Table of Contents

• Why Defining Customer Roles Drives Better Growth Strategy
• The Job Beneficiary: Who Gains from the Job Being Done Well
• The Job Executor: The Person Doing the Work
• When Roles Aren't Defined: What Goes Wrong
• The Purchase Decision Maker: The One Who Controls the Budget
• How These Roles Work Together to Influence Growth
• AI: The Force Multiplier for Customer Role Understanding
• A B2B Software Example: Orchestrating Stakeholder Wins
• A Second Example: Growth in EdTech
• To Sum Up: Targeting the Right Role at the Right Time

Why Defining Customer Roles Drives Better Growth Strategy

At thrv, we've transformed how our portfolio companies accelerate value creation by using our proprietary method to understand their customers. 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—leading to wasted resources, misaligned messaging, and features no one uses.

We've developed a proprietary approach that we implement with all our portfolio companies. We break down customers into three distinct roles, 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 a cornerstone of our method for reducing risk, improving go-to-market fit, and unlocking scalable growth for our portfolio companies.

Our AI-powered platform significantly accelerates this customer role identification process. While traditional methods might take weeks of interviews and manual analysis, our platform processes customer data and identifies these three critical roles in hours - giving our portfolio companies a decisive speed advantage in fast-moving markets.

In this blog, we'll explain how we use each role with our portfolio companies to improve alignment and accelerate value creation.

The Job Beneficiary: Who Gains from the Job Being Done Well

We focus first on the job beneficiary—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 getting the job done, even if they aren't the ones buying the product or using it day to day.

Why We Prioritize Beneficiaries

When our portfolio companies fail to understand who truly benefits from the job, they create messaging that misses the mark and solutions that don't solve the real problem. When they assume that the user and the beneficiary are always the same, they often over-invest in usability and under-invest in solving the core job.

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.
  
  

How We Use Beneficiary Insights

By identifying the job beneficiary, we enable our portfolio companies to:

• Position their value proposition around speed and accuracy of getting the job done
• Align roadmap decisions with what reduces customer effort scores
• Understand what "success" looks like in the customer's world—not just in the product
  
  

When our 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, lower customer effort scores, and ultimately, more predictable growth.

Our AI capabilities have transformed how we identify job beneficiaries. Our platform analyzes customer data to reveal patterns that might otherwise be missed, 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 requires high effort, even the best product concept can fail.

Understanding the executor's needs is critical for reducing customer effort, which is why we measure customer effort scores for every portfolio company. But many products are designed 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.

At thrv, we map out the full job-to-be-done process for our portfolio companies and identify where friction is introduced during execution. Even if the solution delivers long-term value, high customer effort for the executor can block adoption.

For example:

• A physician (executor) may find an EHR system requires too much effort, 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 customer effort directly affects whether the product delivers on its promise.

With our 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 effort points. This allows our portfolio companies to prioritize the features that will reduce customer effort and increase adoption - all while cutting research time by up to 70%.

Our proprietary JTBD software helps teams collect and organize this data in a structured way, identifying customer effort 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 our portfolio companies struggled before working with us was because they didn'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.

Consequences of Role Blindness We've Observed

• Misaligned messaging: Marketing targets decision makers with ROI claims, but sales teams pitch to executors who care about getting the job done with less effort.
• 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 high customer effort scores 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.

By separating these roles using our JTBD process, we focus our portfolio companies 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 we can point to clear customer roles and show how we've addressed each one, it signals operational maturity to future investors.

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).

We help our portfolio companies 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 with lower effort.
• A CMO may greenlight a campaign platform because it helps them show marketing ROI to stakeholders faster and more accurately.
• 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 we use our JTBD platform with portfolio companies, we develop distinct, role-specific messaging and track which jobs are being done faster and more accurately—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.

We 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, our portfolio companies 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 our AI capabilities, we can now scale this understanding across our portfolio companies without scaling our teams.

Our platform enables:

• Automated analysis of customer conversations to identify role-specific effort points
• Predictive modeling that shows which features will improve customer effort scores for each role
• Real-time dashboards that track effort scores 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 our 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 we map and respond to customer needs. Traditional methods often involve lengthy interview cycles, manual synthesis of data, and subjective interpretations that can introduce bias. 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 customer effort for 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 our 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 look at how we've applied this with one of our portfolio companies that builds project management software for marketing teams:

• The beneficiary is the VP of Marketing who wants to get visibility into campaign delivery faster and more accurately.
• 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 with minimal effort.
  
  

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 we build for—and communicate to—all three roles based on their specific job steps and customer effort scores.

By using our proprietary JTBD software, we capture and rank unmet needs for each role, track customer effort over time, and develop targeted messaging for each part of the buying committee. This role-based segmentation is a strategic advantage that improves onboarding, reduces customer effort, and increases renewal likelihood.

With our AI capabilities, we analyze usage patterns to identify exactly which features create the most value for each role. The system reveals 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 translate into feature prioritization, creating a product that serves all three roles without endless debate.

A Second Example: Growth in EdTech

We're also using this approach with our EdTech portfolio company:

• 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 experiences high effort using the platform or feels it lacks 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 requires too much effort, usage will fall off entirely.

With our JTBD method, these breakdowns are avoidable. By interviewing and surveying each role, and mapping their customer effort scores to specific steps in the learning process, we design experiences that support all stakeholders. And our 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, we process thousands of interactions to build a statistically significant model of what drives value for each role. This allows our EdTech portfolio company 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, we align our portfolio companies' 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 use our proprietary JTBD software to make these roles visible, measurable, and actionable for our portfolio companies. Whether we're building the first product roadmap or planning for exit, we align our teams around the roles that drive adoption, lower customer effort, and create long-term equity value.

Learn more about how we accelerate growth at thrv.com.