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Rob PunselieA truly customer-focused content strategy is the cornerstone of good customer experiences.
Over the past 25 years, Rob Punselie has developed and honed content discovery research methods based on time-tested usability knowledge and the Jobs to Be Done product-development framework.
This approach has helped him consistently deliver to his clients effective and durable content and customer experience strategies.
We talked about:
- Content Kings, his customer experience consultancy, and their focus on the Jobs to Be Done methodology
- the surprisingly small number of jobs that exist in many large projects
- the JTBD methodology he has developed
- the need to cultivate deep knowledge of, and experience with, their methodology to use it
- the key factor to developing competency in using the methodology: curiosity
- the “magic quotes” that are key to identifying critical research insights
- his take on customer journey mapping
- how to be genuinely customer centered as you discern how to address the jobs that need to be done
- how staying customer-focused builds your credibility as a business
- how his approach encourages cross-functional collaboration
- the specific benefits to content practitioners of the JTBD approach
Rob’s bio
Rob Punselie is a seasoned transformation leader and founder of ContentKings. With over 25 years of experience, Rob has guided organisations in government, healthcare, and business through complex digital transformations, always with a sharp focus on user needs and measurable results.
Earlier in his career, Rob worked at ASML as a Publications Manager, leading international teams to streamline technical documentation in a high-pressure, global environment. As a lecturer at Leiden University, he spent eight years shaping the next generation of media and journalism professionals.
Rob is also the author of eight non-fiction books, showcasing his expertise in communication, strategy, and innovation. Driven by the belief that IT should be as effortless as turning on a tap, Rob continues to help organisations make digital work — for everyone.
Connect with Rob online
- The ContentKings website
- CourtYard newsletter (in Dutch)
- email: Rob at contentkings dot nl
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 207. At the end of the day, customers care very little about the content you have carefully designed and crafted. They just want to get something done. Teasing out the actual tasks and jobs they need to do is the foundation of a truly customer-focused content strategy. Over the past 25 years, Rob Punselie has developed and honed content discovery research methods based on time-tested usability knowledge and the Jobs to Be Done product-development framework.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 207 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Rob Punselie. Rob is a Punselie, I’m sorry I screwed that up. We were practicing my pronunciation before the show, but Rob is the principal at ContentKings, which is actually they do more than content. They’re a customer experience consultancy based here in the Netherlands. Welcome Rob, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Rob:
Hi, Larry. I’m quite privileged to be here and such a good company and a long list of experts that I admire. What we’re doing right now is a couple of projects. We’ve been working on a larger project, which is called the FK Farmacotherapeutisch Kompas. We’ve been working on content projects for the Brain Foundation and right now we’re working together with a business accelerator program trying to facilitate their software programming and development right now. So that’s the kind of thing that we do and we do a lot of research.
Larry:
Yeah, and that sounds like a general customer experience, usability kind of consultancy, but you still focus on content and this is a content strategy podcast, so we will kind of keep the conversation around that. But I think the first thing, I think a lot of my folks will know about Jobs to Be Done, that it’s a thing that it exists. Could you provide just a quick overview of your conception and your take on Jobs to Be Done and how you apply it in your content work?
Rob:
Yeah. Well, originally we started off with using the task analysis view of Hackos and Redish in the nineties because that’s more or less when we started doing our things and then we came across first Clayton Christensen’s view on “Jobs to be Done”. Clayton Christensen has this view of explaining that actually what customers are doing is they have a problem and they’re hiring a solution to fix the problem that they’re having. And he’s written a couple of very good books about that. And then Tony Ulwick has this outcome driven innovation method, which is a methodology where you can actually manage innovation processes by quantifying what he calls underserved jobs in a particular market. And then you can really focus and deliver innovation and innovative products and services. And then of course you have Jim Kaulbach who has applied it very much into the UX and UI area, but actually Jobs to Be Done a very broad concept, and there are some, it has a lot of purposes and I really believe that it’s of use in many situations.
Larry:
Yeah.
Rob:
Interesting.
Larry:
Yeah, no, it’s just interesting that it’s sort of like a Swiss Army knife in that sense, in that it originated as a business innovation tool and then kind of became a product kind of thing or the people’s, I think, maybe perception of it kind of evolved that way. And then Jim Kalbach, I think because Rosenfeld published it, we kind of had this UX feel to it. But I guess the first thing about it, many of these kinds of practices, it’s very based in research, both how it’s done, but also how you start a project, like that FK project you just mentioned. Tell me how do you get started to identify these jobs and tasks that need to be done?
Rob:
That’s very good. Actually, we always work, so we’re called ContentKings, but we’re not an agency. We say, “Okay, you give me 200 grams of content and we’ll bake it for you.” We do this a three-step method, so it’s analysis, strategy, and then implementation. And in the analogy phase, we always go out in the field and we talk to the stakeholders, customers and the clients that are relevant to our client. And what we did in the case of the FK was that we really talked to doctors, GPs and specialists, in the hospital and we found out that actually those doctors, when they are subscribing medication, they had only had four jobs that they needed to do actually in that whole process. And when we came back with that kind of outcome of the research, that helps the product owner of this FK to all right, now we have to start the development process, the whole agile software development process.
Rob:
And that really simplified things very much because actually in the whole team where you have programmers, designers, and editors, you can simply say, “Okay, now we have four jobs and in this particular sprint we’re focusing on this one job. What can you do from your discipline to support that job?”
Larry:
Interesting.
Rob:
And what it also does is it really specifies the scope of a project like that because you can actually say, “Okay, either what we’re doing supports one of those four jobs or it doesn’t, in which case it’s out of scope.” Just as simple as that.
Larry:
Yeah. Is that a common, when you look at any one function like that, because that’s a big important thing and you mentioned before we went on the air that there’s literally millions of uses of that product every year, but it really just boils down to these four jobs, I’m assuming. Is it safe to assume that there are a number of tasks that make up each of those jobs?
Rob:
Yeah, actually what’s typical for Jobs to Be Done is that these jobs are usually quite recognizable. They’re very plain. The four jobs of doctors when they’re using this FK website is the first job is checking. Actually, it’s verifying whether or not they can prescribe this particular piece of medication, and there are certain tasks in these dosage interactions with medications. The second job is finding an alternative, so they want to know about a different kind of medication that you want to do. The third one is policymaking because when they’re in their whole practice, they quite often doctors have a change of heart when it comes to a different kind of medication that they want to try. And so they do that not on a weekly basis, but quarterly basis. They reviewed all the medication that they’re prescribing. And the fourth one is studying, and that’s all. And so either you support one of those four jobs or you don’t have anything to bring to the table in the project. It’s as simple as that.
Larry:
Interesting. And for any one job, I’m thinking of all the job descriptions I’ve had over the years and there’s always subheadings everything rolls up to that are along those lines. And now you mentioned that you do a lot of field work to start this and that I know you have a, you’ve kind of developed your own methodology, right? How you conduct that research.
Rob:
Yes. What we found out is that, again, it’s based on Hackos and Redish, common knowledge, but what we try and do is talk to people about their work. We ask people, doctors, for instance, when you are doing visiting patients, what does your regular week look like? We break down the activities in big chunks, and then with each chunk we also ask people, “Okay, what are the questions that you have when you are doing these chunks?” For instance, one of the chunks is visiting patients in the hall on the ward. Okay, because what are the questions that you have? Then the third part is what are the sources that you use to find answers to the questions? And only in the fourth bit of the interview, we start talking about the application that is under review that we’re trying to research.
Rob:
It’s a bit beating around the bush. You’re not talking about the subject that you’re actually most interested in, but the thing is, when you arrive at the fourth part of the interview and you’ve done that a couple of times, you know everything you need to know about the whole world or what doctors are doing, and that allows you to really understand, okay, so it’s really about these jobs and this is when they started, this is when it is finished. These are the worries that they have, these are the questions that they have, this is how they solve it. For instance, this checking used to be only a website only. Right now it’s also on the mobile phone, so you see the jobs stays the same, but the solutions and the technology that’s involved can change.
Larry:
Yeah.
Rob:
That’s also a Christensen play.
Larry:
Yeah, no, but as you were talking about that too, I was just thinking of the human interaction that’s going on there. That the fact that it is, it sounds a little recursive, like you’re revisiting stuff, but by the time you get to that point of talking about the thing you actually want talk about, is it as much about the rapport that you’ve built with them and the comfort that they have or are you… Yeah, and plus you’re piecing together in your head all of their concerns.
Rob:
I’ve had juniors trying to follow up this research and they’re short-circuited. It’s too difficult because you really have to, you’re talking to somebody, you have to be credible, so you have to show that you understand what they are doing, more or less. They are the expert. You are not, but you have to have some credibility. You have to take notes. In the Hackers and Ready book. They say, “Yeah, you record things, you just transcribe things. But modern consultancy, it’s transcription and reading back the transcript is time-consuming as well.”
Rob:
You do a lot of the part of the analysis you do on the spot, you’re on the spot thinking about, “Okay, what are they saying? What are they not saying and what can I do? What can deduct from it?” The last interview that I had, they said this and this, so I need to follow up with this. There’s a lot of going on that you’re doing it during the interview and that helps you pinpoint right to the points where, in the end, you come up with the jobs. In the last interviews, you are more or less validating some of the stuff that you have been digging up in the first interviews.
Larry:
Yeah.
Rob:
It’s definitely senior stuff.
Larry:
Yeah. I was going to say in terms of a practice though, I know that a lot of my listeners are more junior and may not have that sort of, because I do a lot of what you talk about all the time, and I know that it’s kind of a mindset, but it’s also just a lot of experience built up over the years. This gives you little pigeonholes to tuck things into, but do you remember, can you think back to how you got started with it and if somebody wanted to cultivate and develop that skill, have you thought about how you could do that?
Rob:
Yeah, actually when we have vacancies, we’ve had several applicants and I think the most important tool that people should have is plain old curiosity. Be curious and you keep asking yourself questions. Why this person is saying this, but he’s not saying that. And so you do your homework. Certainly nowadays online you could find out almost anything about someone, so you can find about the person, the organization he’s working on, how long he or she’s been there, what do you think that their worries are, what keeps them awake at night, and that’s your mindset already when you’re going into the interview then. And there are a couple of, certainly when you’re starting off, you are also a number of pitfalls, so things that you shouldn’t do, so don’t ask stupid questions.
Larry:
The credibility part is important.
Rob:
The credibility, you don’t have to pretend to say, “I know. No, I’m a medical expert.” No, you’re not a medical expert, you’re just a researcher, but you are very curious about what this medical profession work looks like. And so if you build up this kind of interaction and you ask the right, “Can you give me an example of that or why is this? I’m trying to understand what is it? Can you explain? Please do this.” If you do that in the right rhythm almost you start getting a real good interview and then you build up confidence for later on because that will help you later on to really say, “Okay, I can do this. I can make people talk about their job longer than that they wanted and they can tell me more than they anticipated.” Also, there’s this magic trick at the end of the interview, always be mindful the interview isn’t over when you stop recording, then the interview is not over. The interview is still there. Always be alert for the last drop of coffee.
Larry:
Yeah, there’s always something you discover after the end of that. That’s a whole, as you’re talking, I’m like, “God, that’s a whole, not even a workshop. That’s like an ongoing professional development career-long thing that you could always be working on.” But one of the benefits of that approach we were talking before we went on, is about the confidence that gives you when you go into meetings with your collaborators and other stakeholders and you talk about, “Okay, these are the jobs that need to be done,” because you’ve conducted the research in that way/ I guess, because I get that that would give you a lot of confidence you go into that meeting, but how is it better than other ways? I’m assuming you’ve tried other things over the years and have kind of settled on this. Is that a safe assumption?
Rob:
To be honest, we’ve always, because we focus quite often on the field research bit, and this has always given us so much evidence and confidence in dealing with the steps later. Like I said, the first step is analysis. The second step is strategy, and we do that together with the client and we’re trying to develop a content strategy where we’re focusing around these jobs and then it helps if you have examples, you have quotes.
Rob:
Mind you, when you’re doing the interview and it’s all about the magic quotes and you know it the moment the person says this magic quote, you say, “Oh, right, this is the one.” The magic quotes will open the eyes of your client. It will make them see, “Hey, this world is not the way we think it is. Out there, it’s different.” And that gives you the whole, when you’re in the workshop, the design thinking workshop as we do, it gives you a different mindset. It helps you, it opens the mind of people say, “Okay, now we really have to start looking at this perspective, the job perspective, and say, ‘What can we do to support that particular “Job to be Done”?'”
Larry:
And that’s such a common thing is because everybody you work with is good at their job and they’ve figured out a lot of things, but sometimes they get a little overconfident and you have to come back with actual customer data and go like, “Well, actually the world really works this way and we can show you.” And then that’s when you drop that magic quote and they’re like, “Oh, oh, that’s right.”
Rob:
And so that’s also why it definitely needs to be important, the selection of the people that you talk to because your client has to be convinced that they are the people that they work for.
Larry:
As you’re talking about this, a lot of this sounds like it’s in the same family is like customer journey mapping, persona development, task analysis and all those kinds of things. Your work, and I get when I asked that question before about your methodology, well of course you’ve been doing this since you started, so you figured out early on, “Yeah, this just works. I’ll keep doing that.” But you’ve looked, I know you know about and have done customer journey mapping and things like that. How would you contrast this approach that you have with a service design or UX-ey approach to task analysis and persona development and journey mapping and that kind of thing?
Rob:
Well, I would say that, to start off with the journey mapping things, in my vision, it’s the vision that we have at ContentKings, a journey map, a customer journey map is just a “Job to be Done”, but then written down in time, developed over time. And I always like to joke about customer journeys because in reality, I don’t really believe that there is any customer that is really going on a holiday or something like that. Nobody, there’s no customer that already has any plans to go on a holiday. The customer has a problem and for that particular problem, he’s looking for a solution. And it could be that if one solution is found, then there is another problem that needs solution, that the two jobs are connected, but in no way that is a kind of a journey that exists in the mind of the customer. It’s convenient. We all talk about it, and even at our company we talk about customer journeys, but you should bear in mind that it’s something that exists in our mind but not in the minds of the real customers.
Larry:
That’s so interesting. Have you given any thought, because thinking of salespeople have their funnel and a lot of people like the journey model and the way you just said that, it’s like they’re not thinking that they’re on a journey, they just want to hang that picture on the wall or fix that problem, whatever it is. Are there other metaphors that you kind of use in your own head to organize?
Rob:
Yeah. Well, what I also like to explain to people is that I think that we’re oversimplifying quite a lot of interactions and relations online because we always tend to look at the sales processes. Say there is a customer and there’s a salesperson or a sales system that’s trying to sell something. But in the end there’s so many different ways of having an interaction with all kinds of institutions, and that could be that you’re talking about you’re a user and you’re actually interacting with a system that’s a different kind of interaction. Or the example that we were talking about earlier that if you are a citizen and you need a permit and then that means, for instance, a permit for doing something in your garden or chopping a tree, something like that in the Netherlands that we are at, you need a permit to chop trees in your garden.
Rob:
I always try to explain to people working at the government and say, “Okay, so what do you think the people interest when they’re looking for this permit?” And I explained to them, “Nobody’s interested in your permit. I want to cut my tree.” And so if I would only look for any information if somebody comes up to me and say, “Hey, careful with that, you need a permit.” And if you look at that from that angle and then we say, “What would be the first two questions that you’re having when you want to cut down the tree?” And that’s not the whole regulation or why the permit system is there, you just want to know what are the chances of being caught and how much is defined that I get when I am getting caught. That really, and you’re talking about content again, that really creates quite a different format for the content page if you’re trying to write about permits.
Larry:
That’s right, because if you’re just a government bureaucrat explaining how the permitting process works-
Rob:
Nobody cares.
Larry:
Nobody cares about that. Nobody cares. It’s like, “Am I going to get caught?” That’s probably the top question now. I love that switching around, so I hope that maybe we can leave this part of the conversation with people just thinking about different metaphors to guide how they think about organizing because so much of this is just about what you just said, it’s like aligning mental models of an activity in the world and that government bureaucrat is going to think about it way differently from the guy who just wants that ugly tree out of the backyard. Yeah, interesting.
Larry:
That kind of reminds me of there’s the legal and ethical things going on there. One of the things we talked about before we went on the air was I think the term was, I think this kind of practice as a moral compass that can guide the whole design and development process in a more sort of ethical and empathetic way. Can you talk a little bit?
Rob:
Yeah, it’s a big work, of course a moral compass, but I’d like to differentiate between content marketing where you just want to sell stuff and tell an interesting story, and quite often the content marketer really is, “Okay, this is your problem and this problem. Hey, by the way, this problem solves your problem,” but I think you should take it a step further and really try to understand the “Job to be Done”. That’s the issue that your customer is trying to address and trying to help the customer to make the best decision possible, which could also mean that they’re not buying your product. I think in that aspect it is also an ethical choice too. You say, “Okay, now I’m interested in the job that a person has, the “Job to be Done”, because that would enable me to not only promote myself, but to also to really empower the customer to make the right choice.”
Larry:
Yeah, I guess you’re reminding me in the United States there’s a real extreme example. There’s insurance company, I think it’s Progressive Insurance, that has a rate calculator on their website, and sometimes it’ll show that another insurance company has lower rates. And it seems like you’re probably building a lot of credibility with that kind of-
Rob:
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what I mean, because in the end, what people say, “Okay, is this what I think it is?” Okay, they really build up credibility. That’s true.
Larry:
And want to return. You mentioned a minute ago, I love the way you contextualize the end user, the citizen, government relationship, the user, system relationship, but there’s another kind of before that there’s a lot of these cross-functional collaborations. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but I’d love to dive back in to how this work happens because I’m piecing together the thing you said about the key piece of research that just highlights this, that way of thinking about the customers. What other benefits to cross-functional collaboration come out of this approach?
Rob:
Well, what we’ve seen in our experience is that if you really start out your, for instance, agile software development process, if you start out by doing research where you come up with these Jobs to Be Done of customer jobs, whatever you call them, you really have a priority set out for you for the whole thing. Not only you have the scope of your project, but we’ve had people, tech leads of development, people say, “Well, we use the stories.” Okay, that’s okay. But we just look at the jobs and say, “Okay, what part of which particular customer job are we working on?” And the job really prioritizes all the efforts and the user stories are just little parts. I’d like to make the joke that user stories are jobs should be done that’s been taken through the grinder, but you can’t recognize the jobs anymore. The jobs really helps you prioritize, helps people stay connected, and it’s also more or less creates a universal language between designers, programmers, content strategists and other people, and they have to start understanding each other because they’re all focusing on the same particular job.
Larry:
I love that. The common language is sort of a, this is definitely a content thing. Our crafting and coming up with that common language that helps you talk about the projects in the same way. It also sounds like this is really, the way you practice this, it’s like this notion of content-first design or content-first product development. If you’re approaching this as with a story about a job that needs to be done and you’re coming in with content that helps and language that helps people align around that, this seems like, have you seen content practice getting more credibility and more respect with this kind of approach?
Rob:
Definitely. And actually up to the point where sometimes because you have a different angle and you certainly don’t approach things, this is the way we’ve always done this. This is always the way we’ve described our project or our services or our permits or whatever, and you start describing it from the other way on the side of the tables, so to say, people come to you and say, “Okay, well okay, now explain, so this gives you a different perspective on everything that we’re doing.” And you could end up talking to management. And actually the kind of task analysis thing, I’m pretty used to presenting the results of our field two times. One time to our client and the second time to the boss of our client.
Larry:
There’s… anytime you can go up a level, that’s a good thing.
Rob:
Let’s hope so. Yeah, obviously you have to present things differently, shorter, and you have to adapt, but it’s worthwhile. Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. Very cool. Hey Rob, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already, but before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure that we share before we close?
Rob:
Well, I think what I’d like to share is the whole notion that Jobs to Be Done is for content people, content strategists or whatever kind of role they have, it’s really a great way to create a common language with other disciplines. It’s also a great way to prevent from being focusing on your specific narrow content path because it really will help you across the bridge to user experience and if you manage it with marketing people as well. And I think that, in general, it helps people prioritize a lot because there’s a lot of energy, in my opinion, wasted on ways of working that are actually not delivering. And you will find that if you invest in knowing that not jobs should be done of your customers, you’ll get a great return on investment.
Larry:
Yeah, that goes right back to, I think it’s Tony Ulwick’s focus on outcomes that by focusing is that what’s going on there? Just by focusing on the outcome, you get these sort of, you know what to do. That’s where the prioritization comes in, you know the outcome.
Rob:
Yeah, that’s part of it. The other part is that the way that Christensen put it, the thing is about jobs is that they don’t change as much. The example that Christensen gives is that people have been transporting objects from A to B for thousands of years. In Roman age, they use horse and carriage for it, and nowadays we’ve got FedEx for it and in five years time we probably, there’s a drone going on here and I put it on my balcony, and say, give it to the drone, and it’s get delivered. It’s still the same job. It’s adopted technology, but it’s still the same job. The other real benefit, and it’s good that you mention it, is that it is quite sustainable, if you invest in jobs. We’ve had clients that we developed strategies and they’ve not basically changed for eight years. They have changed the implications of it and the implementation of it, but the jobs and the strategies remain the same.
Larry:
I love that. Well, that’s a perfect note to end on because this is strategy is in the of this podcast. Thanks. Hey, one very last thing, Rob. If folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?
Rob:
I always like to connect on the LinkedIn, obviously the website Contactkings.eu or Contactkings.nl, but LinkedIn is, I’m there and I love to chat with all kinds of colleagues and professionals around the world.
Larry:
Excellent. Well, I’ll put those in the show notes as well. Well, thanks so much, Rob. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Rob:
I really enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much, Larry.
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