Siloed teams are a silent growth killer. When product, marketing, and sales operate from different playbooks, the result is predictable: inconsistent messaging, product features that miss the mark, and wasted resources. This internal friction is inevitably felt by the customer and reflected in the company's valuation. The solution is not more meetings or memos, but a fundamental shift in perspective. True cross-functional alignment is built on a single, unwavering foundation: the customer's Job to be Done.

At thrv, we use our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method to create this alignment within our portfolio companies. This approach provides a common language and a shared set of priorities that directs every team toward a single goal: helping the customer get their job done better. This article explains how we use our JTBD method to unify teams, accelerate product innovation, and create equity value.

Table of Contents

• The High Cost of Misalignment
• Our New Foundation: The Jobs to be Done Method
• How We Use JTBD for Cross-Functional Alignment
• Step 1: Identify the Customer's Job and Measure Effort
• Step 2: Align Product Roadmaps to the Job
• Step 3: Align Marketing Messaging to the Job
• Step 4: Align Sales Conversations to the Job
• Measuring the Impact on Equity Value
• Our Unified Team: The JTBD-Driven Organization
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The High Cost of Misalignment

Cross-functional alignment is a state where every department—from engineering to sales—shares a unified understanding of the customer and works toward common objectives. However, this is notoriously difficult to achieve. Teams often drift apart, guided by conflicting departmental goals, metrics, and vocabularies.

• Product teams focus on building features
• Marketing teams focus on generating leads
• Sales teams focus on closing deals
  
  

When these functions are not synchronized by a common customer-centric goal, the business suffers. According to Forrester, organizations that align around the customer achieve 2.4 times higher revenue growth and two times higher growth in profitability. The opposite is also true; misalignment creates drag, slows growth, and erodes value.

Our New Foundation: The Jobs to be Done Method

The core problem is that most companies lack a stable, unifying principle. Personas, user stories, and market trends are often too abstract or change too quickly. Our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done method offers a more durable and practical anchor.

The central idea of our JTBD method is simple: customers don't buy products; they "hire" them to get a job done. A "job" is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. This perspective shifts the focus from the product itself to the customer's true objective.

By defining the customer's job, we establish a North Star for the entire organization. It becomes the single source of truth that informs every decision. Because customer jobs are stable over time, they provide a reliable foundation for long-term strategy and innovation. This creates a shared language that product, marketing, and sales can all use to align product and marketing efforts with sales execution.

How We Use JTBD for Cross-Functional Alignment

We implement our JTBD method with our portfolio companies to drive growth. Our platform gives teams a systematic process for achieving and maintaining cross-functional alignment.

Step 1: Identify the Customer's Job and Measure Effort

The first step is to identify the customer's core functional job. This involves deep customer research to map every step the customer takes to get the job done. For each step, we identify the customer's needs, which we define as precise metrics for success. Customer needs are formatted as action-variable pairs, such as "determine cooking temperature" or "calculate project timeline."

We then use Customer Effort Scores (CES) to measure the percentage of customers who find it difficult to execute each step. A high CES indicates significant struggle and a valuable opportunity for innovation. Our AI-powered platform significantly accelerates this analysis, helping our teams generate these critical insights in hours, not weeks.

Step 2: Align Product Roadmaps to the Job

With a clear, quantified view of customer struggle, product teams can build roadmaps with confidence. Instead of debating features based on opinion, prioritization becomes an objective exercise.

Focus on High-Effort Needs: We direct our portfolio companies to build features that directly address the job steps with the highest Customer Effort Scores.

Innovate for Speed and Accuracy: Product innovation is aimed at helping the customer get the job done faster and more accurately, which directly lowers CES.

Create Equity Value: This disciplined approach ensures that R&D investment is targeted at what matters most to customers, reducing risk and accelerating the creation of products that customers are willing to pay for.

Step 3: Align Marketing Messaging to the Job

A product built to get a job done is easier to market. The value proposition is already defined by the customer's needs. Marketing's role is to communicate how the product helps customers overcome their struggles.

Message with Clarity: Marketing messages speak directly to the customer's job and the specific pain points identified by high CES.

Create Relevant Content: Content strategies are built around the customer's job, providing genuinely useful information that builds trust.

Generate Qualified Leads: This alignment ensures marketing attracts prospects who have the job and are actively looking for a better way to do it.

Step 4: Align Sales Conversations to the Job

When a sales team understands the customer's Job to be Done, their role transforms from vendor to trusted advisor. They are equipped to have substantive conversations about the customer's core problems.

Improve Qualification: Sales can quickly determine if a prospect has the job the product was built for.

Demonstrate Value: They can clearly articulate how specific features help the customer execute their job with less effort.

Close with Confidence: The entire sales process is grounded in solving the customer's problem, not just pushing a product. This alignment of product, marketing, and sales creates a consistent and compelling customer experience from start to finish.

Measuring the Impact on Equity Value

For thrv, cross-functional alignment is not a corporate culture initiative; it is a mechanism for creating equity value. The impact of our JTBD-driven alignment is measurable and directly tied to financial performance.

Lowering Customer Effort Scores is a leading indicator of growth. When a product helps customers get a job done with measurably less effort, it commands greater market share and pricing power. This leads to predictable revenue growth, higher valuation multiples, and equity value creation for our portfolio companies. This clear line of sight from customer need to revenue growth is what makes our JTBD method a powerful tool for value creation.

Our Unified Team: The JTBD-Driven Organization

When product, marketing, and sales are all aligned around the customer's Job to be Done, the entire organization moves faster and with greater purpose. Silos dissolve, replaced by a shared commitment to solving customer problems. This is the end state we build in our portfolio companies. Our proprietary software platform is the operating system that helps this transformation, ensuring that alignment is not a one-time project but a continuous, data-driven process.

Cross-functional alignment through our JTBD method creates the organizational foundation necessary for sustained growth and equity value creation. By providing teams with a common language and shared priorities based on customer needs, our portfolio companies can innovate faster, execute more effectively, and build competitive advantages that create lasting value.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) for cross-functional alignment?

Jobs-to-be-Done for cross-functional alignment is a methodology that unifies product, marketing, and sales teams around a shared understanding of the customer's core job. Instead of each department working from different priorities, all teams focus on helping customers complete their jobs faster and more accurately.

How does JTBD create cross-functional alignment?

JTBD creates alignment by providing a stable, common language based on customer needs rather than internal departmental goals. When all teams understand the customer's job and where they struggle most (measured by Customer Effort Scores), product, marketing, and sales can coordinate their efforts toward the same objective.

What is the main benefit of using JTBD for team alignment?

The primary benefit is eliminating silos and conflicting priorities that slow growth. When teams share a unified understanding of customer needs, they make faster decisions, create more consistent messaging, and build products that customers actually want to buy, leading to accelerated revenue growth.

How is JTBD different from customer personas for alignment?

Customer personas describe who the customer is (demographics, characteristics), while JTBD describes what the customer is trying to accomplish. Since jobs are more stable than customer attributes and directly tied to purchase decisions, JTBD provides a more reliable foundation for long-term team alignment.

How do Customer Effort Scores help with cross-functional alignment?

Customer Effort Scores quantify where customers struggle most in their jobs, providing objective data for prioritization decisions. Instead of teams debating based on opinions, CES gives everyone concrete metrics to guide product development, marketing messaging, and sales conversations.

How long does it take to achieve JTBD-driven alignment?

With modern AI-powered platforms, teams can identify customer jobs and effort scores in hours rather than weeks. However, full organizational alignment typically takes 2-3 months as teams adjust their processes, messaging, and metrics to focus on customer job performance rather than internal departmental goals.

What role does AI play in JTBD cross-functional alignment?

AI accelerates the analysis of customer feedback and behavior to identify jobs and effort scores at scale. AI can process thousands of customer interactions to pinpoint where customers struggle most, enabling faster alignment decisions and more accurate prioritization across all teams.

How do you measure the success of JTBD cross-functional alignment?

Success is measured through improved business metrics: faster product development cycles, higher marketing qualified lead rates, increased sales win rates, and ultimately, revenue growth. The key indicator is reduced Customer Effort Scores, which directly correlate with customer satisfaction and willingness to pay.