The User Research Strategist: UXR | Impact | Career Jobs to Be Done Without the Dogma | Wolfram Nagel (TeamViewer)
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Wolfram is a Senior UX Designer and Researcher and has been working at TeamViewer for eight years.He has been driving and advancing UX Research at the company for nearly two years, developing it further together with a young but highly talented and motivated team. He has been deeply involved with Jobs-to-Be-Done for over a decade and considers himself a pragmatic JTBD practitioner.
Before joining TeamViewer, he spent almost ten years in the Enterprise Content Management space and have been focusing on Multi-Device Experiences since the mid-2010s. He is the author of “Multiscreen UX Design” and has been passionately engaged in UX and design for around 25 years. His expertise lies in Jobs-to-Be-Done, hands-on and pragmatic UX research, as well as content design and content management. He regularly and enthusiastically participates in webinars, meetups, and conferences.
Beyond UX and design, he enjoys photography, particularly nature and bird photography, and loves spending time with his family. In the past, he was an avid groundhopper, traveling across Europe with friends to attend football matches.
In our conversation, we discuss:
* Why it helps to think of every user action as a “job” with a real outcome, not just a task or step.
* The messy overlap between jobs, goals, use cases, and what stakeholders think they want.
* Why most teams start in the solution space and how to bring Jobs thinking in without derailing the train.
* What an actual “job” sounds like in the wild, and how to spot one inside complaints, workarounds, and feature requests.
* Why Wolfram keeps outcome-driven language like “minimize the time it takes to…” as a rule and how it makes your findings way more usable.
Some takeaways:
* Jobs to Be Done is a lens. Wolfram doesn’t wait for permission to use JTBD thinking. Whether he’s asked for a usability test or feedback on a feature, he still pulls out the job behind it. Why? Because understanding the job gives you reusable insights that don’t die with the feature.
* Stop obsessing over the perfect term. Stakeholders just need to get it. Wolfram avoids technical jargon like “JTBD” when introducing the concept. He uses terms they already know, like “use cases” or “problems,” so they’re not thrown off. The focus is clarity, not vocabulary.
* Your users are already giving you jobs, you just have to listen for them. Complaints, feature requests, emails, even rants. All of these hold clues about what someone was trying to do. If you dig in with curiosity (and a few “tell me more”s), you can usually find the real goal underneath the noise.
* Do it late if you must but do it anyway. Sometimes research doesn’t happen until the build is already underway. That doesn’t mean you skip the problem space. Wolfram brings in JTBD insights midstream, not to stop the train, but to nudge it toward stronger value delivery and set up better decisions next time.
* Your feature might flop but your jobs research won’t go to waste. If the solution turns out to be unworkable or doesn’t land, you don’t have to throw away the research. JTBD insights stay valid. They’re reusable, solution-agnostic, and can fuel the next iteration or a totally new idea.
Where to find Wolfram:
* Multiscreen UX Design (book)
* Website
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