What do candy bars, couches, and car dealerships have in common? For Andrew Glaser, they're all opportunities to understand how real people make decisions — and why most product teams get those decisions wrong.

In this episode, Andrew shares his journey from hedge fund manager to product strategist, and now founder of Swizzle, an AI product built around Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) thinking. He opens up about how false positives, feature bloat, and over-reliance on personas lead teams down the wrong path — and what it really takes to make something customers will hire.

We get into the guts of JTBD, from how to know when you've hit causality in an interview, to why understanding tradeoffs is more useful than knowing demographics. Andrew shares practical frameworks and surprising stories — including what Snickers can teach you about product-market fit, why most sofas don't sell, and how Intercom 15x'ed revenue just by reframing how they talked about their product.

Whether you're building software or selling furniture, this conversation will challenge how you think about customer insight — and give you tools to sharpen your product bets.

Inside the episode…

• Why false positives in customer research can wreck a strategy

• How JTBD helped turn around a billion-dollar furniture retailer

• The 4 real jobs behind buying a sofa

• Snickers vs. Milky Way: A JTBD breakdown of context and tradeoffs

• What most people get wrong about customer interviews

• Why personas don't drive decisions — and what actually does

• How Intercom used JTBD to grow from $5M to $75M

• Using AI to support high-consideration decisions

• How to know what your product is allowed to suck at

• Why survey data without context leads to bad bets

Mentioned in this episode

• Andrew's Startup Swizzl - https://swizzl.ai/

• Andrew's cofounder Bob Moesta - https://therewiredgroup.com/about/bob-moesta/

• Clay Christensen's HBR article: "Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done" - https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done

• "Demand-Side Sales" by Bob Moesta - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544509987/?bestFormat=true&k=demand%20side%20sales%20101&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-d_de_k0_1_12&crid=8C2BLR9H1HF6&sprefix=demand%20side%20

• "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton Christensen - https://www.amazon.com/Clayton-Christensen-Competing-Against-%E3%80%902018%E3%80%91/dp/B07KPWQQY3/ref=sr_1_2

Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge.

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