A disconnect between product, marketing, and sales teams is more than an internal inconvenience; it's a direct impediment to growth and equity value creation. When these core functions operate with disparate views of the customer and market, the result is often misaligned product development, diluted marketing messages, and sales efforts that miss the mark. This article outlines how we establish a Shared JTBD Language, rooted in our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done methodology, providing a robust framework for cross-functional alignment, driving customer-centricity and accelerating growth within our portfolio companies.
We will explore how we develop and implement this common vocabulary to ensure teams are united in their understanding and pursuit of customer needs.
In many organizations, product, marketing, and sales teams operate in functional silos. While each department aims for success, their definitions of success and the language they use to describe customer problems and solutions often diverge. This misalignment leads to:
Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental shift towards a unified, customer-centric perspective across all teams. Our Shared JTBD Language is the cornerstone of this transformation.
Our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method is a powerful methodology that shifts the focus from products and features to what customers are fundamentally trying to accomplish—their "job." A "job" encompasses not just functional tasks but also the emotional and social dimensions of progress a customer seeks in a particular circumstance.
We use our JTBD method to identify unmet customer needs with precision. Understanding the customer's job is crucial for alignment because it provides a stable, shared point of reference. By identifying the 'job' the customer is hiring products or services to complete, we create a shared focal point that keeps all efforts aligned on solving the same core problem for the customer.
Key aspects of our JTBD method that aid alignment include:
By adopting our JTBD method, organizations can build a common understanding of customer needs that transcends departmental biases.
Without a unifying framework like our JTBD method, product, marketing, and sales teams often develop their own terminologies and prioritize different aspects of the customer experience:
These differing perspectives and vocabularies create friction and inefficiencies. An inconsistent understanding of the core customer problem leads to a fragmented approach to solving it.
A shared vocabulary is fundamental to effective teamwork. When teams speak the same language, especially one grounded in the customer's perspective, several benefits emerge:
Our JTBD method provides the ideal foundation for this shared language. It anchors discussions in the customer's context and their struggle, measured by Customer Effort Scores, rather than internal departmental goals or product features alone. In our JTBD research, we let people describe in their own words their situation, struggles, and desires. This leaves no room for guessing and helps teams establish and adopt a common language—that of the customer.
Developing a shared JTBD lexicon is a critical step. This involves defining key JTBD terms and ensuring they are understood and applied consistently across product, marketing, and sales. We help our portfolio companies develop comprehensive glossaries of key JTBD terms to ensure teams can speak our language effectively.
Your internal JTBD glossary should include terms such as:
Job Statement: A concise description of what the customer is trying to accomplish, independent of any solution. Example: "Manage personal finances to achieve long-term security."
Customer Need Statement: An action/variable pair defining how customers measure success in executing a step of their job (e.g., "Determine account balance," "Identify unauthorized transactions"). These are metrics for speed and accuracy.
Main Job vs. Related Jobs: Distinguishing the primary functional job from smaller, supporting jobs customers perform.
Customer Effort Score (CES): The percentage of customers who report difficulty satisfying a given customer need statement. High CES indicates significant unmet needs.
Forces of Progress: The factors influencing a customer's decision to switch solutions (Push of the current situation, Pull of the new solution, Anxiety about the new, Habit of the old).
Customer Context & Situation: The specific circumstances surrounding the customer's attempt to get a job done, which can significantly influence their needs.
We recommend hosting a workshop involving key members from product, marketing, and sales to collaboratively define these terms and agree on their application within your organization. This shared creation process fosters buy-in and ensures the language is practical and relevant for all teams.
Adopting a shared JTBD language is a process that requires commitment and structured implementation.
Integrating the shared JTBD language into daily work tools and documents is key for adoption. Here are examples:
Product Brief Section:
Campaign Brief Section:
Discovery Call Questions:
Internal Battlecard Section:
These templates ensure that every team is consistently framing problems and solutions through the lens of the customer's Job-to-be-Done.
Implementing a shared JTBD language across product, marketing, and sales yields significant benefits, contributing directly to equity value creation in our portfolio companies:
Product Teams: Develop more focused roadmaps, experience higher feature adoption rates, and see less rework because they are building solutions for well-understood, prioritized customer needs based on Customer Effort Scores.
Marketing Teams: Create more resonant campaigns with higher quality leads and improved MQL-to-SQL conversion rates because messaging directly addresses the customer's job and areas of struggle.
Sales Teams: Experience shorter sales cycles, achieve higher close rates, and secure better customer fit by clearly articulating how the product helps customers get their job done with less effort.
Organization-Wide:
Our AI-powered platform significantly accelerates the process of identifying these customer needs and helps our portfolio companies' teams generate insights rapidly, giving them a critical speed advantage.
Transitioning to a shared JTBD language may present challenges:
Resistance to Change: Some team members may be accustomed to old terminologies or methodologies.
Time Investment for Training: Initial training requires time away from daily tasks.
Ensuring Consistency: Maintaining consistent use of the language over time can be difficult.
Establishing a Shared JTBD Language across product, marketing, and sales is not merely an exercise in semantics; it's a strategic imperative for companies serious about customer-centric growth and creating equity value. By unifying teams around a common understanding of the customer's Job-to-be-Done and their unmet needs (as identified by Customer Effort Scores), organizations can break down silos, improve collaboration, and develop offerings that truly resonate. This alignment is key to accelerating growth and creating equity value.
We implement our proprietary JTBD method and AI-powered platform to help our portfolio companies achieve this alignment and accelerate growth through product innovation. Our approach ensures that product, marketing, and sales efforts are all directed at solving the right customer problems effectively.
A Shared JTBD Language is a common vocabulary based on Jobs-to-be-Done methodology that unifies product, marketing, and sales teams around customer needs. Instead of each department using different terminology, all teams speak the same customer-centric language focused on helping customers complete their jobs faster and more accurately.
A shared JTBD language improves alignment by providing a stable, common framework based on customer jobs rather than internal departmental goals. When all teams understand the customer's job and where they struggle most (measured by Customer Effort Scores), they can coordinate their efforts toward the same objective.
Key terms include Job Statement (what customers are trying to accomplish), Customer Need Statement (action/variable pairs defining success metrics), Customer Effort Score (percentage of customers who find job steps difficult), and Forces of Progress (factors influencing customer decisions to switch solutions).
Implementation typically takes 2-4 months including glossary development, training, and integration into workflows. However, teams often see improved collaboration and decision-making within 4-6 weeks of beginning to use the shared vocabulary in meetings and documentation.
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 exactly where customers struggle most, enabling teams to develop more accurate shared terminology around customer needs and priorities.
Traditional business terminology focuses on internal processes, features, and departmental metrics. JTBD language centers everything on the customer's perspective—what they're trying to accomplish and where they struggle. This customer-centric approach creates better alignment because it's based on stable customer needs rather than changing internal priorities.
Yes, shared JTBD language works for both B2B and B2C companies. All customers, whether businesses or consumers, hire products and services to help them make progress in specific situations. The methodology remains the same regardless of market type—understanding customer jobs and reducing effort.
Success is measured through improved collaboration metrics (faster decision-making, fewer miscommunications), better business outcomes (higher feature adoption, improved conversion rates, shorter sales cycles), and ultimately reduced Customer Effort Scores, which indicate that teams are successfully working together to solve customer problems.