March 23, 2026

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Hi Everyone,

You've probably made a product, pricing, or hiring decision this quarter based on internal opinions and gut instinct. That's normal.

But 6-10 conversations with the right customers, done in two focused days, will show you what you're missing.

It's called a JTBD interview sprint (short for Jobs-To-Be-Done). You talk to people who recently bought your product, switched to a competitor, or cancelled.

You ask them to walk you through what happened, step by step. And you listen for the real reasons behind their decisions.

What you hear will be useful across the board for product priorities, messaging, pricing, sales conversations, onboarding, and even hiring.

Today, we're walking you through how to run one over two focused workdays.

What makes these interviews different

A JTBD sprint uses what's known as a "switch interview." The name comes from the idea that every purchase is a switch (even if the person switched from doing nothing).

You sit down with someone who recently made a decision and ask them to reconstruct the timeline.

You're asking what people did and why, not what they wish you'd build. The answers tend to be surprising…

The sprint, step by step

Before you start (1 hour)

Write down the specific decision you're trying to inform.

"Should we redesign onboarding for mid-market accounts?" is useful. "Let's understand our customers better" is too vague.

Then decide who to recruit. You want people who recently experienced the moment you're studying, ideally within the last 60 days.

Keep the group similar – one type of customer / one type of decision, per sprint.

Run 6-10 interviews (Day 1 and Day 2)

Each interview runs for 30-45 minutes. Do them in pairs where one person asks questions, the other takes notes. Record every conversation with permission.

Start by asking the person to take you back to the moment when the problem first came up and then follow the timeline forward.

• What did they try?
• What didn't work?
• When did they start looking for alternatives?
• What did they compare you against?
• What made them finally decide?

Two rules to follow here:

1. Don't ask "Would you use feature X?" You'll get wish-list answers that don't match real behavior.
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2. Resist the urge to explain or defend your product when something uncomfortable comes up. Aim for the customer to be speaking about 80% of the time.

Debrief within 30 minutes of each call

After each interview, sit down and write four things:

• What job was this person trying to get done? (Write it as "When [situation], I want to [make progress], so I can [outcome].")

• What triggered them to act? What almost stopped them? And who were the real competitors, not who you think they are, but who the customer was actually comparing you to?
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If you skip the debrief, the details blur together and you lose the specifics that make the findings useful.

Make sense of what you heard (last 6 hours)

Pull your debrief notes or call transcripts together and look for overlaps (Any AI will do a wonderful job with this task).

You'll usually find that two or four job statements cover most of your interviews.

Build a one-page summary that outlines the following:

• Top job statements,
• Most common triggers,
• Competitors that kept coming up,
• 2-3 direct quotes

Then score each finding by frequency, business impact, and your confidence level. That gives you a rough priority order and tells you where to act now versus where to keep investigating.

What you can and can't decide from this

A sprint like this gives you enough to make quick, specific decisions about product changes, onboarding, messaging, and how you position yourself against competitors, as long as you're focused on one type of customer.

Where it falls short is when you need answers that apply across different customer types, or when you're setting pricing, or making a big company-wide decision. For those, treat the sprint as a starting point and validate with broader research or an A/B test.

Go deeper

👉 Bob Moesta on Lenny's Podcast: The Ultimate Guide to JTBD – Bob Moesta, one of the creators of the framework, walks through how it works, common mistakes, and how to run the interviews

👉 Deploy Empathy: Switch Interview Script Template – a ready-to-use interview script with specific prompts for each stage of the customer's decision

👉 Re-Wired Group: How Many JTBD Interviews Do I Need? – practical guidance on sample sizes and when small samples work

👉 Intercom: Intercom on Jobs-to-Be-Done – a free book on how Intercom applied JTBD to product prioritization and what they learned

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll talk about why 80% of stretch goals fail and what to do instead when you're setting Q2 numbers.

That's it for today! Have a great week.

P.S. How many customer conversations has your leadership team had in the last month?