Sriram Krishnan does not like the Jobs To Be Done framework

[00:00] I hate jobs to be done. I think it's a terrible framework. I think no successful company has ever been built on top of JDBD. And if you pick JDBD, you're probably doomed. And here's why. JDBD assumes that, let's go back to the canonical example, right? And there's nothing Clayton Christensen, who was a legend, you know, amazing. The milkshake, right? What is the idea of being the milkshake? You are a person, you go into a commute, and you're like, hey, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get this milkshake because it's the exact right quantity. [00:30] save me on my commute, but they changed it up. And all of a sudden, boom, like, you know, it was not serving the job. And look into the thing that actually it is serving the customer for. [00:39] I'll tell you that's not how actual real companies work, right? Because in real companies, there are so many different parameters. For example, maybe it is really, really hard to go build that milkshake, right? Maybe there's another person who opens up across the street who builds a better milkshake than you do. Maybe the cup configuration in the car changes. Maybe the supply chain for milk chain changes, right? But in my world, let me make this more concrete. When you work in social media, there are often so many other agents in the system where you can't focus on one person's equation. I'll give you an example. [01:09] Facebook for many, many years, Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you're probably going to use Facebook. So it'd be like, well, if you want to throw every tool we have at our disposal, it'll get you to 10 friends in 14 days. So if you sign up on Facebook for many, many years, you'll get this little thing called people you may know. And it'll show you. Then you have this person who just signed up on Facebook. Why are you not seeing this person? It's not because you need a friend.

[01:31] It was really different. So what Facebook did was it made your experience slightly worse to make that person's experience slightly better. This was performing no job for you. It was trying to perform a job for them. Was it right trade off or not? I don't know. We had this problem at Twitter. The single best product launch for the last five years at Twitter was the introduction of the algorithmic ranking. Um, uh, algorithmic ranking. God hearsay. Oh my God. And, uh, it saved the company and power users hated it. [02:01] I know who to follow, et cetera, et cetera. It turns out though, this is not good for power users. It was really built to get for a regular person when they sign up for Twitter, to be able to give them a great experience because we need the power users they already have. And by the TikTok, I'll be a great example of that. So how do you make a trade-off? Do you pick power users or do you pick a regular person? What is the trade-off between them? Jobs We Done does not tell you that, right? In fact, that even worse, if you go sign up for, let me tell you this, if you go look at, if you go order a package from Amazon right now, you know, five years ago or three years ago, you got an email [02:31] and it's been showing up during the last couple of years, it doesn't. Why? Because Amazon doesn't want Google to have that data inside Gmail systems. So it is, you know, for very, very valid competitive reasons, trying to make your experience worse, because that's the right thing to do for a company. So real life and real product is all about these trade offs. And whenever I've seen people trot out JTBD, it's a tell that they actually haven't dealt with a trade off where you have to make one person's life slightly worse in one situation for some other interesting dynamic.

[03:01] Thanks for listening. You can find the full episode on YouTube or head on over to Lenny's podcast dot com.