How to find work you love | Bob Moesta (Jobs-to-be-Done co-creator, author of "Job Moves”)

You just wrote a new book called Job Moves that I have right here. What's, kind of, just the big idea behind this book?

The moment you stop making progress in your career is the moment you start looking for another job. And so over the last 15 years, we've interviewed over 1,000 people, I've coached almost 1,000 people. Because I think there's a billion people a year who switch jobs, and ultimately most of them end up with a job that's worse than the one they were at, but they don't know how to find it. They don't know themselves well enough.

There's a very tactical piece of advice in your book which is the idea of a jobcation.

When you're in a startup, it changes who you are. And the moment that you get out of that environment, you need to take the time to reset your mind and your body. I call it a jobcation, which is a job I can go do with one hand tied behind my back so I can rest and recover to go do something else. It's about actually being able to go to the gym and work out, and have some vacation. The moment you get comfortable with doing nothing, you know who you are again, and you can actually figure this out.

You have this really interesting distinction in the book between job features like salary, and title, and job experiences.

It's very simple, uh, very similar to product. There's a difference between product features and product experiences, and what you start to realize is it's the experiences that keep you at your job. It's not just about the money, because you start to realize money is a surrogate for respect, or, "I've got bills to pay." Or, "I'm falling behind." Money has actually many, many different implications to it, 'cause everybody wants more money. But the question is why do you want more money?

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Bob Mesta. Bob is the co-creator of the Jobs to Be Done framework and worked alongside Clay Christensen for many years. He's also started nine different companies. He's currently the co-founder and CEO of The Rewired Group. This is Bob's second visit to the podcast. In our first conversation, we got super deep on the Jobs to Be Done framework. In this conversation, we talk about his new book that he believes is gonna be even more impactful to the world than the Jobs to Be Done framework. The book is called Job Moves. It's basically a very tactical guide to finding a job that you love. I won't give it away, but if you're struggling to find a job, or hate the job that you are currently in and aren't sure what to do, or you want to get better at hiring and keeping amazing people, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Bob Mesta. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth, and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, and I am very excited to have Christina Cacioppo, CEO and co-founder of Vanta joining me for this very short conversation.