Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4d2nCOx ----------------------- Got a question? Want to recommend a guest? Or do you want to tell me how the show can be better? Send me a voice message via email at [email protected] ----------------------- In this episode, UserTesting’s Lija Hogan sits down with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural and author of The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, to discuss how the “Jobs to Be Done” framework can transform UX and business strategy in today’s growth-focused world. Jim unpacks how this mindset helps teams align around real customer needs and bridge the gap between design and business outcomes. He also shares insights on leveraging AI as a tool to enhance—not replace—human-centered research. Jim reflects on his career journey, his passion for experience mapping, and how reframing UX from a cost-saving function to a growth driver can earn teams greater influence in their organizations. Plus, he explains why empathy shouldn't stop at the customer—UX teams need to understand their business stakeholders just as deeply. Key takeaways: The evolution of jobs to be done from boardroom strategy to everyday design practice Why UX teams need to speak the language of business—and how the word “growth” can open doors How to gain executive buy-in by aligning with business goals and showing proof of impact Tips for using AI to support jobs-to-be-done research and scale customer insights The future of UX: creating more human-centric organizations by democratizing research mindsets Resources & Links: Connect with Jim Kalback on LinkedIn Jim’s JTBD Playbook and Mapping Experiences books Mural Connect with Lija Hogan on LinkedIn Learn more about Insights Unlocked: usertesting.com/podcast
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guest of this episode?
Welcome to the Insights Along podcast. I'm Aaron Diocampo, Brand Content Production Manager at UserTesting, and joining us today as host is UserTesting's Leah Hogan, Principal for Experience Research Strategy. Welcome to the show, Leah.
Thank you so much, Aaron.
And our guest today is Jim Callback, a leading expert in UX, design strategy, and customer experience. Jim is the chief evangelist at Mural, where he helps organizations collaborate visually and think more strategically about design and innovation. He is also the author of several influential books, including Mapping Experiences and the Jobs to be Done Playbook.
With a background spanning UX research, product design, and business strategy, Jim has worked with companies of all sizes to create customer-eccentric solutions. Today, we're excited to dive deep into his insights on jobs to be done, experience mapping, and how AI is shaping the future of research. Welcome to the show, Jim.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation.
Well, that's a great way to kick off the conversation because I'm even more excited to have this conversation. And first, I really want to start with congratulating you on your recent 10-year anniversary mural, which, as we all know, with the speed at which things move in America,
technology that's a good long run and you've had an incredible career that spans design and customer experience and business strategy and just like all the things. And so I kind of want to take you back actually to start with, you know, what originally drew you into this space at the intersection of all of those different disciplines and then also just
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Chapter 2: What is Jim Kalbach's career background and role at Mural?
How has your perspective evolved over your time in this space?
Yeah, great question. I think I'd have to go back to my studies at Rutgers University. I started with a degree in music, but then after graduating, I went back to grad school and got a degree in information science. And that was at a time when, you know, the Internet was just coming around and, you know, email and things like that. So I got online at the time through Rutgers very early on.
I was surfing the web and I had an email account back in the 2000s. in the early 90s, and that got me really attuned to online experiences. But then from there, I moved to information architecture. So my information science degree set me squarely up for an information architect role, which, of course, includes usability in a lot of the things that we would call UX these days.
And then I, you know, continued working in that field, both internally and externally for large companies on the one hand, you know, in a large product design team, but also as a consultant in a couple of roles externally for design and innovation projects and things like that.
When I came to Mural, though, I took a sidestep and I actually then headed up what we called our customer experience team. And that included customer success, which is post-sales account relationships, the support team. and our services team as well too, which has to do with experience. And I think that's the common thread, right? Going from UX to a more CX kind of thing.
It's really about the customer and their experience, but the medium in which I was creating those experience changed from pixels and screens to enablement sessions and onboarding flows and things like that. And then in 2020, I became the chief evangelist here at Mural when the pandemic started. And it's an interesting role because I have kind of a helicopter view of things.
And by that, I mean, I work with some of our biggest and best accounts. which puts me in touch with design teams of all kinds in all kinds of industries around the world. So although I'm not really practicing UX per se or design per se, I get to work with lots of teams in different situations. So that keeps me in touch with what's going on.
Yeah, I think that that is like the perfect blend of experiences to give you a lot of wisdom about like how to do the work and why to do the work and how to make the business case to do the work. And so, you know, I think from there, I just want to shift gears and talk about the fact that obviously you wrote a really, I think, helpful book around the jobs to be done framework.
And it's been around for a while. So I think you bring your own perspective to it. But I'd love to hear more about how you think that framework has evolved from its original evolution, right? Or how it originally was envisioned to work. Right. And how it can be really leveraged in this very quickly changing business context.
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Chapter 3: What is the Jobs To Be Done framework and its evolution?
Just prior to that though, Clayton Christensen, very famous business thought leader, unfortunately he passed away a number of years ago, but He kind of coined the term or popularized the term in his follow up book to the innovators dilemma called The Innovator's Solution. But if you look at I mean, let's just start with from Clayton Christensen.
in the stratosphere in terms of business consulting and advice, right? You know, he would hobnob with the CEOs of the world's largest companies and talk strategy at that super, super high level, right? And then even Tony Olwick at Strategin with his ODI, he was also leveraging some of the principles of jobs to be done at a fairly strategic level, you know, thinking about
how do you think about your market differently? And when I say markets, I mean like segmentation of your market and what's the overall value and value proposition at the highest level, right? And since then, there's been some other flavors and other practitioners but for me in 2003, kind of on the, in, on the ground in the middle of a design team, right? I was like, you know what?
I think this can also help me and my team think through problem solving and designs and things like that. And I think it was that perspective that kind of comes out. I hope it comes out in my book. What, what, you know, I'm not a consultant, like, so I don't go in and consult CEOs and give them a nice answer in a PowerPoint deck. I,
I want to position and think about jobs to be done as something anyone can use in part or in whole. It's almost a mindset that I want to be able to bring to literally everybody. Right. So the evolution that I just painted is, you know, jobs to be done as a high level strategic notion from Tony. Oh, sorry, from Tony.
Clayton Christensen to kind of this, you know, strategic consulting model was very systematic and very, very rigorous. And for me, it's kind of bringing it down and saying, no, there's value in job jobs to be done, thinking that anybody can tap into and anybody can leverage even in just small ways through the course of their project development or whatever they're doing.
Yeah. And I think that's a really powerful concept because there's so much rigor in the Ulbricht frameworks and just, you know, I see these beautifully constructed like interview guides and scripts and research plans that come out of researchers. But there's also just the you can listen to people piece that I think is really powerful for folks and very common sense.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How can the Jobs To Be Done framework help UX teams gain business influence?
So jobs to be done, help me get a seat at the table, or as I like to say, help me get a customer the seat at the table, because I don't want a seat at the table. I want the customer to have a seat at the table.
Yeah. Well, you know, that's a really great point because that's obviously something that a lot of teams in UX and design are really struggling with right now. Like, how do we get the buy-in and the ear of our business partners to just give us the time and the space to say, there's another perspective outside the room that should be here? That's right.
So what I think, and this is a little bit of a different question. So you say that you do that, but how do you do that? Like how do you connect to that very visceral? Like I understand.
Yes.
No, as a business.
I think, you know, just, just sticking with jobs to be done for a second. Um, I think it's, you know, for me, there's a couple of tactics there. One is to find a business stakeholder as high level as you can, who not only gets jobs to be done, but would be willing to be a kind of a champion for it.
And that's what happened to me early in my career, particularly around mapping and mapping experiences. I had high level support and doors got opened that way because it's always nice to have a little bit of weight behind your motions and your decisions from above. But also getting a proof point, get a case study together that you can say, hey, we did this and show that around.
And again, I think the jobs to be done label and positioning and posture helped with all of those things as well. But I also think it's about having more empathy for our business stakeholders. Right. And this sounds weird because designers are all about empathy and we have empathy maps and all that kind of stuff is like, yeah, point that stuff back at your business.
And I was the angry UX designer. You know, why don't they get it? And it was us and them. Right. It was the turtlenecks in the suits and they don't get it. Right. It's like. Drop that division in your mind and say, they do know things that you don't know, and there are business things that you need to learn, and their motivations are different.
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Chapter 5: Why is using the language of growth important for UX professionals?
If I were to go back and redo my UX career over, I would be using the word growth like punctuation, right? Because very often UX and usability and things like that are positioned as cost savings and friction savings and... customer experience, right? Either we'll reduce the number of calls to the call center, that's money, right? So invest in us and you'll save more money, right?
Or customer satisfaction is better, that saves you money. If you flip the script and say, we'll earn you more money and make a revenue generator out of UX. However you need to argue that, that's a more powerful argument. Because most business leaders will say, we grow through more sales and marketing. Those are revenue generators. And why? Because they want to grow.
And there's a belief in the business mindset that growth comes through sales or marketing, not from UX. I disagree. And of course, now we have product led growth and all these other things, right? And I think it's about making that case of how does UX and design and research not just save costs and save friction and bad experiences, how does it drive growth for the business?
And I would just start using that word all over the place.
I think you just like if all people do is just listen to this far into the podcast, they will come away with a really powerful piece. Because I think a lot of what it is that we do is speak about risk and how we can de-risk or create space to ensure that you can optimize the time that you're spending to not rework something. But that growth piece is where product teams and other teams are.
And business people really do understand that revenue side.
Exactly. It's a powerful shift. Yeah. De-risking is preventing risk or incurring costs, preventing incurring costs. If you flip the script to we're going to make you more money. Right. And you can and you can argue that somehow. Right. You know, you know who does that really well? A.B. Testing.
The A-B testing group, the statistical A-B testing group, they're really good at that because they'll say, I will tell you which workflow, which experience will generate you more revenue, right? And it's those types of arguments that I think the UX field in general has not embraced or really –
Like we really got to dive deep and find what are those things where it's growth and flip the script from we'll de-risk and we'll save you money to we're a revenue generator as well.
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Chapter 6: How does Jobs To Be Done contribute to driving revenue and product-market fit?
Yeah, sure.
Well, you know, to that end, I guess what is, what are some of the ways that you can use jobs to be done to flip that script? And so like, how do we grow revenue? How do we open up new markets? How do we like, how do we grow? Yeah.
Yeah, sure. Well, I'm an innovation diffusionist. I don't know if that's a word, but I actually got introduced to human-centered design and human-centered innovation through Everett Rogers. And he wrote a book called The Diffusions of Innovations. It's the most famous book that nobody knows about. That's the way I like to describe it because we all know some of his theories from there.
And the one theory is the innovation adoption curve. You know, the innovators, the laggers, the middle majority, that's from Everett Rogers and in that book. And when I was at information school, we had to read that. And that's where I really started to think, wow, it's all about the human. And that's what made me human centered. The reason why I mentioned that is because.
His book is a humanistic way to look at adoption of innovation. Why do human beings, the people that you serve, why do they adopt one solution over another? And what is that adoption process? And so for me, Jobs to be Done is a way to help a commercial organization predict adoption, which is not sales. It's not about demand generation. Sales is transactional.
It's about, okay, I bought this thing. That's only part of the story. It's not an insignificant part of the story, but that's only part of the story. What we really wanna do as service providers and innovations is have something that people adopt. and pull into their lives and go, how did you know I needed this? Thank you so much. That's where you get brand loyalty.
That's where you get a customer response. And the way that we say that these days is product market fit. And product market fit is about revenue generating, right? Because you want to generate more revenue, you need better product market fit. Jobs to be done can help you predict what those pull factors are going to be.
And in the jobs to be done theory, it basically states that people pull solutions into their lives that get a job done better than other solutions, right? So therefore, if we can study the jobs to be done in an abstract way, because the job is not using your product, the job is a a goal that somebody has, right? Independent of your, so there's a really human behavior, right?
And who better to talk about human behavior than UX people and user researchers, right? So you can take all that goodness that you know as a UX researcher and point it at adoption in a business context and say, I'll make you more revenue by creating market pull. So that's a little bit theoretical, but I hope that answered your question.
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Chapter 7: What practical advice does Jim offer for applying Jobs To Be Done in business?
Oh, I love it. That's gold.
But you know, any UX designer or researcher listening, they'll go, they'll, they'll know what I mean. Oh yeah. I can, I can imagine how I would do that. Right. It's that's not a mystery for us.
It's not a mystery for us, but I think it's getting people to slow down enough to say like, we have to flip the script if we want to be successful. And it's like getting people to really buy into that. We're going to make more money. We're going to do it more easily if we do it this way.
Right.
Right. And everybody laughed. And the laugh was basically, yeah, we've all worked on those types of projects. And for me, the thing that job doing jobs to be done up front, it provides a very strong rationale, customer centric rationale for what you're doing and why you're doing it. And it allows teams to focus on the right things for the right reasons.
Because I've never worked for or with an organization that lacks ideas. This is another question I ask. Is it the problem? Is your company's problem you don't have any ideas? You're just sitting there going, I wish I had an idea. It's usually the opposite. You have a backlog. I mean, that's the definition of a backlog. You have a backlog of ideas.
And everybody at happy hour solves their company's problems. There's ideas swimming around any organization at any one point in time. The question is, which should we do? And very often we bring a logic to prioritize those ideas that are based on finance or technology or stakeholder preference or some thin data points. Right.
And it's like, you know, when I said bring the customer to the table, I want to bring the customer that prioritization table. Right. And that's what jobs to be done can help you do, because it's generally very far up front.
So once you have signal on the job to be done and the unmet need, using something as sophisticated as ODI or even a lighter version like I teach, you can then say, okay, maybe we should use this as the reason to prioritize the backlog. And the reason is so that we have better market adoption and the throughput of sales and all the other things that need to happen is so much easier.
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