We designed a JTBD interview studies to explore a big question:

What's going on in our customers’ worlds that drove them to give our product or service a try – and how have we helped them make progress?

To explore this question at an existing business, we design studies around people who have recently been in the “before” state prior to switching to our product and are now in an "after "state of achieving some kind of success with us. This group is likely to have a fresh memory of their time in the old world and fresh perspective on their new world.

To get this perspective, we recruit interviewees who fit at least two criteria:

1. People who have made a decision to switch to our product or service very recently (i.e. started a trial and upgraded to a paid plan within the last 30 - 90 days)

2. People who have achieved a success milestone during that time

Sitting down to recruit people for match these criteria is an exercise that brings many teams to their first moment of realignment.

Designing a JTBD research study is often the first time teams have stopped to consider what makes customers successful, whether this is consensus on that outcome, and how (or whether) it's measured.

Choosing to say, “Let's find customers who are successful” means asking:

• How do we define success?
• How do our customers define success?
• Does success mean something different for different user groups?
• How do we know that this is the best way to define success?
• Where did that success metric come from?
• Is success quantifiable? Should it be?

For a great many teams need to JTBD, recruiting participant is the first time in a long time that anyone has stopped to consider these question – and it's where the change work begins