Usability and conversion rates, that's all kind of surface level stuff. It's ultimately we want the innovations that we make to have an impact and they're not going to have an impact unless the population that you're making that for accepts it and says, yep, that's what I thank you. Thank you for making that for me. And that's adoption.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Back in the early 2010s, you did some work for GoToMeeting and you were there at the time that the company launched a feature, which I believe was called HD Faces. How is HD Faces a really good example? So riffing off what you've just been talking about there of how not to make a smart bet on what customers will find useful or value will pay for will adopt.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, I mean for me that that was an example of disruption. And when I say disruption, I mean the Clayton Christensen definition of disruption, which is very specific. It's not just a general use of the word disruption. He talks about market disruption where an incumbent in any field or domain, they start to get more and more technologically advanced, more and more feature rich offering more and more service to their customers, to their increasingly sophisticated customers as well too. And the way that I describe it is they kind of work themselves up into a tizzy where their technology is what they think they're selling, right? And so more of my technology, the better like HD faces was that company saying to itself, well if this is hard for our engineers to do, it must provide a lot of value, right? Because it's hard for, it's going to be really expensive and hard for us to do this.
- So customers must really, really want this thing that's you working yourself upstream in the market to a higher and higher technical position. Disruption happens when somebody says, yeah, but I think people just need webcams and I can do that through my browser. Now. At the time, web screen sharing and webcams was a fairly complex and unique technology, but now everybody shares screens and webcams and stuff like that and the newcomer into the market figures out a way to fulfill that need way cheaper. And then it's a symptom of companies that they get wrapped up in their own technology. And it was a lot of money to implement HD faces. And what it did was it took your webcams on a go to medial and made them high definition because that's the most important thing in a conference call I, it did nothing for our sales and it did nothing for our brand reputation. And there was almost no lift from this thing that we invested a ton of money into. It's a total symptom of market disruption.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if you could have given the executives that go to meeting your latest book, the Jobs to Be Done Playbook before they came up with HD faces, what might they have learned that could have helped them to avoid the failure of that particular product?
- Jim Kalbach:
- The things that people value may not be the hardest thing for you to do or the most expensive things for you to do. And there were tons of things inside of God means obviously pre pandemic like a decade before the pandemic actually. And at the time we were struggling with the fact that a lot of people didn't realize they could talk through their computer. Sounds weird. But in 2010 it wasn't assumed that you can just talk into your laptop. So people would call up, call in, remember when you got on a conference call and then you dialed in on the phone or that was the whole conference call that that could have been the whole conference call, but we were pairing it with screen sharing. But you had these people dialing in on their phone. So this idea of muting the mute etiquette that we have now was not only did people not know how to mute, they didn't know how to talk through their computer.
- And I think were, if we solved that problem, I bet if you, I didn't do a job so we don't study, but I bet people would've said one of the biggest unmet needs was minimize the struggles that I have using audio or something like that would've been something around audio. And what did we do? We brought out high definition webcams and from a design team, I know the design team was very, very focused on trying to solve that audio problem. But I didn't get the sense the rest of the organization was really, really trying to solve those more human problems. How do two people interact on this screen thing? And I think what would've come out was a whole different set of priorities and what they thought was going to save the company. I think user, our customer base would've told them different things. And a lot of those things were probably easy wins or low cost, low effort things as well too. But our focus was off, I believe. And that's what jobs be done brings with it. It brings a human-centered focus back to the table. And it does it in a very clear and rigorous way too. Cause you can lay it on the table and say you're the top five things that people are struggling with in general, but there are unmet needs that you can try to serve. And that's important. That's the evidence that I was talking about, trying to bring that evidence to the table.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now I was having a deep dive into Jobs to be done and prep for today and I came across a couple of your talks where you were going through it to different levels of detail. And one of the things that stood out to me was that the research methods and jobs to be done seem to be very much in the wheelhouse of the research methods that UXs would be comfortable with. You know suggested in one of the talks I saw anyway that there are really two main areas of research that happen in a Jobs to Be Done project. Initially starting with what seemed to me to be very similar to the kinds of interviews we would do with customers or with our users. Just how close are those interviews that you do in a Jobs to Be Done study? To what most UXs, again this is a gross generalization, would be comfortable with having previously done interviews with customers or users. How closely aligned
- Jim Kalbach:
- Are. I think there would be a familiarity and a comfort there if you've ever led that kind of open interviewing. They are semi-structured interviews that essentially you're doing and it's a lot of listening and then guiding the conversation. I think the big difference is what you're listening for and what you're looking for from that interview is going to be slightly different than maybe if you do a broader ethno ethnographic study or even something like Contextual inquiry. And that's what Jobs to Be Done brings with it. It brings with a very, very specific and predefined language of categories of information that you're listening for, right steps. The emotional factors and the way that those things are formulated is also very, very specific as well too. But if you're comfortable leading a semi-structured kind of interview in a professional setting through contextual inquiry, let's say you would probably be very comfortable also doing a Jobs to Be Done interview. It's just your attention is just going to be focused on perhaps different and other specific things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Got it. Got it. And I get the sense that one of the things that you feel is beneficial in jobs to be done is also that we get an opportunity through doing it to quantify what those jobs or opportunities are that we should be focused on. So you talked about focus earlier, what is the most meaningful thing we can do for our customer, for example. And I get the sense that jobs to be done helps us to answer that which method or seemed to me you were suggesting surveys here are then used once you've actually mapped out the job to then figure out what matters and what.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, you can then quantify things if you need to or if you want to through surveys. I mean the thing about a surveys then your sample size goes up when you're doing qualitative interviews. I don't know about you Brendan, but I'm usually 10 to 20 people. If you do a study with 20 qualitative interviews, that's a pretty heavy lift. You gotta schedule all of those hour each, you gotta three hours for the analysis or more per study. That's a lot of data that you're going to collect. That's a heavy lift if you do 20 interviews. And I wouldn't count that as a quantitative sample. Running a survey though, you can survey 500 people if you want. So you can get quantitative really, really quick. You're obviously not going to get the depth and the texture that you get from the qualitative side. But that's why the two I think pair together.
- The importance I think of quantifying things is to be able to have that evidence and it is very, very powerful for those people that are going to be listening to your evidence differently. Cause when a UX person comes up with an insight, a qualitative insight and shows it to another UX person, there's a whole sensibility that they bring with it to interpret that. If you bring that to somebody else in business or marketing or sales or something that they're going to say, you only talk to six people what they're going to be thinking. So it's really, I believe the quantification of jobs to be done or the possibility to have quantification. I think it brings powerful evidence then to the table and it makes all of your qualitative research that much more valuable in a broader group of people. But there are also ways to prioritize things that are a lot more shooting from the hip as we say.
- Which you could use the team that you're in to try to estimate or guess prioritize on behalf of the customer as well too. If you can't go out and do a big survey, which I've done I've that as well too. And that's just a function of time and resource and things like that. Cause sometimes you don't have the ability to administer a large survey and analyze the results. What could you do? You could still take that very precise and rigorous jobs to be done. Insight that you've extracted in it's nice categories and it's nice formulations and you can still do a prioritization internally or with your team or somehow that's a little bit more guerrilla style as we used to say back in the days as well too. So I'm not saying you can't get value out of job speed done unless you do this quantitative survey. I'm just saying that that's a very, very powerful tool. That's part of the technique that you can build up to or not.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that technique, that survey, it's like the things you're listening for in a Jobs to Be Done interview. You are trying to key into specific questions here. What are those? I think there's two main questions that you ask. Oh right. People in a jobs to be Done survey,
- Jim Kalbach:
- Right? Yeah. This is a technique that Tony Wick pioneered to try to pinpoint unmet needs. And the first one is, how important is this to you? So you would end up with statements. They could either be what I call job step statements or outcome statements. Those are two different categories of information in jobs to be done. And each one of those categories has its own rules of formulation. Let's just talk about outcomes for the sake of these here. You could take all of your outcome statements and then have people rank them along two dimensions. How important is this to you and how satisfied are you getting that done today? I've been starting to phrase that second question as how easy is this for you to get done? Because I'm dissatisfied with the satisfaction question. And even you basically had two points of data for each one of those statements, which are very rigorously formulated and you can even validate those if you want before you go out. And what that allows you to do is then plot them on a matrix. And what you can see are the things that are highly important, but people are finding difficult to get done or they're dissatisfied getting done those, that's where you want to put your attention, the things that are important but are hard to get done currently.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's still a subjective measure of importance and difficulty, but we're able to quantify that at
- Jim Kalbach:
- Levels. You quantify
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It, satisfy other stakeholders need for quantification. Yeah.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah. And it's amazing what then comes out cuz you're like, oh wow, I didn't expect that. Or then, you know, get the results and you go back to people and it's like, yeah, but you didn't come out in the qualitative study. Cause sometimes in the qualitative part of the study, you don't necessarily get that side to side comparison of all of the things at once. And you do the quantification and yeah, it's about the data and satisfying those stakeholders. But you often get something back that you didn't expect either as a researcher as well too. So it shines a new light onto your understanding of the field as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now I'm just mindful of time, I've got one last question on jobs to be done here before we bring the show down to a close. Now this fascinates me jobs to be done. It really does. It seems to me that it holds so much potential for increasing the influence that designers and UXs have within their organizations. But it also on the other hand, doesn't seem to have been fully embraced by the UX and design community. Now you've said about this or touching on this, never before in my experience has what business people are talking about overlapped with what we are talking about. We should be part of this conversation and be involved in what they are talking about when they say jobs to be done. So why have, at least to me it seems that product in particular has been much quicker to jump on to jobs to be done and to see its value in use it than we have in UX. Why is this?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I don't know. I don't know. It actually is a mystery to me. Cuz when I first learned about Java to be done, I was deep in UX. I hadn't even written my mapping book yet. I was doing ethnographic studies, I was reading the contextual inquiry book at the time and things like that. And then I learned about Java to you done. I said, well this is great. This'll help me as UX practitioner. And then later on I learned that a lot of UX practitioners are saying it's a gimmick or it's just, it's the fad or I think part and I don't know where that comes from because it only has only helped me [laugh] in my career. So I'm like, no, this'll actually help you. I think it comes from it. It appears to overlap as we've talked about with the interviewing technique and contextual inquiry.
- Some of the things that I've even mentioned too. It appears to overlap with those things. But I think there are two important differences. The first is it didn't come from the design community, it's it not a design method. That's the thing. It actually came from the business community and it was a way for them to understand the people in their markets. And that's an important point that I think, again, when you're facilitating these conversations, and this is what I would do, I would explain jobs to be done. And this came from Clayton Christensen, and this is a business thing, and I've framed the conversation differently than this is hocus pocus UX thing that was just made up last year. It brings a different weight when you frame things in those two different ways. But the other thing is I do think to us be done has a level of precision and rigor that a lot of other methods don't have that a lot of other methods don't have.
- I mean, I'm just to pick on design thinking for instance. So design a fan of design thinking, by the way, I love Dschool mural. We just acquired a company that enables design thinking training and things like that. I love design thinking, but there's a point in design thinking where you're supposed to create how might we st sentence based on insights in your research. And the D school actually teaches come up with a point of view. So go out and do research, empathize, come up with a point of view and then take that forward into your ideations. I cannot find anywhere in the design thinking literature. And I've asked probably a dozen people what is precisely, tell me what the criteria is for deci deciding on that thing that you're going to move forward into the ideation and design thinking doesn't have that logic. In fact, one of the authors that I found says, pick the thing that's the most surprising to you as a researcher and make how we statement out of that. I'm like, whoa. Wow, that's highly biased [laugh]. Right? And how do you know you're being complete and comprehensive and how do you know? So I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Think it's also not very user-centered or human-centered it it's
- Jim Kalbach:
- Not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The antithesis of what we say that
- Jim Kalbach:
- We're there to do. Yeah, yeah. It's the researcher. I dunno, I'll just throw this my hat into the ring. Throw this thing into the ring. And so I think that jobs to be done. I always saw it as something complimentary that could give design thinking a lot more power. If you bring your design thinking research in, do the quantitative prioritization and say, let's make a, how might we statement around this? Cuz 500 people said that this is the most important thing that's you satisfied on. And you'll also then get better, I believe participation from your stakeholders as well too. Cause they won't be like this friended just made this thing up. Why are we doing this thing for Brendan? Because he did six interviews and he's making this, how many we statement up? You get away from that. So I think job suite done brings a level of rigor that is missing in some of these other methods and disciplines as well.
- So same thing with the design sprint. How do you, you know what to put the top of a design sprint for instance. So I think those two things. One, the fact that jump speed is not a design discipline. It did not come from the design community, actually came from the business community. You can leverage that fact to your advantage. And then the other one is that you can bring a level of specificity and rigor into your methods. Even if it's another type of method like Design Sprint or something like you can bring that in there. Javas speed done allows you to do that with a lot more confidence and a lot more evidence.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It answers the question, how do we know if we're solving the right problem?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Right? Exactly. Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That doesn't tell us how to solve it.
- Jim Kalbach:
- It doesn't tell you at all how to solve it. In fact, Joss speed done goes out of its way to expunge solutions from its language. It's the exact opposite. It just tells you what problem, what's the right problem and what's the right problem. It's the one that's going to predict adoption because what jobs to be done says if you can come up with the right solution, we're not telling you what the solution is, but if you can come up with the right solution for this problem, your chances of innovation, success, i e adoption increase. That's what it says,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Jobs to be done, people. Check it out!
- Jim Kalbach:
- Hey Jim,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Helping people to focus and to collaborate more effectively has clearly been a major aspect of your life's work. And speaking of that work, you once said that work is not a place, work is what you accomplish with others. So what is the most important skill or behavior that you feel is within each of our ability to improve that? If we did so, if we took that on that we would accomplish more when working with other people.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, as I met, it's a great question because I, I've always described UX as a full contact sport, and that's where the facilitation and conversation fostering aspect comes in. Unlike I'm just going to compare it to coding or programming. No, nobody looks at a programmer's code. It says, oh, that's, that's not aligned. Or Why did you use those phrases in there? But everybody with two eyeballs looks at UX work, right? So it is very much more a conversation and you're out there and it is about agreement and alignment and getting all of those things. That's why I call it a full contact sport. So collaboration I think is core to design and being able to be a good collaborate good collaborator, and leading by example. And I actually think there's three things. So I'm going to answer your question about the one thing with three things.
- The one first is a willingness to participate in the collaboration and a willingness to listen to have big ears and a willingness to listen to others. The other is respect as well too. And again, as I was an angry UX designer, sometimes I didn't respect what I heard from others. But there are other perspectives in other worlds in inside of any organization that I think you need to respect as well too. So willingness to listen and then in respect that you also need to bring. And then the other one I think is curiosity. The last one is curiosity. Hey, tell me more about that. Or yes, or what if we took your idea and we added it with this idea. So that curiosity of not just hearing the words coming outta somebody's mouth and then reacting to that but really, really trying to think about what is new about that, right? Because we talked about jazz, you take something, you make it your own, give it back into the world. Then you have to take that, make it your own, give it back into what You can only do that if you're curious. So willingness, respect, and curiosity, I think undergird and are foundational to anybody collaborating. Any one person. Could you ask what any one person can do? I think bring those three things to the table and you'll have a good collaboration.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm. What a excellent place to say goodbye to our conversation today. Jim, I've really enjoyed the time today that we've spent. You've certainly brought some very novel and unique and valuable perspectives to this collection of conversations. That is brave UX. Thank you for sharing your stories and insights with me today, and also for your generous contributions to the field over the past 15 years.
- Jim Kalbach:
- Well, thanks for having me, and thanks for listening. I really appreciate the questions and I appreciate everybody tuning in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome, Jim. And Jim, if people wanna keep up to date with you and the workshops that you run, I know you're doing a lot of jobs to be done workshops and training in this space as well. What's the best way for them to do that?
- Jim Kalbach:
- I think first of all, you can find me out on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with other UX folks out on LinkedIn. Jim Kalbach, I think it's Jim Kalbach. Yeah, you'll find me out on LinkedIn. But also the Jobs To Be Done Toolkit. So jtbdtoolkit.com, that's the website that we launched at on the heels of my last book to keep the conversation going. And like you said, there's some free downloads there. There's an online course. We also do live trainings there as well too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think there's also a free monthly webinar that you're running?
- Jim Kalbach:
- Yeah, yeah. We're doing that right after Thanksgiving here in the us. We did the first, no, the last Tuesday of the month that it's more of a community call. It's not really a webinar. We've been having guests recently, and I'll interview the guests and they'll share something, but it's really about the questions and what people bring to the table. And we call that jobs to be done untangled because there's a lot of confusion and myths and questions that people have about jobs to be done. So it's more about, Hey, let's come together and try to answer those together.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. All right. Check it out people. Thanks Jim. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, including the Jobs To Be Done Toolkit and all the other ways that you can reach Jim, his LinkedIn profile, some links to his books as well, they'll be in the show notes, so please check those out. If you've enjoyed this conversation and you want to hear more conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product management, like Jim, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are really helpful. Also, subscribe to the podcast so it turns up in your podcast app on a weekly basis, and tell someone else, just one other person about the show if you feel they would get value from these conversations at depth. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. My profile is linked to at the bottom of the show notes, or just search for Brendan Jarvis or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.