Transcribed by https://otter.ai - this transcript is mostly machine-generated and may contain errors. [Intro music] Skipper Chong Warson Hi, I'm Skipper Chong Warson, and you're listening to the second season of the How This Works show. Thanks for being here. I have a product strategy and design business called How This Works co. I also work as a facilitator and leadership coach. Have you ever wondered how people become good at what they do? That's what this show is all about. I chat with a variety of folks about how they got started in some particular subject matter, where they are now, and a number of topics in between. Today, I have Aaron Young with me. He runs Switch Insights based in Atlanta, Georgia. We're going to talk mainly about switch interviews and what that means for products and services, and how that applies to where we live, work, and even buy wedding dresses. Aaron, I appreciate you joining me today. Aaron Young Sure I'm excited to chat with you today, Skipper. Skipper Chong Warson Aaron, let's start with establishing pronouns. I'm he/him. How should I refer to you? Aaron Young He/him sounds great. Skipper Chong Warson Awesome. Thank you. So Aaron, is there -- we're going to get into your introduction in a moment -- but is there anything about your personality that might be a surprising element or something in your background you'd like to share that some of our listeners may not expect from you? Aaron Young I think the quirkiest thing about me is how little I care about dessert. Skipper Chong Warson About dessert really? Aaron Young Yeah, so I tried chocolate for the first time when I was 27 I was on the streets of Bruges. I was with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and mostly did it out of a challenge to get over with this gimmick that I'd held on my whole life, which I avoided, this thing that everybody loves. I didn't have ice cream till I was 28 I still haven't had a cupcake or any of these other cookie-type things that people love. I basically spent my whole life ignorant to them, disinterested in them, avoidant of them, and at this point, the whole breadth of my sweet tooth is oatmeal raisin cookies and a berry sorbet. But otherwise, and this extends to being a picky eater in many ways, I mostly spent my 20s trying things that are very normal. I remember August of my 25th year was low-hanging fruit month. I had a mango for the first time, a nectarine, a peach, a kiwi, and so, yeah, just a late arrival on most foods. And have been able to push into the distant future and hopefully forever desserts, because I've got my other vices, like jalapeño potato chips. Skipper Chong Warson I like that. You've picked a side and desserts is not your side? Aaron Young No, no, it's always been my two truths and a lie. It definitely gets attention. Skipper Chong Warson Well, Aaron, let's get into the meat of our show. I mentioned a little bit about our subjects that we're going to talk about today in the show's opening, but I want to hear it from you. What are the subjects that we're going to talk about today that you know an awful lot about. Aaron Young Sure. So I spent much of the last 567, years obsessing, can't get let go of an idea around how people switch products, or how people switch in general. I think this is such a big part of our day-to-day lives. We used to have an old equilibrium, and now we have a new one. We're struggling to transition from here to there. It could be what products we use in the home, at work, where we live, where we work, so many things in our lives where we're trying to sort of improve, and the same sort of switch dynamics unfold in all those stories, the timeline unfolds in the same way, in a repetitive way, and you can bring the sort of skill of a documentarian to those moments. And when there's a winner and a loser, there's someone with a financial stake in that, there's a way to play a role in helping them win more and lose less. I suppose so. Aaron, when did you discover this area of work? Sure. So I was a new consultant after 1213, years working at a set of companies in DC that do best practice research. Okay, I was a qualitative researcher looking for a new application of that skill, and in the first project that I did helping an old company of mine wrestle with a churn problem. I was made aware of a methodology called the switch interview, and got to observe a guru, a jobs to be done, luminary expert named Bob Moesta, interview our customers. He spent two days -- 48 hours, well, two days, not 48 hours, but you know what I mean, interviewing 10 people who had switched in and out of our product in the last six months, and I was incredibly humbled by what I learned, and I think it was sort of reminding yourself of the sort of contextual moment in which that choice happens. What is going on with your customers? Life The very moment, the very day, the pressures they feel when they decide you are going to be or not be part of their lives anymore, is a very weird, idiosyncratic moment in their lives. But for companies that detail is hard to access, often stripped away out of their analysis. And so it was the aha moment. Was seeing that done, and I couldn't let it go, because I had worked at those companies for 12 years and did not know what I learned that day. And I don't think the 300 400 people who worked very hard every day, Ivy League grads, so smart, so so much hubris, I suppose, could not really reconcile seeing that documentary unfold, and so I thought, well, there are hundreds, 1000s of companies globally who struggle with these moments. Struggle to see their products through the eyes of their customer, as opposed to see or see them customers as a person out there in the universe, struggling to make progress, pulling a portfolio of solutions into their lives to help them get to the other side of the river, and we had lost sight of that struggle and the multiplicity of struggles, and therefore how use of our products played out. And so it was a humbling moment, in a moment where I felt like I had to learn this new thing that could be powerful for my future. Qualitative research businesses Skipper Chong Warson got it so started in qualitative research discovered jobs to be done, and specifically within jobs to be done, this idea of switch interviews, how long before you stood up your own business? Did you work in this methodology for a while? Were you able to interact with it more? Tell me more about that. Aaron Young Yeah. I mean, I've been independent six, seven years, but I've only been doing switch interviews for about two or three years. I see generally those first three, four years were me wandering in the wilderness, figuratively, not literally, taking on, you know, mid-career, accepting whoever trusted me to do something, a chance to sort of help them with the problem they had. And as a researcher by trade, that meant interviews often, but it could have meant a survey or other writing projects, anything that required a lot of questions and analysis at the heart of it. But my favorite projects were the switch interviews, because, again, had such a big impact on some problems that a company was facing around either acquisition or churn. And so over time, made the decision that I could specialize around this, which I think is a fairly normal path for a consultant who narrows their scope over time towards something that is both there is demand for it in the universe and then there's pleasure from practicing those verbs for companies every day. Skipper Chong Warson And so yeah, in our initial conversation, you talked about the notion of switch interviews actually, let me back up. So we've been talking about switching in terms of a product. Can it also apply to a service? Aaron Young Certainly, I think that, I will say that people's instinct, when they hear switching, they think about churn first, right? I have people who are my happy customers, and then suddenly they surprise me and let me know they're going to a competitor or elsewhere in the universe, right? And I think our instinct is to think these are impulsive decisions, or that there's a singular root cause behind them, something happened. But if I ask them directly to explain it to me, they'll be able to summarize it in a neat little package for me. But actually, 3, 4, 7 dominoes fell over some period of time to cause us to detach from our old way of doing something and pick a new way. And that story and its full breadth is very interesting to learn now, switching in as the same dynamics, you're simply the winner in that context, right in that weird world, when I'm doing a switch interview, the company I'm doing it for may not show up until chapter 678, of that story, but they had an old way, and everything was at peace, equilibrium, and then something happened that caused them to begin to doubt that their current way was working, and a journey of conviction building unfolds over some period of time Until a customer says it's time I need to find a new way, and a company wants to position its product to be the obvious solution in the context in which that exasperation boils over. Now, you asked me a different question, which was about products, services. I could say about voting, about where you live, where you work. All of these stories have the same tug of war between past and future, old equilibrium, new equilibrium. Something is pushing you away from your old way. Something is pulling you towards your new way. There's magnetism, but along that journey there are headwinds, there are habits you have to break that are bigger than that tailwind. And there are anxieties you have to overcome, and these stories unfold in fits and starts as you build conviction that the new way is worth taking a chance on, you know. And so my wife is currently considering changing jobs, you know, and we observe her switch and all that sort of messiness every day that there are various grievances that have built up with her old employer. There's magnetism and excitement about this new role for which she was offered a job, but she's got anxiety about whether you know what she's giving up, and habits that are going to be hard to break. And the story is sort of unfolding in front of us, and we can see all the dimensions of that story together, and so services, products, boats, everything. This sort of analysis, the way the stories unfold is going to be a multi-step, multi-domino journey that brings somebody to the precipice of changing. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. So I think when you're talking about switching, I think another word that can stand in for that is this idea of change. And change has lots of things that push-pull that you described. It can also have part of what we're going up against with change right, going shifting from the status quo to something else. We have the habit of the thing that we've been doing, right? And there's that notion of anxiety that is sparked from the idea of, I don't want to change. I don't, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to make that switch. And then on, on top of that, if we zoom out, the notion of switching comes from that idea of jobs to be done and that framework. Can we zoom out for a moment and talk a little bit about the idea of there's a job that we're looking to be performed by a product or a service, and what are those component parts of that job? Aaron Young Right? And so maybe to connect the dots jobs to be done is a well-known buzzword at this point. I think part of the problem it faces is that it's practiced in multiple ways by multiple people. Some are more friendly to products, some are more friendly to marketing and sales. I've glommed onto this one practice by Bob Mesta, who was a very close confidant, friend of Clayton Christensen, who wrote the seminal book on jobs to be done, and his principal research tool, as I described earlier, is the switch interview. Let's study why five people switched in and five people switched out in the last three, 612, months, got it and through their stories broken down in documentary form all the dominoes I've described, we will be able to see what their job to be done is, and we'll actually see that across our customer base. We have multiple people with different jobs to be done, and they'll cluster in a new way. And so it's sort of essentially building a replacement for personas as they're classically understood, now, organized by why people switch, or what they're trying to accomplish, rather than who they are in demographic data. Now, jobs to be done is a very wonderful product customer theory that, you know, people pull products into their lives to help them perform a job, and if things work well, they'll hire it again. If they don't, they'll find a new way. But we're always trying to get to the other side of the mountain, or climb the mountain or get to the other side of the river, and we're using tools at our disposal and jobs. The switch interview allows us to see when a product is underperforming at a job, and then what a customer, through their struggle, decides it fits better. And so in a sense, the switch is the admission that the old tool is not helping us accomplish the job that we have today, and we need to go through the journey of identifying a replacement tool that will allow us to accomplish the job with greater ease, faster, easier, cheaper, whatever it might be. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, I'd like to dig in a little bit more about actually something, a topic that came up when you and I initially talked, and I think it was a statement that you made, and I took a note on it, this idea that switching is messy. Can you say a little bit more about that, and maybe what those places are and why it might seem so messy to an uninformed observer? Aaron Young Yeah, and I'm curious if I want to use the word messy still, but I think, yeah, what I might be trying to clarify there is that people ask us all the time why we do what we do. Sure, when I moved to Atlanta, people constantly said, Why did you move here? Right? What was going on, you know? And I think the question suggests that I have about two or three cents. Says worth of information to convey, and that should wrap in a bow a clear summary of what why I'm an Atlanta resident now, right? And when I say it's messy, it's that six, seven dominoes fell over the course of five years that led me to slowly detach from DC, my former home, and pick Atlanta as my new city. And that story unfolded in fits and starts over an extended period as Domino's fell, whether it be, you know, six seven scenes like a documentary, like walking down the street of DC and for the first time saying, Maybe I don't want to live here anymore, going on a vacation or a trip and being like this place is pretty cool, unwinding my commitment to full-time work, which gave me the permission to leave feeling the pressure of the cost structure of DC and the flexibility to travel and thinking maybe my home base should be a cheaper town. And it all concluded someday in me saying Atlanta, that's where I'm headed. That's just one story, right? But I could talk about this peloton bike behind me and how I broke up with running on the street. We're constantly making these switches in our life, and I suppose they're just not linear, is what I'm trying to argue. They are two steps forward, one step back, tug of war, extended periods of time as we build conviction that it's time to give up this good enough way and find a new way in a world where, as you described, habits are sticking, status quo is powerful, and we need to erect or build conviction an argument in our head that we are finally going to apply energy to changing this thing that isn't working anymore. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, and as you said, it's not something that happens on a very specific timeline. A switch doesn't occur from one day to another. It might actually occur over the course of six to 12 months. And just because I gave it a time frame just then, also doesn't mean that, in order to be a switch, that it only needs to take six to 12 months, right? It could take a day, it could take a couple of weeks, several years. These are things that might elongate into a variety of different time frames. Aaron Young Yeah, for sure. And I think our demand for a new way is born the first time we think maybe this old way isn't working anymore. Something about my job isn't working like it used to. Now, considering that, I'll leave. But at that point, we just have, we're unwilling, yet to put energy to the journey of switching right that we isn't at the top of the to-do list yet, and so how does, how do grievances mount to the point where it's at the top of the to-do list? And you asked about the structure of an interview or how they unfold, right? The whole point of the interview at first, is to bookend the switch story right? Where does the story end? Where does the story begin? And those are sort of bookend a journey. Scene one, scene seven of a movie that you could watch of your customer building conviction that it's time to break up with you, and then going to the trouble of finding a new way, which also takes effort, right? We can sit exasperated for a very long time because we just can't figure out the new way yet. And so then the issue, once you've book ended, the conversation is to hunt for energy, to look for emotion, frustration, excitement, the energy that helps us move from old status quo to new status quo, and those emotions that an energy, help us see the sort of dominoes as they fall to get us closer and closer to picking a new way. Yeah, Skipper Chong Warson So Aaron, you were talking a little bit about you gave two examples from your real life, one about the peloton versus outside running, and then another one about moving from the DC area to Atlanta using the framework of a switch interview. Can you walk us through one of those examples? Aaron Young Sure. I'll take the DC to Atlanta example, and I'll try to be as succinct as I can, since it, you know, took 6, 7, 8 years to unfold, right? I think the sort of original, first thought is difficult to ascertain specifically when it happened, but I think I had a clear sense that I was walking the same streets and living the same life at 35 in the same neighborhood that I was when I was 22, 23 and that felt repetitive. Yeah, that my life could use a little bit of dynamism. And so I started taking all these trips to cities in America that were interesting to me. I'd spend four days a week, four days a four-day weekend, and I. Nashville, Austin, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and I started to sort of see that the grass could be greener on the other side. That makes sense. And so I think there was a period of passive awareness after that, sort of first thought that there was something happening within me. I'm sure the 2016 election sort of played a small role. DC itself was beginning to change. I was less interested in the puzzles that DC people were working on. So I said another domino there. I was falling out of love with the work that I was doing, and sort of exhausted with that. But I think I had various habits that made in spite of the pushes, the grievances that were building up with DC, and the magnetism I was beginning to feel to Austin's tacos, or friends I had in Atlanta, which is sort of where things ended up, or, you know, all the other attributes of all these wonderful places in America, I ultimately had some habits that were difficult to break. I had a full-time job I was committed to, expected to be at Monday through Friday every week, and I was dating a woman whose family was from DC, and as long as we were together in the short run and the long run, we were probably going to be DC residents. And so those habits made it difficult to unwind my commitment to DC Anyway, okay, I think things became more active. So there's a pivot from a passive understanding of my options to an active search. Shortly after I broke up with that woman I was seeing and that work, and so I was an independent consultant, enjoying DC, but felt like maybe there was somewhere else to be. Now, I had a unique problem, which is I had a lot of push, a lot of grievances that have built up with the old way my habits had been broken. So I was free to do whatever I want. I had very little anxiety, although, breaking up with the city you've been in for 15 years is a big decision, making a new one is a small decision, and I had not enough pull anywhere. I didn't have an obvious place to go, so I had to do a lot of work to find a home. The search process and the selection took a lot more effort in this switch than the average one. If I set out to spend six weeks in four different towns that I was interested in. I was going to pick one at the end of that journey. One week into that journey, the pandemic began. I was in an Airbnb in Atlanta, and so I ended up spending six months there, living above somebody's roof, I mean, the garage, enjoying this town and being, you know, getting a sense of what was here, but doing so in the safe pandemic ways. And then when that ended, I finally said, Well, I won't ever see those other cities. This has been a great home. I think that something that's sort of important about the story is, you know, I was at a certain point in my life where I was unwinding my commitment to the hustle that's required when you live in a city like DC, New York, San Francisco, the expensive cost structure that comes with that. And so as I was sort of going on a more exploratory What am I going to do with the rest of my life journey, Atlanta fit in a way that other cities might not have. And so that's sort of I talked to like, how do I piece together my job to be done here? If I wanted to summarize, you know, I was looking for a less demanding town that gave me the space and freedom to explore what I wanted to do with my life at that point, what jobs and work and puzzles I wanted to solve and Atlanta fit comfortably and in the context of the pandemic, it was a familiar place. I had friends there. I went to university down here. And so there were all these forces at play in my story, things pushing me away from DC, things pulling me to various places, but ultimately, in the crucible moment of having to make a decision, having to replace my old way with a new way. A, that story took a long time. And B, I ended up picking a very familiar, comfortable place with a cheaper lifestyle that would allow me to do that. There's more to this story that I'm not even mentioning. My mom lives in the DC area. I was breaking up with seeing her every week, you know. I had a lot of anxiety about that, you know, and so I had to sort of make peace with that, and I ended up getting a larger place in Atlanta just to accommodate an open-door policy that she could come visit whenever she wanted. So there's just a lot of negotiation between past and future. And while I'm giving you a very convoluted example around where I live, which is a big decision, these things unfold with smaller and smaller items. It's just a little less messy and a little less baggage associated with those decisions. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, I hear you, and it sounds like as you go through someone else's switch journey, they're going to be different parts of it for different people. Would this decision have played out in the same way? Had you not been stuck in Atlanta during the first part of the pandemic? Not sure. But you also can't rewind it and go back and say, Well, I'm going to go and visit Austin or visit Pittsburgh or visit some of those other places as options, but that's where you ended up. You evaluated that while you were there, and that's the decision you ended up making. Aaron Young Yeah, there's something so powerful you said, and it'll help me move away from being so wonky about all this, because it doesn't seem as practical or applicable to the average person, perhaps, or maybe it's applicable to everybody. But if you study 10, 12, 15, of your customers, you will be surprised to learn that switches to and away from your product happen in different contexts with different value judgments and different expectations and needs, because your customer doesn't have you don't have a singular type of customer, but you don't have infinite you have three, four or five clusters of people with different jobs to be done. And so one thing that's so powerful about the switch interview, for me is it isolates. When the swap old way for new way makes sense to a customer base. You think everybody should break up with their old way, because your product is obviously amazing and superior, sure, but the trade old way for new way happens in very specific moments when the chessboard is moved around in a way that makes the old way seem intolerable, and untenable. It is time for me to transition to my new way and most of a customer base, most of the people you consider prospects, or on these large lists of people that you are sort of built into your territories as salespeople, most of those people currently don't live in a context, which brings them to the precipice of switching. Now you can alter and play with that trade and swap to create more energy and excitement about your product, or lower the price, or do different things to sort of at the margin, adjust the dynamics of that trade the variables that matter, but most people are stuck in their old status quo and are not going to change today, but if you identify the specific moments when they do make that trade, those can be your personas, your clusters. People in these three, four contexts go to the trouble of breaking up with their old way and picking a new way. Skipper Chong Warson So through the process of detailing this out for a company around their product or their service. What are the things that you as someone who focuses in on, among other methods, the switch interview, what is the thing that you go back to your client or the person you know, the group that you're working for? What do you go back to them with? There's the story of switching. But what else is a company or an organization looking for when they say, Aaron, come in. We want to do some switch interviews. As you said, qualitatively, you know, five to some amount, five to 10, maybe. What is the thing that you as a practitioner go back to them with? Aaron Young I think the essence of what a switch interview reveals for a company is demand. Demand agnostic to a solution. There are natural springs of it in the universe, people who are motivated to find a new way. Yeah, and a company's responsibility is to map supply, its product, its processes, to that natural well or spring of demand, and the switch interview shows you the strongest sources of demand in your customer space, okay, what does that practically look like? For me? It is something akin to personas organized by job to be done or why people switch not who they are. And it could be a 15, 20, 25-page report with four jobs to be done and a series of questions answered about each job to be done, about what language are people with this job using? What are the design requirements for somebody with this job that are different from job two, three, and four, right? What are these people willing to sacrifice through the decision-making process that these others won't what various attributes of sort of demand, what is demand, and what should you do about it in a 4, 5, 6-page profile for each customer got it sometimes, I would add that there's in the context of that my clients are different. Sometimes they have an acquisition process. Problem where that sort of map of their customers is fantastic, sometimes they have a churn problem. There you're sort of evaluating across the four jobs to be done, identified you're performing really well with job one and three, but two and four are good and awful. And let's unpack why this group with this job to be done are unsatisfied with the fit of your product in their context. And how can we tinker with the product or admit and give us permission to not serve that job to be done either because it'll be difficult to serve them, or because it's too small a group, or whatever. I zoom out to that question of it's supposed to be the switch is supposed to be a mirror onto what demand is in the universe, and when people are most motivated to change so that you can position your product, whether it be the building of it, the marketing of it, the selling of it, to those specific doors people are walking through, not to some general wishful idea of who would and what characteristics are likely to need us someday you want to position for the moments that people are motivated to change, and this tool helps us identify those moments in great clarity through 12, 15, 20 examples. Skipper Chong Warson Got it. So, that idea, that motivation to change, you referred to it previously as the precipice upon which someone is standing that makes them move from the status quo, the things that they've done before, to this new thing, this buying, deciding, moving into another space. I wonder that precipice, that moment in which someone changes, goes from A to C. How does that potentially factor into a product or service? Aaron Young Sure, maybe here I have a fantastic example that may take a little bit to get out, but I have a friend. She has a wedding dress business here, the Switch isn't from dress A to B, but it's in how the dress would be purchased. So her business has a try at-home experience. Rather than going to the boutique and trying on four dresses over 60 minutes, women are able to order dresses to their home. Okay? And over the course of 72 hours, one can try on the dress as many times as they want, whoever they want, and it's a very in her eyes, modern way to experience the dress purchase process. Now her instinct originally was that modern women of all types are confident in their ability to buy things online and that they're willing, in 2024 to make that decision. And so she can just name a couple of grievances people have had with the boutique, and people will naturally map her solution to their context and make the transition to using her service and buying her dresses in this way. Okay? And I pushed back, and I said, I think that this trade the old way the boutique for the new way buying it over the internet, but specifically with a tried home experience of a boutique quality dress sure would only happen in very narrow contexts where that trade made sense to the woman in the context in which they were living. We did 12 or 15 of these interviews, and there were three clusters of women. Cluster One were women who lived 345, hours from the big city. There was a boutique nearby. It was run by a 75-year-old, well-intentioned woman. The Inventory felt quite dated, and so they wanted access to that big city dress where they were. They considered the logistics of getting their friends to go up to Atlanta, Chicago, New York for the weekend, but it didn't work out. And so Tina's my friend's service allowed them to have access to those wonderful Botti dresses in their current context, without the commitment of purchase from minute one. Skipper Chong Warson Got it. Aaron Young Cluster two, a much bigger cluster, in my opinion, is women who felt uncomfortable at the boutique. They were indecisive. They couldn't make a decision in 60 minutes. They didn't like being in the center of attention. They didn't have friends to go with to the boutique. They might have felt rushed. Sure where could they experience this that would be better their safest, most comfortable place, their apartment, house, bedroom, their mirror. Skipper Chong Warson Their lighting. Aaron Young They could try it on three times a day for three days to really build confidence and convictions. Is this the right choice? She would like access in the way that she has decided she wants to make progress. A beautiful big city dress is part of that story. Then she needs a service like Tina's. And so jobs be done is ultimately about understanding vectors of progress and then fitting into them and along those journeys got it? Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, that it all absolutely makes sense. And I think it ladders up. Aaron, one thing. And then I'm wondering is, as we're discussing this topic, and we've gone into some examples, and we've talked broadly about switch interviews, and then also a little bit about jobs to be done, is there an area that we haven't covered yet, that you would like to get into and spend some more time on. Aaron Young I could talk for a few hours about this, and then every day, getting better at it. I think the last thing worth bringing up is, and it's funny, because it's my biggest challenge, and it was my challenge when I told you that story about being exposed to this for the first time. It's very my clients, or as I view my customers, and I will use a word that's not very generous, but it's a word that I embody heading into my jobs to be on experience is hubris. My customers. It's very hard to find people in the universe who are at the executive level, who don't are willing to admit that they don't know the answers to these questions. Why the people switch buttons? And if I was sort of wrap this in a bow and try to explain the best, I think my customers tend to be people who are pre-hubris. They haven't yet built conviction as to who buys their product and when, like my friend Tina. And then there's post-hubris. The numbers are demonstrating that I don't know the answers to these questions, because we have a switching problem that is not enough. People are buying a trickle in, or there's a switching out. Problem will flood out. And clearly, I don't know anymore why this happens. And if I pull up and try to sort of do my best, is that we all have a placeholder answer for this. Why do people switch? Why do people buy our product? Why do people stop buying our product? What is going on in life when they make that decision, but we tend not to know, and it is dangerous, is, why did Skipper or Aaron buy our product or switch to us at 2:42pm on Thursday? Yeah, why not the week before? Why not the week after? And I think it's that context that forced us today to put the effort in to they make the decision that is so important understanding the crescendo moment of the decision that is so impactful to our bottom lines. And so I think it's surprising how long people can sit in their hubris. I did again. I'm not being mean. I hope and delude ourselves into thinking we know the answers to these questions, but we really just don't. And I think it's dangerous to not get to this granular level of specificity. And these are the revenue generating and destroying events in our company's history. They happen every day. They're ordinary, and we tend to study them in the spreadsheet. We tend to ask a few questions when it happens, but it's really narrow and focused on, what did we do to let you down? Why did this relationship between you and us break down? But there's a documentary here, seven, eight scenes, and we can bring that skill of asking questions and storytelling and narrative building to see how the whole thing unfolded, and they can instruct us, or teach us how others will switch in or switch out. And these events are hiding in plain sight. They're studyable in this interesting way, and if you do, you'll get to that level of causality that is so critical to understanding how people actually enter and exit our lives, if we're a company, and there are lots of people whose jobs and job security and success and bonuses are all dependent on getting the switching dynamics right, and so I wish, I just wish more people had access to these stories or sought them out, and maybe that's my mandate. Let's study these switches in this granular way. Skipper Chong Warson So one last question before we jump into our closing round. Aaron, if someone said to you, I'm interested in learning more about switch interviews, or more generally, about jobs to be done, what would you recommend them to look into? Aaron Young The seminal book on it, either will be "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton Christensen, or to lay out, in business school jargon, what this framework is, if you're looking for more in practice, sort of look at it. Bob Moesta's "Demand-Side Sales" is a fantastic book that brings it to sort of the granular, real-world level, and has example interviews and whatnot in it. But really, I have been a sponge and obsessive about anything that Bob Moesta has created, if anything, he is my guru and I aspire to be some kind of disciple from a distance. He has about 10 real live interviews in the public domain. The famous one is the mattress interview. But there are all kinds of other ones. There's one of a Porsche purchase, there's one of a peloton purchase. And so just trying to understand that, and he's a very active person on podcasts, and so you can search in all your favorite podcast areas for Yeah, just him talking about jobs to be done. I'll say that I think the switch interview is misunderstood and underrepresented if you google it tomorrow or today, you won't find much. There's very little material on it. But again, the basics of it are the documentarian pulling together the seven dominoes that fell that led me to break up with DC, pick Atlanta, running versus Peloton. And I think if you just look into those stories in that way, you'll be surprised at how much insight you'll personally grab, even without all the material. Skipper Chong Warson I said one last question, but another one occurred to me. Do you see trends in the future about the ways in which something like the switch interview will evolve? Is there something you hope for? Aaron Young I think it's a fringe thing that should be it's a very fringe thing that should be much more central to the practice of most companies. Again, these are the revenue generating and destroying events in your company's history and to and the only way to access them in this granularity is to talk to your customers. If anything, I fear that people will skip over this step and trust AI too much to piece together these things. But maybe the mistake most companies make that I wish they could undo is that they have all these breadcrumbs about their customers and their customer journeys that are very focused on the relationship between them and the customer, not the customer out in the universe, in a context, struggling to make progress in ways that may or may not include them at various junctures. And so I'm not sure I'm doing a great job of answering your question, but I fear that there's an opportunity for the world to see this thing and take it in, but that AI might force us all out of business. So who knows? Skipper Chong Warson Well, AI is definitely the shiny object right now. A lot of people are either using it or wanting to use it in a variety of different ways. And so I think it's a good reminder that in order to understand these human relationships that we have with services and products, I think the best source for it is talking to those humans. Aaron Young Yeah, and I think the switch interview captures all the weird, idiosyncratic maybe there's one more thing I do want to say. The absolute magic of jobs to be done in specifically switch interviews, is it's a mechanism to retrieve and interpret and eventually codify all the contextual details that happen around your customer's decision-making that you do not have access to, And most of those details, at first blush, are idiosyncratic. They're unwieldy. They don't seem like the source of pattern. But when you let them sit, when you take your customer individuality seriously, and then you let those stories fit in all their glory as individual instances, it'll be shocking once you have 12, 15, 20, that some of those idiosyncrasies matter. Now I don't know if AI will ever without unless it can interview customers in this delicate, messy way. I don't know how those idiosyncrasies will not get lost if you're just trying to use data points we have to predict things and to interpret things based off the buttons people press and all that. Skipper Chong Warson Well, definitely in terms of pattern recognition, or use the word hubris before, or even this notion of bias that we all carry, I think that the current cross. Of AI tools are bogged down in a lot of that previous information that they may have been trained on, but not necessarily, like you said, this winding, idiosyncratic, gnarly sort of mess of how we come to I'm going to switch from this product or service to this product or service. And I think that there are lots of different pieces, and I think that it would be challenging to capture all of that nuance. Aaron Young Yep, yep, yep, for sure. Skipper Chong Warson So, let's get into our closing questions that we ask all of our guests on the show, Aaron, is there something in your life that you wish you would have learned earlier? And maybe it's not your home life, maybe it's something to do with your work. Aaron Young I have a soapbox of some sort that I get on where I like to tell people that verbs are more important than nouns. I grew up in DC. Those are my formative professional 22 to 35 years, and it's a noun town. People are subject matter experts. They work for specific political parties for specific parts of our government. When you meet people, they tell you your nouns. And it sort of came to me slowly, mostly through a question that a fancy man once asked me in an interview, which is, what are your verse and, you know, I think the lesson there is that, you know, the happiest years of our career are the ones where we can see the greatest alignment between what we're good at and what we like doing and what is expected of us in the jobs we do every day. Job descriptions are bundles of verbs, 1520, 25, of them, and each bullet represents an activity of some sort that will do with some regularity, and I am very much an independent researcher in this way, because my verbs are asked questions, organize the answers, make recommendations through insight, okay? And so if you're asking me to summarize, I think that people early in their career think about nouns or think about, you know, what we study in university. I was a history major, right? But verbs are what matters. And if I sort of wrap this up, you know, it aligns very well with the theory of happiness, with flow, with that, the sort of moments that we're so engrossed in our activities that we lose track of time. We should wake up and do those things as often as possible. And we can be mercenaries on the nouns for a surprisingly long time, but as long as our verbs are right, we'll be happy, but if you flip that, you'll be very unhappy, and it's unsustainable. Skipper Chong Warson So Aaron, what about something that you're really excited about right now? And by that I mean something you're reading, something you're listening to, maybe watching what's something that's capturing your attention? Aaron Young I'm an enormous baseball fan, so it's playoff season for me. There's two games every day. It's fantastic. I also have a very deep understanding, no, it's just laundry to me. I grew up a Mets fan, but I had to break up with them because of bad ownership so, but yeah, just the sport is, I've always loved it, and I have a special interest in the minor league baseball, so I track the minor league season. Go to minor league stadiums. Could probably name 300, 400, or 500 minor-league players for you right now, if you will push me to and so, and that's really drawn out of an interest in talent and talent management. So how does an organization acquire and develop talent? Is just an interesting thing that has been a way for me to mature as I age. My understanding of baseball. Anyway, I could have named a movie or a TV show or something, a book. You know, I got better answers there too. I'm going deep on Cal Newport and deep work, and just trying to organize my life in a more serious way, but truthfully, I'm always, you know, looking, looking at what's happening in the Arizona fall league right now, or, you know, triple-A, double-A, single-A baseball all summer. So, yeah, that's where I'm at. Skipper Chong Warson Got it. If you found yourself unexpectedly with a day off with unlimited resources, what's something that you would want to do? Aaron Young I like to sit in very quiet, peaceful places, and I like to move my body as such. So I'd probably find a fantastic a 10-mile hike and then grab a beer, sit and look out at the water, more like a lake on a mountain side than a beach. I think sand is awful, so I hate the beach. Skipper Chong Warson Desserts and sand. Aaron Young Yeah, sand is the worst. I don't understand it, yeah. So I think I just want to be. Outside nature, long, beautiful hike. I also just like constant stimulation, so I guess I could do the same thing with a big city, right? I'd love to walk around Amsterdam or Porto or Madrid, Valencia, any of these places, and just walk for hours and sort of observe what is happening, the people, how they behave, the energies, voices, sounds of life and somewhere strange. And so I yeah, I think I'd like to explore cities and things on foot and constantly, as an introvert, let those you know, external stimuli float in and see what kind of picture sponge, sponge it all up and see what kind of impression I can develop of something. Skipper Chong Warson Sounds quite lovely. So, Aaron, we're recording here in October of 2024 what's one thing that you think will be true in one year? Aaron Young This is the one I told you. I didn't think I had an answer for I have no idea. That's fine. I'm an observer of the past and I'm a predictor of the future. Skipper Chong Warson And then Aaron with our last question for people who want to learn more about you and your work, apart from our discussion, where can they find more information about Aaron Young Yeah, the primary place I am active is LinkedIn. I'm doing my best to show up there in an authentic and not nauseating way. And so I struggle with how to do that, and but all my information is there, and two, three times a week, I publish something that tries to be a little bit better than the average discourse there. So yeah, but also happy to chat with anybody who's interested in what this means for them and or their business. Skipper Chong Warson Thanks Aaron for making time today just talking more about this notion of switching and the way that in which you approach your work as a researcher. I definitely learned a lot. Aaron Young Yeah, thank you for having me, and it's always fun to workshop talking about this, and, you know, I tend to sort of emphasize how it's interesting, and it's nice to also introduce stakes and sort of reveal how valuable it can be sometimes. So it's always fun to struggle towards figuring out that, yeah. Skipper Chong Warson And that’s it for this episode of the How This Works show. Thanks so much for joining us — we appreciate your support. We’re focusing on growing our community this season, so if you enjoyed the episode, sharing it with just one person would mean a lot. Subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us online at howthisworks.show, that's four words with no dashes. Again, that's howthisworks.show. We're also active in most social media places. We appreciate you tuning into this conversation with Aaron Young. I learned a ton about switch interviews. Until next time, remain ever curious and we’ll talk again soon. [Outro music] Aaron Young It's always been my two truths and a lie definitely gets attention. Skipper Chong Warson As a sidebar, have you heard about Stephen Colbert's best cookie answer? Aaron Young I haven't, but I suspect oatmeal raisin cookies are not it. Skipper Chong Warson Well, half of it is an oatmeal cookie. But the way that he approaches it is that he's not a fan of raisins. A lot of people aren't fans of raisins and baked goods, but for him, where his cookie magic happens is by taking dried cherries, infusing them with rum. So I don't know if you're a drinker or you like that sort of thing in your food, infusing them with rum, then using that in an oatmeal cookie. And apparently that takes it to a whole other level. Aaron Young Okay, well, it sounds like me and my wife have some experimentation to do this weekend. Skipper Chong Warson Awesome. Yeah.