Table of Contents

• Why Traditional Growth Assessment Often Falls Short
• AI Advantage: Neural Analysis for Portfolio Companies
• We Start with the Customer Job, Not the Product
• We Uncover Unmet Needs: The Leading Indicator of Growth
• AI Advantage: Predictive Need Analysis
• We Confirm Product-Market Fit Through Customer Effort Scoring
• What Strong Product-Market Fit Looks Like in JTBD Terms
• What Weak Fit Looks Like
• We Assess Whether the GTM Strategy Aligns with Urgent Needs
• AI Advantage: Message-Job Alignment
• We Use JTBD to Estimate Repeatability Across Segments
• We Use JTBD to Inform Growth Strategy Implementation
• AI Advantage: Strategic Planning Acceleration
• JTBD as a Signal for Long-Term Value Creation
• JTBD Reduces Strategic Drift
• To Sum Up: A Better Way to Accelerate Growth Through Customer Understanding
• Ready to Accelerate Growth with Confidence?
  
  

Why Traditional Growth Assessment Often Falls Short

When evaluating portfolio company growth potential, most executives focus on traditional metrics: financial health, operational efficiency, competitive landscape, and leadership strength. These are useful foundations—but they primarily reflect the past.

At thrv, we understand that growth-focused operations are about the future: Will this company grow? Can it generate new revenue quickly and predictably? Most importantly, will that growth drive sustainable competitive advantages?

This is where traditional assessment often misses the mark. Financial statements show historical trends but can't predict what will unlock the next revenue chapter. Market sizing studies estimate the total addressable market (TAM) but don't reveal whether a company is solving problems customers urgently need addressed.

At thrv, we go beyond traditional assessment by using AI to analyze customer jobs, uncover unmet needs, and project scalable growth opportunities. Our proprietary platform applies machine learning to customer research—enabling faster, more accurate assessments of growth potential.

We provide portfolio company executives with a measurable way to assess customer demand, product alignment, and expansion potential—before capital is committed to major initiatives. Our Jobs to be Done framework offers a forward-looking lens into whether a company can deliver repeatable, scalable growth.

AI Advantage: Neural Analysis for Portfolio Companies

Our proprietary operating system processes thousands of customer data points in hours—not weeks—to identify patterns human analysts might miss.

We Start with the Customer Job, Not the Product

During growth assessment, it's tempting to begin with what the company has built: features, market positioning, pricing, and existing customer metrics. We take a different approach, starting with the customer's Job to be Done—the goal they're hiring the product to help them achieve.

When we evaluate a portfolio company's growth potential, our first question is: What job is the customer trying to complete? If that job is important, underserved, and persistent, it signals real market opportunity. If not, even a talented leadership team may struggle to sustain growth.

Our AI enables us to analyze thousands of qualitative data points—such as interviews, reviews, and usage patterns—to identify core jobs faster and with less bias. This accelerates our understanding of what customers are truly hiring the product to do.

Our Jobs to be Done analysis allows portfolio companies to:

• Identify whether the company is solving an urgent problem
• Evaluate whether customers are satisfied with current alternatives
• Determine how much upside exists if the company can satisfy the job better than competitors
  
  

For example, a payroll software platform might frame its value around integrations and user interface (UI). But our analysis often reveals the real job customers need to accomplish is "ensure every employee is paid accurately and on time with minimal manual oversight." If current solutions create friction in that job, the growth potential lies in solving that problem—not launching more integrations.

Starting with the job makes it easier to assess whether the company aligns with a real, underserved need—and whether the market opportunity remains open.

We Uncover Unmet Needs: The Leading Indicator of Growth

Growth doesn't come from what's already working. It comes from addressing what isn't—and doing it better than anyone else.

That's why we focus assessment around unmet needs. Using our proprietary JTBD software, we evaluate how well the company satisfies specific steps in the customer's job. Each step is measured by:

• Importance: How critical is this step for the customer?
• Satisfaction: How well is this step being served today?
  
  

Our software uses AI to detect patterns in unmet needs across job steps. It analyzes survey data and qualitative feedback to surface the needs most likely to drive growth—before competitors recognize them.

The biggest opportunities emerge where importance is high and satisfaction is low. These are areas where customers are willing to switch, pay more, or expand usage if someone can solve their problem more effectively.

When a company already addresses one or more of these unmet needs, it often indicates growth runway. And if they're not—but the need still exists—it presents an opportunity to guide strategic direction and accelerate value creation.

AI Advantage: Predictive Need Analysis

Our AI models don't just identify current unmet needs—they predict which needs are likely to become more critical over the business development horizon, giving portfolio company executives insight into long-term growth opportunities.

We Confirm Product-Market Fit Through Customer Effort Scoring

Product-market fit (PMF) exists on a spectrum—and when evaluating a portfolio company's growth potential, the question isn't just if PMF exists, but where and how much opportunity remains to deepen it.

Traditional assessment might examine usage retention, feature adoption, or net expansion to gauge PMF. These metrics have value, but they're lagging indicators. What matters more—especially when assessing future growth—is understanding how well the product satisfies unmet customer needs in their job.

Our platform scores product-market fit by assessing customer effort and willingness to pay to get the job done. This approach helps portfolio company executives quantify risk and prioritize strategic moves with precision.

Our customer effort scoring gives executives a quantitative view of product-market fit. Here's how we approach it:

• Break down the job into 10-20 steps and 50-100 customer needs
• Survey the market to measure customer effort for each need
• Generate customer effort scores that reveal which needs represent the highest-value growth opportunities
  
  

What Strong Product-Market Fit Looks Like in JTBD Terms

When a product shows strong alignment with high-importance job steps, we often see:

• Low customer effort scores for critical needs
• Higher willingness to pay for solutions that address underserved steps
• Consistent patterns in how customers describe their success with the product
  
  

This alignment creates compounding advantages: lower acquisition costs, faster sales cycles, and higher retention. It's also a strong signal that the company can grow—because they've found a meaningful problem to solve.

What Weak Fit Looks Like

Conversely, if a product has high satisfaction on low-importance job steps—or if the highest-opportunity needs remain completely unmet—that's a warning sign. Even strong top-line numbers may mask deeper issues that could emerge as churn, slow sales, or failed expansion efforts.

By using our JTBD software to run this analysis during strategic planning, executives can avoid those risks and identify where to focus growth initiatives.

We Assess Whether the GTM Strategy Aligns with Urgent Needs

You can have an excellent product, but if the company's marketing and sales strategy doesn't reflect the actual pain customers feel, you won't win consistently—or grow efficiently.

In our experience, when go-to-market (GTM) teams default to generic personas, vague positioning, and feature-based messaging, these approaches fail to speak directly to what customers are struggling to accomplish.

We use AI to evaluate GTM content—ads, sales scripts, web copy—and detect whether messaging aligns with the job language and emotional triggers uncovered in our JTBD analysis. This ensures every touchpoint reinforces the customer's struggle and desired outcome.

When misalignment exists, we typically see:

• Sales cycles are longer than necessary
• Conversion rates are lower, even with decent inbound
• Messaging focuses on product benefits, not customer struggles
  
  

We assess GTM alignment by mapping the company's messaging and sales process to the Job to be Done. Using our JTBD process, we evaluate:

• Are campaigns built around high-opportunity unmet needs?
• Do sales scripts and demos focus on job completion—not just features?
• Is there language-market fit? Do prospects immediately recognize the problem being described?
  
  

When a company speaks to a customer's most urgent need, demand increases—even if the product hasn't changed. We've seen businesses boost pipeline performance and reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) just by reworking messaging around high-friction job steps.

For executives, this is a crucial strategic checkpoint. If the product is solid but GTM is off-track, there's often a quick win. But if both product and GTM are misaligned with what customers care about, it's a much steeper climb.

AI Advantage: Message-Job Alignment

Our AI analyzes marketing content and sales materials against customer interview language, scoring how well GTM assets align with the vocabulary customers use to describe their struggles.

We Use JTBD to Estimate Repeatability Across Segments

One of the most powerful levers for portfolio company growth is repeatability: can the company take what works and expand it into adjacent markets or verticals?

Too often, this question gets answered with top-down assumptions: "If it works for manufacturing, it will work for logistics." But that's only true if both segments are trying to complete the same job, in the same way, and are currently underserved.

Our AI allows us to cross-map job steps and unmet needs across verticals, flagging where the same struggle appears in different contexts. This reveals scalable growth paths beyond surface-level TAM assumptions.

That's where our JTBD method shines. Instead of guessing at repeatability based on industry overlap, we test it by mapping jobs and needs across segments. With JTBD survey data, we can:

• Identify whether new segments have the same unmet needs
• Evaluate how those customers currently solve the job
• Determine if the company's product can be repositioned or lightly adapted to meet those needs
  
  

This allows executives to move from "total addressable market" to total addressable job—a much clearer predictor of expansion potential.

A Repeatability Example

Consider a SaaS company that helps HR teams automate new hire onboarding, currently strong in mid-market tech companies. Can it grow in healthcare?

With our JTBD analysis, we find that the core job—"ensure new hires are fully onboarded with minimal friction"—is just as important in healthcare. But satisfaction is lower due to more regulation and fragmented systems. That's a green light. The need exists, it's underserved, and the company's product is close enough to serve it with modest adaptation.

For executives, this unlocks a credible growth thesis based not on guesses—but on confirmed demand across job-aligned segments.

We Use JTBD to Inform Growth Strategy Implementation

Growth doesn't start after strategic planning—it starts during assessment. The best executives walk into implementation with a focused, evidence-based plan to create value from day one. But too often, growth strategy is reactive, based on internal interviews or lagging performance metrics.

Our Jobs to be Done framework gives executives a head start. It turns early customer insight into a roadmap for implementation—one that's grounded in real demand and confirmed through data.

Our AI-driven platform builds implementation playbooks tailored to each portfolio company. It prioritizes actions based on job severity, opportunity scores, and segment demand—so executives don't lose time after strategic decisions.

We work with portfolio company leadership during strategic planning to:

• Identify which unmet needs are most urgent and underserved
• Prioritize 1–2 jobs or job steps that can unlock growth in the short term
• Align early initiatives (feature development, GTM messaging, sales enablement) with those needs
  
  

This isn't about trying to address everything at once. It's about focusing execution energy on the right thing, right away.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Imagine you're evaluating a company with a strong base of SMB customers and modest enterprise adoption. Our JTBD analysis reveals that enterprise buyers have higher unmet needs in areas the product already supports—but messaging and onboarding don't reflect it.

That insight becomes your growth sprint: reposition the product, build onboarding that solves the job better, and enable sales to tell a clearer story. Instead of taking six months to diagnose growth bottlenecks, you walk in with a plan ready to execute.

This is what makes our JTBD method so valuable—not just for understanding growth potential, but for activating it immediately.

AI Advantage: Strategic Planning Acceleration

Our AI-powered platform analyzes past successful growth initiatives across our portfolio to recommend which job steps are likely to yield the fastest growth when addressed.

JTBD as a Signal for Long-Term Value Creation

When evaluating a company's long-term potential, executives need more than a strong first year—they need a clear line of sight to sustainable, compounding value. This is especially critical when targeting growth acceleration or preparing for strategic initiatives.

Jobs to be Done offers a powerful signal for long-term value creation by answering one key question: Is this company positioned to solve a recurring, meaningful problem that customers will continue to face in the future?

By continually tracking user behavior and survey feedback, our AI tools monitor how well the product satisfies evolving job needs. This enables strategic pivots that maintain alignment over time—driving compounding growth.

We've seen that companies anchored around high-opportunity jobs:

• Evolve more effectively as customer expectations shift
• Launch features and services that expand wallet share naturally
• Tell a better story to strategic partners and stakeholders
  
  

This is because they're not built around a static product—they're built around helping customers succeed. And as long as that job remains relevant, the company has permission to grow alongside its customers.

JTBD Reduces Strategic Drift

Without a unifying customer need, companies often lose focus as they scale—chasing trends, building features no one uses, or entering markets they're not equipped to serve. JTBD helps anchor decision-making so that every investment, hire, and initiative maps back to the customer's progress.

That clarity compounds. It strengthens internal alignment, accelerates roadmap planning, and makes leadership transitions smoother. For portfolio company executives, that means fewer surprises and more predictable growth.

To Sum Up: A Better Way to Accelerate Growth Through Customer Understanding

When it comes to accelerating portfolio company growth, you can't afford to rely on assumptions. Market size, revenue trends, and usage data may tell you what has happened—but they don't tell you what's possible next.

With AI integrated into every step of our JTBD methodology, we give executives a future-facing lens on value creation. Our approach replaces guesswork with scalable, data-backed insight—so you can implement growth strategies with confidence.

We apply our methodology to uncover what customers are trying to do, where they're struggling, and how well the company is positioned to help. This leads to better strategic decisions, faster execution, and more confidence in the growth narrative.

Our JTBD process and software make growth potential measurable—so that executives can focus capital and strategy on what really drives value: solving unmet customer needs better than anyone else.

Ready to Accelerate Growth with Confidence?

As an operating partner, we bring our proven JTBD methodology and AI capabilities to identify, measure, and realize growth opportunities that traditional assessment misses.

Visit thrv.com to learn how we apply our JTBD platform to accelerate growth and create substantial value for portfolio companies.

Case Study: How Target Used Our JTBD Platform to Drive Growth

Using our JTBD platform, Target's Registry team reversed declining revenue and achieved over 25% top-line growth by identifying and addressing critical unmet needs in their customers' jobs to be done. Our approach transformed Target from a market follower to a leader, with a 20% increase in Net Promoter Score and market dynamics shifting so dramatically that Amazon began copying Target's features.

Conclusion: Customer Understanding as Growth Engine

The future of portfolio company growth lies in systematic customer understanding powered by advanced technology. Our AI-driven JTBD methodology transforms how companies identify opportunities, prioritize resources, and execute growth strategies.

By focusing on stable customer jobs rather than changing market trends, we help portfolio companies build sustainable competitive advantages that drive long-term growth. The combination of human insight and AI acceleration ensures that customer understanding becomes a core operational capability, not just periodic research.

At thrv, we've proven that systematic customer understanding creates measurable business results. Our portfolio companies don't just know their markets better—they serve customers better, grow faster, and build more resilient businesses.

Partner with thrv to implement our proven methodology and unlock systematic growth opportunities in your portfolio company. Learn more about our approach at thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done.