The Milkshake Dilemma

What job did you hire that product to do?

This image is generated by DALL-E

When I started working as a Product Manager at OneCard, one of the things that I wanted to do was talk to customers. I had multiple conversations with my colleagues about the project I was working on but I knew talking to customers would help me generate much richer insights.

I had this belief because of what I saw at my first job at Internshala. Sarvesh, who is the founder at Internshala, fostered a culture where every employee, no matter what their role was, worked in the customer support team for a few weeks. Everyone used to get customer feedback emails in their inbox so that we stay updated on how our users experience the product. I still remember that a lot of marketing and product ideas used to stem from those customer emails and calls at that time. I did the same at my second job at SaaSBOOMi where I talked to 30+ women founders to understand their needs from a community and soon after that, we built PULSE (you can check out the initiative here).

So, after circling down what exactly we needed to figure out and then segmenting the users as per the requirement, it was time to write questions that could help us get what we needed and at the same time, easy for users to understand and answer. Julie Zhou’s list of 7 questions came in handy here. Summarising them below - 

1. Let the user talk about the problem (What and Why): Describe the last time you <had X problem>. What happened? What did you do? Why did you do that? 

2. Understand the user’s view on the existing solution: What works for you about <existing solution Y>?

3. Get to know the pain points: What’s the worst part about trying to <solve problem X?>? How much does this suck? 

4. Understand the cost for the customer: How much <money, time, effort> did you spend to <solve problem X with existing solution Y>?

5. Understand the expectations: What’s the best experience you’ve ever had in <solving problem X>?

6. Gather potential visions: If you had a magic wand for <problem X>, what would you use it on? 

7. Test your hypothesis: If I gave you a <proposed solution>, what parts about <problem X> would it help with or not help with?

You can read more on this here.

I have always found the utmost level of clarity in Julie’s writing. My manager was interviewing a candidate last week. I was sitting in the same room when he asked the candidate - Who are the top 3-4 women you follow on the internet? I asked the same question to myself. Julie’s name was the first to come to my mind. I met her during a Women in Product event hosted by The Product Folks in Bangalore in August last year. I hope I get to work with her someday (fingers crossed). 

So, after all the reading and discussions, we created a list of 5 questions and conducted 50+ user interviews.

But this post isn’t just about my experience of conducting user interviews. It’s about understanding the consumers with a broader lens. It’s about the Jobs Theory which I recently got introduced to and which I think everyone should keep in mind before conducting any user interview. All thanks to Clayton M. Christensen’s book - Competing Against Luck.  

What’s Jobs Theory?

The author explains that a lot of companies “unwittingly design innovation processes that perfectly churn out mediocrity. They spend time & money compiling data-rich models that make them masters of description but failures at prediction.” To understand what made a customer buy a specific product, we need to ask a better question. One such question is - What job did you hire that product to do?

Let that sink in. This is such an important question.

Applying Jobs Theory to the Milkshake Dilemma

Storytime - Bob and Rick were on a mission to help bakeries and snack food companies develop new products that people would predictably buy. They reached out to Clayton (the author of the book) for help. Bob shared a project for a fast food chain: how to sell more milkshakes. That chain had spent months studying the problem in detail. They asked the customer tons of questions like - “Can you tell us how we can improve our milkshakes so you’d buy more of them?” “Do you want it cheaper?” “Do you want a thicker milkshake?” “Do you want it chunkier or chocolatier?”. After collecting all these insights, the chain tried many things in response to the customer feedback. 

Within months, something notable happened: Nothing. After all these efforts, the sales of the chain’s milkshake category didn’t change.

So the author along with Bob and Rick approached the problem with a different question - What job arises in people’s lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to ‘hire’ a milkshake? To figure this out, the team stood in the restaurant for 18 hours one day and simply watched people - At what time did people come to buy the milkshake? Did they come alone or with someone? Did they buy anything else with the milkshake? Did they have the milkshake at the restaurant or did they ask for a takeaway?

Here’s what the team found out - 

1. A large number of milkshakes were sold before 9 a.m. to people who came alone to the restaurant. These people bought a milkshake, got into their cars, and drove off. The team asked them - “What job were you trying to do that caused you to come here and hire a milkshake?” Customers had a hard time answering so the team probed on what else they sometimes hire instead of milkshakes. That’s when things became clear. These people had a long and boring commute to work. They need something to keep the journey interesting. They weren’t hungry but they knew they might need something to eat by midmorning. There were certain competitors to milkshake. Some people said that they hire bananas sometimes but they get finished too quickly and you’ll be hungry by midmorning.

   Some said donuts but they are crumbly and sticky and hence make a mess in the car while driving. One customer said that one time he hired a Snickers bar but he felt guilty about eating candy in the morning. But a milkshake? It was the best of the lot. A thick milkshake with a thin straw - it takes time to finish it and hence you don’t feel hungry by mid-morning. It’s easy to carry and fits right in the cup holder in the car. What these people had in common had nothing to do with their individual demographics. Rather they shared a common job that they needed to get done in the morning. And the team had an answer - “Help me stay awake and occupied while I make my morning commute fun.”

2. A good quantity of milkshakes were also purchased in the afternoon and evening. Now, at this time, the same customers hired the milkshakes for a very different reason. Here the customers came with their children. Parents who said ‘no’ to their kids multiple times during the day - no new toy, no staying up late, no going outside in the sun, these parents were now looking for a moment to finally say yes to their kids and be a loving mom/dad. That moment arrives at the counter when the kid asks if he can have a milkshake. “Of course, you can.” This time the milkshake isn’t competing with a banana or a doughnut or a Snickers bar. It’s competing against stopping at a toy store or finding time for a game to catch later on.

Solutions that the team came up with - 

For the morning customers, the milkshake should be thicker so that it takes time to finish up. The addition of fruits and chocolate chips will add a surprise element to make the ‘commute interesting’. One can also think of moving the dispensing machine from the back of the counter to the front and providing a swipe card, making it easy for the customers to fill up the milkshake and rush out again.

For the afternoon customers, milkshakes should come in half making it easier for the parents to yes to their kids and also making it easy to finish the milkshake more quickly.

The author makes a critical point here - if the fast food company had only focused on making its product better in a general way - sweeter, thicker, bigger, it would have been focusing on the wrong unit of analysis. One must understand the ‘job’, the customer is trying to do in a particular circumstance. A one-size-fits-all approach would have been a disaster here.

So, anytime I’m conducting my next user interview, on a broader level, this is one thing I’m going to keep in mind - ‘What job did the customer hire our product to do?’.

🍎 On the sides

1. Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen on a broader level tries to explain what causes growth and how to create it. It focuses on why our long-held maxim - that the crux of innovation is knowing more and more about the customer - is wrong. Since I have started reading it, I’m finding it really interesting. Here’s a new and engrossing thing I learned from the book - In the 1950s, the US Air Force realized that their pilots were having trouble controlling planes.

   They assumed that it was either because of poor training or pilot error. But it turned out that the problem was something else - The cockpit had a design flaw. They had been built around the ‘average’ pilot in the 1920s and since then the cockpit design remained the same but the Americans had gotten bigger. So the next step was quite simple - Redesigning the cockpit to fit the average pilot in the 1950s. That’s what the US Air Force did.

   They measured 4000+ pilots and updated the measurements of the ‘average’ pilot. So, how many pilots do you think fell into the definition of average after this gigantic undertaking? Well, the answer is none! Every single pilot had a ‘jagged profile’. Some had long hands, some had long arms, and for some, the height was an issue.

   The revised cockpits designed for EVERYONE actually fit NO ONE. The US Air Force finally kept aside the baseline assumption and that’s how my friend, the adjustable seat was born. Todd Rose in his book, The End of Average, wrote that there’s no such thing as average in the real world. And innovating towards ‘average’ is doomed to fail.

2. I came across a video on YouTube that reminded me of this show that my brother and I used to watch a lot. The name of this Discovery channel show was ‘How do they do it?’ where the host used to visit huge factories to show how ordinary things are made. The video I recently stumbled on explained how chocolate is made. So, if you too are a fan of chocolates, check out this video here.

3. A close friend shared this video with me. Being born in a joint family, I have seen this happening multiple times. This needs to stop!

And with this, we have come to an end. I’ll keep Thinking Out Loud here. Also, do let me know what job did you hire my newsletter to do :P

See ya 👋