Aligning Product, Marketing, and Customer Success: How We Accelerate Portfolio Company Growth Through Jobs to be Done

When we begin working with portfolio companies at thrv, we consistently find teams operating in isolation despite good intentions. Product builds features based on technical feasibility. Marketing creates campaigns around product capabilities. Customer success scrambles to address issues that could have been prevented. The result is fragmented customer experiences that constrain growth and limit equity value creation.

Our proprietary JTBD method provides the framework that transforms scattered efforts into unified customer focus. By establishing customer jobs as the common language across functions, we help portfolio companies achieve the alignment that drives measurable growth. When we implemented our JTBD method with the Target Registry team, this cross-functional alignment contributed to their achievement of over 25% annual revenue growth and 20% Net Promoter Score improvement.

This guide reveals the systematic approach we've developed for aligning product, marketing, and customer success teams around customer job completion, accelerating time to value, and creating sustainable competitive advantages that increase equity value.

Table of Contents

• Why Traditional Alignment Efforts Fail
• Jobs to be Done as Universal Customer Language
• The thrv Cross-Functional Alignment Framework
• Building Customer Effort Scorecards That Unite Teams
• Implementing Joint Planning Systems
• Function-Specific JTBD Applications
• Measuring Alignment Impact on Growth
• Frequently Asked Questions

Why Traditional Alignment Efforts Fail

Research shows aligned companies grow 19% faster and achieve 15% higher profitability than their disconnected competitors. Yet despite this awareness, most organizations struggle with cross-functional collaboration because they address symptoms rather than root causes.

In our work with portfolio companies, we've identified the fundamental issue: teams speak different languages. Product talks about features and user stories. Marketing discusses segments and campaigns. Customer success focuses on health scores and retention rates. Each perspective describes what teams do rather than why customers need the solution in the first place.

This language barrier creates measurement misalignment that sabotages growth. When product teams are measured on feature releases, they prioritize output over customer progress. When marketing teams focus solely on lead generation, they attract prospects who aren't good fits. When customer success teams concentrate only on preventing churn, they miss expansion opportunities based on additional customer jobs.

Our AI-powered JTBD platform solves this by establishing customer jobs as the common currency across functions. Rather than debating feature priorities or campaign messages, teams unite around a fundamental question: What job is the customer trying to accomplish, and how can we help them complete it faster and more accurately?

Organizations implementing this approach see remarkable results. Companies with strong alignment between product, marketing, and customer success achieve 36% higher customer retention rates and experience significantly faster revenue growth compared to siloed competitors.

Jobs to be Done as Universal Customer Language

Jobs to be Done focuses on the progress customers seek rather than their demographics or behaviors. A job represents the progress a customer wants to make in a specific circumstance—it's the reason they hire a product or service.

Every customer job operates across three dimensions that inform how different teams approach their responsibilities. Functional jobs represent the practical tasks customers need to complete. Emotional jobs reflect how customers want to feel during and after job completion. Social jobs describe how customers want to be perceived by others.

Understanding customer jobs is just the beginning. True alignment emerges when teams share a detailed view of the specific job steps customers must complete and where they experience the most effort.

When we work with portfolio companies, we structure customer needs as direct action and variable pairs. For project management software, properly formatted customer needs include "Identify project risks," "Allocate resources across projects," and "Communicate status to stakeholders." This specificity transforms vague customer requirements into measurable targets that all teams can optimize against.

Our approach provides a single source of truth because it focuses on the constant—customer progress—rather than variables like demographics, channels, or specific solutions. This consistency enables all teams to contribute uniquely while working toward shared results.

The framework also naturally bridges short-term tactics and long-term strategy. Product teams use JTBD insights to prioritize features for the next sprint. Marketing teams use the same insights to develop messaging for campaigns. Customer success teams use JTBD understanding to design onboarding experiences that accelerate time to value across the entire customer lifecycle.

The thrv Cross-Functional Alignment Framework

We've developed a systematic approach for embedding JTBD insights into operational excellence across product, marketing, and customer success functions. Our AI-driven method significantly accelerates this process, generating unified customer understanding in hours rather than weeks, giving portfolio companies a critical speed advantage.

The framework begins with cross-functional job discovery workshops that include representatives from all three functions. These sessions generate comprehensive job insights, build shared understanding of customer contexts, and establish ownership for maintaining job clarity over time.

Product team members typically identify functional jobs related to workflow efficiency and capability gaps. Marketing professionals surface emotional and social jobs related to status and identity. Customer success representatives contribute jobs observed during customer conversations, particularly those related to value realization and expansion opportunities.

We facilitate collaborative job refinement that reveals how different functions naturally emphasize different aspects of the same underlying customer needs. The goal is weaving these perspectives into comprehensive job statements that capture all three dimensions while maintaining clear measurement criteria.

Our AI-powered platform then analyzes these unified job statements to identify the specific job steps where customers experience the highest effort. This analysis reveals precisely where each function can contribute most effectively to reducing customer struggle and accelerating job completion.

We document these insights in accessible formats that each function can easily reference and apply. These job cards become the shared reference point for all downstream activities—from product roadmaps to marketing campaigns to customer success playbooks.

Building Customer Effort Scorecards That Unite Teams

Traditional metrics create silos by measuring team activities rather than customer progress. Marketing celebrates lead volume without knowing if those prospects can actually be successful. Product tracks feature adoption without understanding if usage correlates with job completion. Customer success monitors engagement scores that may not predict actual customer value realization.

When we implement our JTBD method with portfolio companies, we establish scorecards centered on Customer Effort Scores—the percentage of customers who report difficulty satisfying a given job step based on effort required, speed of execution, and accuracy of execution.

Job completion rate measures the percentage of customers who successfully accomplish their primary job within a defined timeframe. This metric requires all teams to contribute: marketing must attract customers with the right job, product must build capabilities that enable job completion, and customer success must help customers navigate toward success.

Time to first job success tracks how quickly new customers achieve their first meaningful progress. This metric inherently demands cross-functional coordination since reducing time to value requires seamless handoffs between marketing's attraction, product's onboarding experience, and customer success's guidance.

Customer Effort Scores by job step measure how difficult customers find each stage of job completion. Unlike traditional satisfaction surveys, JTBD-based measurement identifies exactly where customers struggle, enabling targeted improvement efforts from the most relevant teams.

The power of JTBD-driven scorecards emerges when teams take ownership of specific elements that contribute to overall customer effort reduction. Product teams own CES related to core functionality and feature usability. Marketing teams own CES for pre-purchase and early-stage interactions. Customer success teams own CES for ongoing value realization and problem resolution.

Our AI-powered platform continuously monitors these effort scores across all customer segments, automatically identifying when specific job steps show increasing difficulty and alerting the appropriate teams for intervention. This real-time intelligence enables proactive improvement rather than reactive problem-solving.

Implementing Joint Planning Systems

Shared understanding means nothing without shared action. Even teams aligned on customer jobs will drift apart without structured systems that maintain focus and coordinate efforts.

When we work with portfolio companies, we implement three layers of joint planning: strategic alignment sessions, tactical coordination meetings, and customer immersion activities.

Quarterly JTBD alignment workshops bring product, marketing, and customer success leaders together for intensive sessions that refresh shared understanding and coordinate upcoming initiatives. These sessions begin with customer job validation—reviewing recent research, analyzing completion rates, and identifying emerging needs or changing contexts.

Teams then conduct collaborative prioritization using Customer Effort Scores to identify the highest-impact improvements across the entire customer experience. This analysis reveals whether product features, marketing messages, or customer success interventions will most effectively improve job completion rates.

The workshop concludes with cross-functional initiative planning where teams design coordinated efforts. Marketing campaigns support product launches. Customer success programs reinforce new feature adoption. Product developments address issues identified through customer success interactions.

Weekly tactical coordination ensures that daily activities across all teams contribute to shared JTBD progress. These brief sessions focus on immediate customer struggle points and coordination opportunities. Each team shares their primary contribution to customer job completion for the coming week, identifying handoff points where one team's work enables another's success.

Monthly customer immersion sessions ensure all teams stay connected to real customer experiences rather than abstract metrics. All three teams review customer interviews, support conversations, and usage recordings together. This shared exposure reveals gaps between team assumptions and customer reality while identifying improvement opportunities that might not surface through individual team research.

Our AI-powered platform supports these rituals by automatically surfacing the most relevant customer insights, tracking action items across functions, and measuring the impact of coordinated initiatives on customer effort reduction and job completion rates.

Function-Specific JTBD Applications

While teams share common customer understanding, each function contributes uniquely to customer job completion. Excellence emerges when each team optimizes their specialized capabilities around shared JTBD insights.

Product teams use JTBD insights to prioritize features based on customer progress rather than internal assumptions or competitive pressure. When we work with portfolio companies, we help product teams apply job-based criteria that consider Customer Effort Scores—identifying which job steps create the most difficulty based on effort required, speed of execution, and accuracy of execution.

This framework helps product teams avoid the common trap of building features that solve minor jobs or compete in areas where customers already experience low effort. Feature design maps new functionality to specific job steps, ensuring each capability helps customers make measurable progress. Our approach to product roadmap prioritization ensures development resources focus on creating maximum customer value.

Marketing teams leverage JTBD insights to attract the right customers with messages that resonate with their actual needs. Job-based segmentation replaces demographic targeting with progress-based customer grouping. Instead of targeting broad categories, marketing targets specific jobs that transcend traditional boundaries.

Content strategy aligns with job completion stages. Early-stage content addresses job recognition and initial struggles. Middle-stage content explores job solutions and progress possibilities. Later-stage content focuses on implementation confidence and success probability. Our AI-driven approach helps marketing teams identify the most job-relevant messaging, dramatically improving lead quality and campaign effectiveness.

Customer success teams use JTBD understanding to accelerate customer value realization and identify expansion opportunities based on customer progress. Onboarding path design guides new customers toward first job success rather than feature adoption. Success teams map onboarding activities to specific job steps, ensuring customers experience meaningful progress quickly.

Health scoring incorporates job completion metrics alongside traditional engagement measurements. Customers who actively use features but aren't completing jobs receive different assistance than customers showing low engagement but making progress toward their goals. Expansion conversations focus on additional jobs customers need to accomplish rather than additional features they might use.

Measuring Alignment Impact on Growth

Revenue acceleration represents the most compelling measurement dimension for portfolio company executives. When we implemented our JTBD method with the Target Registry team, systematic cross-functional alignment contributed to their reversal of declining revenue trends and achievement of over 25% annual top-line growth within 12-18 months.

Time-to-value improvements emerge consistently across portfolio companies. Aligned teams reduce time to first customer value by 25-40% within six months because marketing attracts better-fit prospects, product provides clearer onboarding experiences, and customer success guides customers toward relevant progress more efficiently.

Customer Effort Score reductions provide leading indicators of alignment success. Coordinated JTBD implementation typically reduces overall customer effort by 20-30% as teams eliminate redundant touchpoints, clarify communication, and streamline processes around customer job completion rather than internal convenience.

Operational efficiency gains manifest through reduced support requirements, compressed sales cycles, and improved resource allocation. Product development cycles shorten as teams maintain clearer focus on customer struggle reduction. Marketing campaign performance improves through better targeting and message relevance. Sales cycles compress as prospects quickly recognize solution fit for their specific job context.

The ultimate measure of successful alignment is sustainable revenue growth driven by customer success. Portfolio companies implementing comprehensive JTBD alignment achieve 36% higher customer retention rates and significantly improved expansion revenue as customers complete jobs that justify additional investment.

Our AI-powered platform continuously tracks these metrics, automatically identifying which alignment initiatives generate the highest returns and recommending adjustments based on evolving customer effort patterns and job completion rates.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does JTBD-driven alignment take to show results?

Most portfolio companies see measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and team collaboration within 90 days of implementation. Significant revenue impact typically emerges after 6-12 months as improved alignment compounds through the entire customer lifecycle. When we implemented our JTBD method with the Target Registry team, they achieved over 25% annual growth within 12-18 months.

What makes Jobs to be Done more effective than other alignment frameworks?

Jobs to be Done provides a single source of truth because it focuses on the constant—customer progress—rather than variables like demographics, channels, or specific solutions. Traditional frameworks like personas help one function but don't guide decisions across all teams. JTBD creates natural alignment because every function contributes to the same fundamental goal: helping customers complete their jobs faster and more accurately.

How does AI accelerate the alignment process?

Our AI-powered platform generates unified customer understanding in hours rather than weeks, identifying high-effort job steps and recommending specific interventions for each function. AI algorithms analyze customer behavior patterns to detect struggle signals that human analysis might miss, enabling proactive intervention before effort impacts conversion or retention. This speed advantage proves critical for portfolio companies pursuing aggressive growth trajectories.

What are Customer Effort Scores in the JTBD framework?

Customer Effort Score measures the percentage of customers who report difficulty satisfying a given job step. At thrv, we assess difficulty based on three specific criteria: effort required, speed of execution, and accuracy of execution. This measurement identifies which job steps create the most friction, revealing where product improvements, marketing clarity, or customer success intervention will generate the highest impact.

How do you handle resistance from teams used to optimizing individual metrics?

We address resistance through gradual implementation and early wins. We begin with pilot initiatives that demonstrate JTBD alignment benefits before expanding to full implementation. We celebrate collaborative successes that result from cross-functional coordination rather than individual team achievements. Our AI-powered platform makes shared accountability easier by providing clear visibility into how each team's efforts contribute to collective customer progress.

Can this framework work for B2B companies with complex sales processes?

B2B implementations often show even greater benefits because complex sales processes create numerous high-effort job steps where alignment generates disproportionate impact. Our work with portfolio companies demonstrates that B2B alignment proves particularly effective during evaluation, consensus building, and approval processes that directly impact deal velocity and closure rates.

What's the biggest mistake teams make when implementing cross-functional alignment?

The most common error is focusing on tools and processes before establishing shared understanding of customer jobs. Successful implementations begin with customer research and job validation before designing metrics or planning coordination systems. We facilitate this foundation through cross-functional job discovery workshops that build genuine shared understanding rather than superficial agreement.

How do you maintain alignment as portfolio companies scale?

Scaling requires systematizing the frameworks and measurement systems that create alignment rather than relying on personal relationships. We establish clear handoff protocols that work regardless of team size, implement technology platforms that maintain shared visibility into customer progress, and embed job-based thinking into hiring and onboarding processes so new team members naturally adopt the alignment mindset.

What role does customer success play in driving alignment?

Customer success teams provide critical feedback loops that inform product development and marketing strategy. They surface real-world job completion challenges that might not appear in usage analytics, identify additional jobs customers need to accomplish as they mature, and validate whether product features and marketing messages actually reduce customer effort as intended.

How do you measure ROI for alignment initiatives?

We track multiple impact dimensions including revenue growth acceleration, time-to-value reduction, Customer Effort Score improvements, and customer lifetime value increases. Portfolio companies implementing comprehensive JTBD alignment typically see 19% faster growth and 15% higher profitability compared to baseline performance, with 36% higher customer retention rates providing sustained competitive advantage.

Cross-functional alignment through Jobs to be Done represents a fundamental shift from activity-based optimization to progress-driven collaboration. When we use our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done method with portfolio companies, we consistently see organizations that successfully implement this approach create sustainable competitive advantages and accelerated equity value creation.

Our AI-powered platform eliminates guesswork and significantly accelerates the alignment process, generating unified customer understanding in hours rather than weeks while maintaining the depth and accuracy needed for confident decision-making across all functions. Portfolio companies gain critical speed advantages in identifying high-effort job steps, coordinating interventions, and measuring impact on customer progress and business performance.

The framework's power lies in its foundation: when all teams share understanding of what customers are trying to accomplish, coordination becomes natural rather than forced. Marketing attracts customers with relevant jobs. Product builds capabilities that enable job completion with minimal effort. Customer success accelerates progress achievement. This unified focus transforms scattered improvement efforts into systematic customer progress acceleration—the foundation of sustainable, profitable growth that creates lasting equity value.