Customer JTBD Interviewing Skills
6 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
Upgrade your JTBD interviewing game. Learn the full process— from planning to execution—practice interviews that uncover customer progress.
Customer JTBD Interviewing Skills
6 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
Upgrade your JTBD interviewing game. Learn the full process— from planning to execution—practice interviews that uncover customer progress.
Course overview
Aquire the skills and methods to perform Customer JTBD interviews yourself:
Acquire the Skills to Run Customer JTBD Interviews with Confidence
🔍 Stop guessing why customers buy. Instead, learn how to uncover the real stories of progress that shape decisions.
Most customer interviews fall short.
Why? Because teams often:
❌ Ask about features instead of struggles
❌ Accept surface-level answers
❌ Miss the non-obvious jobs that drive switching behavior
This hands-on Customer JTBD Interviewing Skills course helps you break those habits and master a repeatable, end-to-end JTBD Research Process.
You won’t just “learn the theory”—you’ll practice it live, using a real-world case study of your choice, and walk away with insights you can 💡 immediately apply to product, marketing, and sales decisions.
What You’ll Learn (and Practice)
🧠 Formulate Better Hypotheses
Stop chasing assumptions. Learn how to craft hypotheses that uncover motivations and struggles to make progress—not just product ideas.
🎯 Plan + Recruit with Precision
Discover overlooked contexts and triggers that make or break interviews. Recruit participants who reveal the full spectrum of jobs—including the hidden ones.
📝 Use Structured Storytelling Prompts
Move beyond “Tell me about yourself.” Practice interview cards and prompts (life events, triggers, retell in detail, playback) that pull customers into narrative mode and reveal hidden forces.
🤝 Run Team-Based JTBD Interviews
Split facilitator vs. listener roles to capture richer insights. Leverage The Wheel of Progress® framework to uncover drivers of behavior most teams overlook.
🌱 Spot Non-Obvious Jobs & Patterns
Train your ear to hear what others miss: anxieties, habits, switching triggers, and compensating behaviors. Then synthesize them into clear demand clusters and opportunity areas.
✍️ Write Desire for Progress Statements That Stick
Go beyond personas. Create living, testable progress statements that capture what customers are really trying to achieve—and directly align with product, marketing, and sales.
BONUS MATERIALS:
- Get Customer JTBD Mural Board for conducting customer jobs-to-be-done research using The Wheel of Progress(R)
- Get the 12 Elements of Progress listening framework for conducting team-based interviews
- Get Customer JTBD Card Deck (62 digital cards) color-coded to match 12 Elements of Progress (additional $99 VALUE)
Who is this course for
01
The Marketer who wants to better tailor their messaging to the core jobs-to-be-done (aspirational, functional, emotional, social)
02
A Product Manager who wants to fall in love with problem (based upon jTBD research) prior to thinking about the solution.
03
The Designer or Researcher who wants to better understand constraints or behavioral-based barriers to customer progress.
04
The Product Trio (PM, UX, Tech) who want to learn how to improve the customer interview process as a team (multiple perspectives).
What you’ll get out of this course
🎯 Master the full E2E JTBD Research Process
Learn a repeatable framework for planning and conducting customer interviews that actually uncover why people switch.
🧑🤝🧑 Practice both facilitator + listener roles
Step into the room as both the one asking questions and the one catching nuance — so you never miss hidden insights.
🛠️ Run JTBD interviews as a team
Learn how to plan, structure, and execute team-based interviews that eliminate bias and capture a richer picture of customer struggles.
🧠 Aggregate and synthesize insights across interviews
Turn messy raw conversations into clear patterns of demand, progress, and opportunity.
🔦 Spot non-obvious jobs competitors miss
Learn to hear the anxieties, compensating behaviors, and hidden triggers buried in customer stories.
📝 Formulate Desire for Progress Statements that stick
Craft statements that capture real customer intent — language you can plug directly into product roadmaps, marketing copy, and sales enablement.
🚀 Confidence in avoiding the top 5 interviewing mistakes
No more overlooking context, stopping at surface answers, or asking solution-led questions.
What’s included
Live sessions
Learn directly from JOHN GUSIFF in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
6 live sessions • 22 lessons
Week 1
Oct
22
Session 1: Introduction and Overview of E2E JTBD Research Process
The Focus of Your Research (different types of Customer JTBD interviews)
Selecting a Case Study
Formulating a Hypothesis for Job Performer/Job-to-be-done
Determining your Recruitment Strategy
Planning your Customer JTBD Research (end-to-end process)
Reviewing Milestones for Case Study Execution (recruiting, interviewing, etc.)
Week 2
Oct
27
Session 2: Select a Case Study for your Team
Formulate a Hypothesis around your Case Study
Customer JTBD Interview Spectrum
Customer JTBD Interview Structure
Customer JTBD Interview Structure using JTBD Cards
Customer JTBD Interviews (Team roles and responsibilities)
Revisit the Milestones for Case Study Execution (recruiting, interviewing, etc.)
Oct
29
Office Hours (Interview Structure)
Week 3
Week 4
General Guidelines for Conduction JTBD Interviews
Case Study: Performing Customer JTBD Interviews (as a Team)
Week 5
Nov
19
Session 3: Case Study Check-in and Synthesizing Multiple Interviews
Team Case Study Check-ins (status, progress, schedule, etc.)
Customer JTBD Interview Aggregation and Synthesis Process
Desire Progress Statements
What people are saying
Don Garza
Minh Tran
Kyle Sandburg
Eckhart Boehme
Meet your instructor
JOHN GUSIFF
JOHN GUSIFF
CX Strategist
John Gusiff is the Managing Partner for Customer Centric Solutions LLC. He founded the company in 2002 after spending 15 years helping leading brands across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C industries, design and implement customer acquisition, engagement, service, and retention strategies.
He is passionate about improving the lives of customers via human-centered design and design thinking methods. He leverages customer jobs-to-be-done (jtbd) insights research along with applied behavioral science when consulting with his clients.
He has worked directly with executives in marketing, sales, product development, customer service and support functions to help them rethink how they better service their customers and implement the processes, organization, and technology to support it.
Clients have included: American Honda, Canada Goose, Citibank, Ecobee, G Adventures, Gympass, Humana, Porch, lululemon, Royal Ambulance, Shaklee, and TransAlta.
Join an upcoming cohort
Customer JTBD Interviewing Skills
Cohort 7
$750
Dates
Payment Deadline
Course schedule
Four Weeks; 6-8 hours for Case Study
Four Cohort Sessions
1.5 to 2 hrs per session of Instruction
This course is designed for multiple Teams to each go through a Case Study of their collective choice from start to finish. Planning, conducting, and synthesizing findings across two to four customer JTBD interviews.
The Case Study Itself
6 to 8 hours
Outside of LIVE cohort class sessions to provide guidance and direction, educate on methods, check-in, and review share outs by each team.
An additional 6 to 8 hours will be required by your Teams to recruit participants, conduct the interviews, and synthesize findings.
Maven Community
Leveraging the Maven community for posting announcements, reading materials, general discussion, and takeaways from the class.
Learning is better with cohorts
Active hands-on learning
This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects
Interactive and project-based
You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams
Learn with a cohort of peers
Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you
Frequently Asked Questions
Join an upcoming cohort
Customer JTBD Interviewing Skills
Cohort 7
$750
Dates
Payment Deadline