Bob Moesta

Compensation is often a surrogate for other needs like respect or learning; optimizing for experience can be more valuable than maximizing salary.

"I can actually pay people less if I give them better experiences... I pay them fairly well, but I know they can make more money elsewhere. And ultimately I want them to be attracted to go. So if they..."

Career changes are primarily driven by a desire for personal progress and learning, not just salary increases.

"And you start to realize that all of these things where we think we have to pay more money, over 50% of the people who got new jobs didn't get more money. It's a lie. It's about progress. It's about w..."

Career stagnation is the primary trigger for job seeking, but most people fail to find better roles because they lack self-awareness and a structured search process.

"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 a thousand people. I've coached almost a thousa..."

After a high-intensity role like a startup, a 'jobcation'—a lower-demand role—can provide the necessary space to recover and rediscover your professional identity.

"I call it a jobcation, which is a job I can go do with one hand tie by hide 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..."

Treat your career search like product development by prototyping different roles through informational interviews before committing to a path.

"The thing that I think has been most powerful is, again, treating you like a product. How do we prototype different job positions for you? So how do we think of you? ... It's this notion of starting b..."

Standard job descriptions are often arbitrary lists of tasks rather than reflections of the progress the role needs to achieve.

"Job descriptions are made up. They're literally just made up. And there are a list of stuff that the manager will say, all right, we want them to do this. And then they'll think of all the stuff they..."

An effective job description defines the situational context and the definition of success (progress) for the hire.

"Job descriptions should really be, here's the context we're in. Here's what this role is about. Here's what progress means in this role and here's how we will actually reward you for actually doing th..."

Requirements should be framed as outcomes and experiences rather than static skills or years of experience.

"Look at the way you've written the job description, look at the way you've wrote the requirements and be more specific. It's like, yeah, you need to know Excel, PowerPoint and word, why? What do you d..."

Evaluating candidates based on their self-awareness of energy drivers and weaknesses leads to better long-term fit than skill-matching alone.

"I'm actually using the book as... If you want to apply for a job with me, we got to go through the process. And so basically they have to come to me and tell me their energy drivers and drains. They h..."

High-performing team culture is built on complementary energy profiles where one person's 'drain' is another's 'driver.'

"I should actually find my teammates that actually love to do the stuff I suck at or love the stuff that drains my energy. Because ultimately that's the diversity of a team that actually makes it reall..."

The guest introduces a specific framework for identifying 'Energy Drivers' and 'Energy Drains' to manage personal productivity, prevent burnout, and design roles.

"Think of moments where you actually go into a situation and you get energy from it... At the same time, the fact this is those moments where you go in and you get the life sucked out of you, that's an..."

Using a narrative framework like Pixar's story spine helps candidates communicate their career journey and value proposition concisely.

"This actually comes from Pixar. The way Pixar actually does its films is it has to come back with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, statements around it... It's this notion of once upon a time...."

Long-term roadmaps should be defined by the problems (struggling moments) to be solved rather than specific features, allowing for flexibility as technology changes.

"So instead of just talking about features, it's typically talking about features for the first 90 to 120 days, but after that we just talk about struggling moments because that's the seed for real inn..."

Demand is created by a specific 'struggling moment' in a user's life, not by the product itself.

"But the real thing that if you start to study causality is that a struggling moment causes demand. And you start to realize that in some cases that struggling moment exists and can exist for a long ti..."

True customer-centricity involves documenting and solving for the specific moments where users feel stuck.

"And so that's what we mean when we're customer-centric is that we're studying the struggling moments they have and people like Intercom and Basecamp, they look at struggling moments and that becomes t..."

Interviews should focus on the 'story' of why a user switched from an old solution to a new one.

"The first thing we do is we try to extract the story from the customer. And it doesn't have to be my product, it could be somebody else's product if I haven't built it yet. It's like, what are people..."

Avoid interviewing people about what they 'might' do; only interview those who have taken action or attempted to solve a problem.

"I only talk to people who have already tried to make the progress... I need to talk to people who did something and tried and though they might've failed, what made them try?"

Rigid discussion guides prevent interviewers from following the most valuable conversational threads.

"The other tip I have is to not have a discussion guide. It drives people crazy because everybody wants to ask the same set of questions, but the problem happens is when you ask the same set of questio..."

User feedback should be clustered into behavioral 'pathways' rather than demographic segments.

"And then what we do is instead of trying to look for themes across all of them, we actually do something, instead of segmenting them, we cluster them, we find the pathways because what you start to re..."

Sales processes should be engineered to match the buyer's natural decision-making timeline rather than the company's internal sales targets.

"Instead of trying to base the sales process on how we want to sell, we need to actually design the sales process on how they want to buy. And it seems like it's the same thing, but they're actually re..."