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Satisfied customers are not yet a market.

You have asked your customers – but

nobody can tell you why they buy.

Not even your customers themselves. Whoever knows the reason knows in advance what will work. Whoever gets this wrong misses the market.

What this sounds like in interviews

“It sends a chill down my spine when someone says: in November, we decide what our development resources will be spent on for a whole year.” – Managing director, JTBD interview 2026 (translated from German)

Most people go in on a hunch, because nobody has asked the customers. And if you ask them yourself, you burn through your contacts.

Together with you, we find out.

  1. 01 Talk to your customersNot with a questionnaire: a few conversations with exactly the right people tell you more than 800 questionnaires.
  2. 02 Find the reasonWhat was going on the last time they bought? That is where you see what your product has to do.
  3. 03 Make you visibleTo your customers – so that they use your product, love it and recommend it.
  4. 04 Get foundBy the people who need your product, without having to know you first.
Why this works

People don’t buy a new product. They buy whatever helps them right now. That is why we talk to your customers – not with a questionnaire, but properly: what was going on the last time they bought? Why then, and why that? That is where you see what your product has to do and how to sell it. A few conversations with exactly the right people tell you more than 800 questionnaires.

How we work

We find the people to interview, hold the interviews and analyse them – and we don’t stop there: together with you, we develop the strategy that fits and help you put it into practice. We work out together which part of that is worth most to you. How far we go is up to you. Hypotheses and gut feeling become evidence before you commit budget. The course comes from the customer, not from the meeting room.

We work on four fronts: the product, processes and priorities, your team, which learns to ask for itself – and your visibility wherever your market asks, including in AI answers. We measure whether a system names you. What we do not promise is a placement; the systems decide that.

Two formats. The Sprint: a few weeks on board to read the situation and deliver a basis for your decision – then we go ashore again. The accompaniment: we stay, train your team and make the changes alongside it, until it navigates on its own.

That a small crew can do this is down to the method – and to a division of labour we have worked with since 2022: machines do the legwork, people make the judgements. We have measured it – the same interviews analysed by hand and by machine, the same patterns. For you, that means four weeks from the first conversation to a decision-ready basis, at a fixed price. Every quote can be checked against the original recording, every analysis is reviewed, and all of it complies with data protection law – even where customer data is especially sensitive. So you can stand in front of your board and answer any follow-up question – right down to your customers’ own words.

And yes: one person, a handful of specialists, no army of consultants. That is deliberate. You talk to the person who does the work – since 2006, in more than 700 client projects. No junior in between, no overhead you end up paying for: short lines of communication, speed, an easy start.

Which decision is on your desk?

Your entry point is not your role – it is the decision you have to make in the next 90 days.

You have to justify a roadmap or launch decision – and have no solid customer data?

SprintIn four weeks, a basis for your decision, with options, trade-offs and a clear recommendation.

What you get from a Sprint
  • A decision paper that holds up at board level: options, trade-offs, one clear recommendation
  • The handover into your planning: next steps, responsibilities, ready for the backlog and the budget round
  • A way of measuring whether the decision is working – before the quarter is over

No workshops without a basis for decisions. No reports without next steps. And once the decision is made, we can stay with you through the implementation until the impact is measurable, if you want us to.

More about the Sprint

Your product owners implement requirements instead of starting from the customer’s problem?

Sprint as a pilot projectYour team learns the method on a real project – with capability building included.

More on this

A pilot project with capability building included: your team learns the method on a real project – so that the knowledge does not run aground in the organisation.

The decision is still waiting – for budget, a board meeting, a role that has yet to be filled?

Positioning AssessmentStart smaller: a self-contained assignment that shows you how we work before you decide on a Sprint.

Already know JTBD?

You know JTBD – but lack the tools to apply it properly yourself? Mastering JTBD: interview craft, analysis and standards – learned from the people who helped shape the method in the German-speaking world. Learn JTBD at the original source

Evidence, not promises.

700+

client projects. Peter Rochel has worked with Jobs to be Done since 2006.

5×

more sales within a few weeks – after four in-depth interviews at the yoga-mat start-up Mantrafant.

271

sources in our market study on visibility in AI answers – published under an open licence.

Who is behind this

Peter Rochel has worked with Jobs to be Done since 2006 – more than 700 consulting projects, from a yoga-mat start-up to a family business with billions in revenue. Co-originator of the Wheel of Progress (with Eckhart Böhme), in close professional exchange with Bob Moesta, one of the pioneers of the method – whom you can also hear in his own words on the Innovate+Upgrade podcast.

Our interviewing technique comes from investigative interviewing. Not because customers are suspects – but because this craft reconstructs motives from what people actually did. Methods without this craft produce notes, not scripts.

Featured in: FOCUS · heise · impulse · Bitcoin Bundesverband · all media coverage (in German)

Three cases in detail

5× more sales within a few weeks

Four in-depth interviews showed the yoga-mat start-up Mantrafant why customers really bought. Within a few weeks, sales rose fivefold – with 60% less spent on winning each new customer. Read the case study

Trust beats price – and nobody in the company knew it beforehand

An IT service provider with around 60 employees wanted to enter the cybersecurity market. Six in-depth interviews showed that customers were not buying the feature list but trust – and in five out of six cases, a specific incident was the trigger. The owner went on to build three companies on it. Read the case study (in German)

A basis for a launch in three weeks

Twelve in-depth interviews gave a family business with billions in revenue the basis for a new product launch. Five of seven recommendations made it into the product – today one of the top three in its category in Germany. All case studies

How we measure our own market

We also measure the market we work in ourselves. Before we set the price of the Positioning Assessment, we examined what the market charges for visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers, what demonstrably works and what does not – with 271 sources, published under an open licence. The market study: Wer genannt wird, wenn der Markt fragt (“Who gets named when the market asks”, in German)

What reference customers say

“Whatever you do, don’t start on your own. That’s a really bad idea.” – that is what our reference customers say when prospects ask them (translated from German).

You can talk to them yourself – ask us about reference calls on your intro call.

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