Today, we welcome our special guest, Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio, along with her husband Mathias. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.  She’s also a co-host of the Software Social Podcast, a weekly conversation between two SaaS founders… self-described as “one just starting out, and one who’s established.” Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing, “Deploy Empathy”, which we are certain to get into today.

Today, we welcome our special guest, Katerina Kozludzhova. Katerina is an experienced product manager who became so enthusiastic about innovation, she went on to get a PhD, with her dissertation on the commercialization of software innovations.  Today, she is the Chief Assistant Professor of Business Innovations at Plovdiv University in Bulgaria where she teaches courses on innovation, creativity, design thinking, product development, and commercialization.  She’s the author of the book, “Business Innovation,” which we are certain to get into today.

So we release part 2 of our effort to try to break jobs to be done. We prod it, push it, pull on it and generally try to exploit its weaknesses to see how it holds up. We will look at situations where JTBD seems to break down... situations where things people do are hard to explain from a jtbd perspective. We will talk about the role of emotion in people’s behaviour. In JTBD there is this notion of an emotional job which we will take apart.

Today, we try to break jobs to be done. We prod it, push it, pull on it and generally try to exploit its weaknesses to see how it holds up. We will look at situations where JTBD seems to break down... situations where things people do are hard to explain from a jtbd perspective. We will talk about the role of emotion in people’s behaviour. In JTBD there is this notion of an emotional job which we will take apart.   This is part 1 – the riddle. Stay tuned for part 2 next week!

Today, we welcome Beat Walther for the second part of our talk. Beat started out his career at P&G, has worked at McKinsey and is managing partner at Vendbridge, the agency I work at and which he co-founded 20 years ago. He is co-creator of the CFI approach. CFI stands for Customer-Focused Innovation, an approach which helps companies focus their innovation resources on the winning ideas. Beyond his work at Vendbridge he is a board member and has coached more than 200 Startups. To listen to part 1, just scroll down to episode 8!

Today, we welcome our special guest Beat Walther. Beat started out his career at P&G, has worked at McKinsey and is managing partner at Vendbridge, the agency I work at and which he co-founded 20 years ago. He is co-creator of the CFI approach. CFI stands for Customer-Focused Innovation, an approach which helps companies focus their innovation resources on the winning ideas. Beyond his work at Vendbridge he is a board member and has coached more than 200 Startups.   This is part 1 of the podcast with Beat. Stay tuned for part 2 next week!

Dan Adams is the founder and president of The AIM Institute and is author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth.  He’s a chemical engineer by training and the holder of many patents, including a listing in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.  Dan is a teacher to thousands of innovation practitioners, has coached hundreds (if not thousands) of innovation projects, and is the chief architect of Blueprinter® software – the tool that helps novice Voice of Customer practitioners to be as effective as experts, and helps experts to be as effective as masters. 

Anyone in the Jobs-to-be-done space by now surely knows his name and work but it’s worth pointing it out. He is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Chief Evangelist at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He has written 3 books: Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). He is also the Co-founder and Principal at the JTBD Toolkit, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content. Jim blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.

If you’ve heard or used the term mental models, that’s because of her work and the book she wrote with that title “Mental Models”. Indeed she pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Indi is a writer, researcher, and coach for inclusive product strategy. Beyond Mental models she’s published Practical Empathy and she is very close to publishing her next book “Time to listen”. You can find all of that and more on her website indiyoung.com

Today, we welcome our special guests, Ronan Healy and Jane Hession.  This husband and wife team are the founders of the “How Might We” design studio. Their mission? To help to be more creative, to solve problems, can I use the phrase, “to innovate” by using something inside that many of us have lost touch with… the power of play. A self-described “researcher at heart,” Jane has worked with entrepreneurs, corporations and even the Irish government. She has a PhD in Entrepreneurship Management and is author of “Women in the Modern Workplace.” Ronan is a true student of innovation, with experience in agile methods, design thinking, systems thinking, and something that we like here, Jobs-to-be-Done. He’s a highly experienced facilitator, advisor, consultant and teacher.