The 3 Customer Types That Determine Portfolio Company Success
Table of Contents
The Purchase Decision Maker: The One Who Controls the Budget
Let's Talk About How We Can Help You Unlock Customer-Centric Growth
Why Defining Customer Roles Drives Better Growth Strategy
For private equity and growth investors, accelerating value creation often hinges on how quickly a portfolio company can understand its customers. But most customer research, segmentation, and persona development lumps everyone into one catch-all category: "the user." This oversimplification creates friction across product, marketing, and sales—and leads to wasted resources, misaligned messaging, and features no one uses.
Atthrv, we take a different approach. We break down customers into three distinct roles, each with a different influence on the job to be done:, each with a different influence on the job to be done:
The job beneficiary — the person or group that benefits from the job being completed
The job executor — the person actually doing the work to get the job done
The purchase decision maker — the person who decides whether to pay for a product or solution
Recognizing and understanding the differences between these roles is one of the most overlooked levers for reducing risk, improving go-to-market fit, and unlocking scalable growth.
At thrv, our AI-powered platform significantly accelerates this customer role identification process. While traditional methods might take weeks of interviews and manual analysis, our platform can process customer data and identify these three critical roles in hours, giving portfolio companies a decisive speed advantage in fast-moving markets.
In this blog, we'll explain each role in depth, show how they apply to different business models, and demonstrate how private equity-backed companies can use this framework to improve alignment and accelerate value creation.
The Job Beneficiary: Who Gains from the Job Being Done Well
The job beneficiary is often the most important person in the customer ecosystem—but the one most easily ignored. This is the person or group whose life or business is improved when the job is successfully completed. In other words, they benefit from the outcome, even if they aren't the ones buying the product or using it day to day.
Why Beneficiaries Matter
Failing to understand who truly benefits from the job leads to messaging that misses the mark and solutions that don't feel urgent. When companies assume that the user and the beneficiary are always the same, they often over-invest in usability and under-invest in solving the real problem.
For example:
In healthcare, a nurse may be the job executor, but the patient is the beneficiary.
In B2B software, a financial analyst may be doing the work, but the CFO benefits when forecasts improve.
In education tech, a teacher might use the tool, but the student's progress is the end goal.
What Private Equity Needs to Know
Identifying the job beneficiary allows leadership teams to:
Position their value proposition around meaningful outcomes
Align roadmap decisions with what drives long-term retention
Understand what "success" looks like in the customer's world—not just in the product
When portfolio companies speak directly to the person who benefits—whether or not that person is the buyer—they create emotional resonance, strategic relevance, and brand trust. That leads to stronger word-of-mouth, higher retention, and ultimately, more predictable growth.
Our AI capabilities have transformed how we identify job beneficiaries for portfolio companies. Our platform analyzes customer data to reveal patterns that human analysts might miss, uncovering hidden beneficiaries and quantifying their importance to long-term growth. This reduces the risk of targeting the wrong stakeholders and accelerates value creation by focusing resources where they'll generate the highest returns.
The Job Executor: The Person Doing the Work
The job executor is the individual who directly interacts with the product or service to complete the job. They may not benefit from the outcome personally, and they may not control the budget—but they're the ones actually using the solution. If their experience is frustrating or time-consuming, even the best product can fail.
Understanding the executor's needs is critical for user adoption, satisfaction, and efficiency. But many companies design solutions for decision makers or beneficiaries, assuming that ease of use is secondary. That assumption creates friction during onboarding and leads to poor usage metrics—even if the product technically solves the job.
Atthrv, we help portfolio companies understand the job executor's role in product success by mapping out the fulljob-to-be-done process and identifying where friction is introduced during execution. Even if the solution delivers long-term value, a poor experience for the executor can block adoption.
For example:
A physician (executor) may find an EHR system too cumbersome, even if it helps the hospital improve reporting (beneficiary: administrator).
A salesperson (executor) might avoid using a CRM that benefits the VP of Sales—if it adds hours to their workflow.
A warehouse worker may resist inventory software if it slows them down, even though the operations director values the data it provides.
In each case, the user experience directly affects whether the product delivers on its promise.
With thrv's AI-driven analytics, we translate executor needs into actionable product roadmaps at unprecedented speed. Rather than relying solely on interviews or surveys, our platform processes usage data, support conversations, and feedback to create a comprehensive view of executor pain points. This allows portfolio companies to prioritize the features that will drive adoption and reduce friction - all while cutting research time by up to 70%.
OurJTBD software helps teams collect and organize this data in a structured way, identifying pain points that traditional user research often overlooks. This turns user experience from a soft metric into a strategic growth lever.
When Roles Aren't Defined: What Goes Wrong
One of the most common reasons companies struggle to scale is because they don't clearly define the differences between the customer roles involved in the job to be done. When teams don't separate the job beneficiary, executor, and decision maker, they end up building for everyone—and satisfying no one.
Atthrv, we see this pattern regularly across product, marketing, and sales.
Consequences of Role Blindness
Misaligned messaging: Marketing targets decision makers with ROI claims, but sales teams pitch to executors who care about usability.
Product bloat: Engineering builds features to please every stakeholder request, creating complexity instead of clarity.
Poor adoption: The tool looks great to the C-suite, but execution friction drives low usage and high churn.
Internal confusion: Teams debate who the "real customer" is instead of aligning around a shared framework of roles.
Our AI technology eliminates this role blindness by continuously analyzing customer interactions across touchpoints. The system automatically flags when messaging, product development, or sales approaches are misaligned with specific customer roles, allowing teams to course-correct before these misalignments impact growth. This proactive approach transforms how portfolio companies align their operations with customer needs.
By separating these roles using ourJTBD process, portfolio companies can focus their teams and eliminate the noise that slows down growth. portfolio companies can focus their teams and eliminate the noise that slows down growth.
This doesn't just create a better product—it improves internal efficiency, increases close rates, and builds more compelling exit stories. When leadership can point to clear customer roles and show how they've addressed each one, it signals operational maturity to future investors or buyers.
The Purchase Decision Maker: The One Who Controls the Budget
The purchase decision maker isn't always the one using the product or directly benefiting from it. But they control access. They sign the contract, approve the pilot, or allocate the budget. That makes them one of the most influential customer roles in any buying cycle—especially in B2B markets.
This role is often tied to hierarchy—VPs, directors, procurement teams—but that doesn't mean their needs are only financial. In fact, decision makers are often motivated by a combination of strategic goals (growth, cost control, competitive differentiation) and political considerations (cross-team buy-in, career impact, board optics).
At thrv, we help teams avoid generic value propositions by connecting messaging and metrics directly to the job the decision maker is trying to get done. Just like the executor and the beneficiary, decision makers have specific goals, and our JTBD process helps clarify what those goals are and how best to support them.
For example:
A CIO might approve new data tools not because of their features, but because they help them ensure scalable infrastructure.
A CMO may greenlight a campaign platform because it helps them show marketing ROI to stakeholders.
A founder might invest in customer success software because it increases retention ahead of fundraising.
Rather than targeting a generic persona, our approach maps each stakeholder's job to actionable needs—allowing marketing, product, and sales to speak the right language at the right time.
When teams use thrv's JTBD platform, they can develop distinct, role-specific messaging and track which jobs are being served—and which still represent untapped opportunity.
How These Roles Work Together to Influence Growth
Understanding the individual roles of job beneficiaries, executors, and purchase decision makers is only half the equation. The real opportunity lies in seeing how these roles interact to influence product adoption, retention, and expansion.
At thrv, we help teams operationalize this framework by identifying role-based needs through our JTBD process and aligning every department around those needs. When each customer role is mapped clearly to the job they're trying to accomplish, companies can deliver a consistent experience that drives measurable growth across the full customer lifecycle.
AI: The Force Multiplier for Customer Role Understanding
The complexity of managing these three customer roles traditionally required extensive research, cross-functional alignment, and ongoing maintenance. With thrv's AI capabilities, portfolio companies can now scale this understanding without scaling their teams.
Our platform enables:
Automated analysis of customer conversations to identify role-specific pain points
Predictive modeling that shows which features will improve adoption for each role
Real-time dashboards that track role satisfaction across the customer lifecycle
Automated alerts when messaging or product roadmaps drift from role-specific needs
This AI-driven approach eliminates guesswork and aligns every initiative with measurable growth objectives. More importantly, it creates a continuous feedback loop that helps portfolio companies stay ahead of changing customer needs while operating more efficiently than competitors relying on traditional research methods.
The integration of AI into our JTBD framework transforms how portfolio companies can map and respond to customer needs. Traditional methods often involve lengthy interview cycles, manual synthesis of data, and subjective interpretations that can introduce bias. With at, we've created a system that:
Processes natural language at scale - Analyzing thousands of customer conversations, support tickets, and feedback points to extract meaningful patterns
Identifies needs across roles with statistical confidence - Quantifying the importance of specific needs to each customer role
Predicts which product investments will create the most value - Using algorithmic analysis to prioritize roadmap items
Continuously validates assumptions - Creating a feedback loop that gets smarter with each customer interaction
For portfolio companies, this means moving from quarterly customer research cycles to real-time customer understanding. It means scaling customer insights without scaling headcount. And most importantly, it means creating equity value faster by reducing the time from insight to implementation.
A B2B Software Example: Orchestrating Stakeholder Wins
Let's say a portfolio company builds project management software for marketing teams:
The beneficiary is the VP of Marketing who wants more visibility into campaign delivery.
The executor is the project manager entering tasks, managing deadlines, and collaborating across teams.
The decision maker is the CTO who needs the platform to integrate securely with other systems.
If product teams focus only on the executor's workflow, they might improve usability but fail to capture the data the VP wants. If sales only sells to the CTO on compliance, the value to end users and leadership gets lost. True growth happens when the company builds for—and communicates to—all three roles based on their specific job steps and frustrations.
By using the JTBD software from thrv, teams can capture and rank unmet needs for each role, track satisfaction over time, and develop targeted messaging for each part of the buying committee. This role-based segmentation is a strategic advantage that improves onboarding, boosts NPS, and increases renewal likelihood.
With our AI capabilities, this B2B software company could analyze usage patterns to identify exactly which features create the most value for each role. The system might reveal that project managers value timeline flexibility above all else, while VPs of Marketing prioritize cross-project visibility, and CTOs focus on security attestations. These insights can be automatically translated into feature prioritization, creating a product that serves all three roles without manual analysis and debate.
A Second Example: Growth in EdTech
Now consider a portfolio company in education technology:
The beneficiary is the student, whose learning outcomes improve with personalized support.
The executor is the teacher, who uses the platform to assign lessons and monitor performance.
The decision maker is the school administrator or district purchasing team.
If the teacher finds the platform difficult to use or lacking flexibility, they may revert to old methods—even if the content is strong. If the decision maker doesn't see progress tracking that supports their funding metrics, they may not renew. And if the student experience isn't engaging, usage will fall off entirely.
With JTBD, these breakdowns are avoidable. By interviewing and surveying each role, and mapping their satisfaction and importance scores to specific steps in the learning process, product and marketing teams can design experiences that support all stakeholders. And leadership can tell a clear story to investors about which roles have been served and which still represent upside.
Our AI platform accelerates this process by automatically analyzing learning patterns, teacher adoption barriers, and administrator priorities across dozens of districts simultaneously. Rather than relying on small sample interviews that might miss critical needs, ai processes thousands of interactions to build a statistically significant model of what drives value for each role. This allows EdTech companies to prioritize features with confidence and create messaging that resonates with the specific concerns of each stakeholder.
To Sum Up: Targeting the Right Role at the Right Time
Too many companies miss the mark by treating "the customer" as a single entity. But growth happens when we speak to the right role at the right time—the person doing the job, the one benefiting from the outcome, and the one controlling the budget.
By understanding the distinct motivations of each role and mapping them to a shared job framework, portfolio companies can align product development, go-to-market strategy, and messaging around what truly matters. This creates tighter alignment across teams and stronger relationships across the customer lifecycle.
At thrv, we work with private equity and growth-stage companies to make these roles visible, measurable, and actionable using our JTBD software. Whether you're building your first product roadmap or planning for exit, we can help you align your team around the roles that drive adoption, retention, and long-term value.
Let's Talk About How We Can Help You Unlock Customer-Centric Growth
If your portfolio companies are struggling with messaging that doesn't convert, roadmaps that don't align, or buyers who don't stick, it might be time to revisit how they define "the customer." Understanding the job beneficiary, executor, and decision maker is foundational to winning in competitive markets.
Our AI-powered platform helps portfolio companies identify and serve these critical customer roles in hours—not weeks—giving them a decisive advantage in competitive markets. Let us show you how we're using ai to translate customer needs into actionable growth strategies that create measurable equity value.
Learn more about how we support growth strategy atthrv.comorcontact our teamto start a conversation.
Posted by thrv
