Skip to content
Blogs
    • Thought Industries: Align Your Product Team with Your Customers

      What blew me away was within 3 weeks we were thinking differently about how we were doing things at the company. To see immediate benefit just opened everyone’s mind.

      Thought Industries is a SaaS learning management platform that helps B2B companies educate their customers and generate revenue from training at scale. They work closely with their customers, which led to an enormous amount of feedback and feature requests. Prioritizing their product roadmap based on the squeakiest wheels in their customer base was no longer enough to achieve their goals. 

      As CEO Barry Kelly says, "We needed some research and science behind what we decided to build."

      In this interview, you'll hear how thrv introduced the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to Thought Industries and executed the research they needed to make better roadmap decisions. According to Barry, the result was not only insights from a project deliverable:

      It is not just a research project, it’s a process of change management.

      For those of you interested in introducing Jobs-to-be-Done change management to your company, Barry offers a couple pieces of advice:

      1. Get executive sponsorship because not only do you need your execs to buy in to this way of understanding customer value and presenting your roadmap, but also the positive effects of Jobs-to-be-Done reverberate beyond the product roadmap into how you understand your customers and their needs, which impacts product marketing and sales.

      2. In spite of the company-wide implications, start with a small team working on the same customer and the same job, so that you can get results quickly and show the impact of JTBD.

      If you're a PM, how do you get that executive sponsorship?

      Paraphrasing Barry:

      If a PM said to me, 'Instead of showing you a Gantt chart with release dates for the next roadmap review, I'm going to show you one slide on which we'll communicate why we’re developing what we’re developing and why we’re competitive based on the customer's job, the job steps, and the research data to back it up,' I'd take that to the bank and get on board right away. 

      What blew me away was within 3 weeks we were thinking differently about how we were doing things at the company. To see immediate benefit just opened everyone’s mind.

      Thought Industries is a SaaS learning management platform that helps B2B companies educate their customers and generate revenue from training at scale. They work closely with their customers, which led to an enormous amount of feedback and feature requests. Prioritizing their product roadmap based on the squeakiest wheels in their customer base was no longer enough to achieve their goals. 

      As CEO Barry Kelly says, "We needed some research and science behind what..

      View Detail
    • AutoQuotes: Accelerating Revenue Growth

      2020 was extremely challenging in our market and yet we were able to grow our business. New products contributed to 30% of our new bookings.

      Over the course of 2020, AutoQuotes implemented Jobs-to-be-Done with thrv. The training and research led to a new product roadmapping decision-making process that aligned the operating team, the board, and the employees with their customers' problems and generated revenue growth from new products.

      In this video, you'll hear:

      • Jim Contardi, CEO of AutoQuotes, explain how Jobs-to-be-Done helped them look at their market in a whole new way, identify opportunities they didn't see before, and make it clear where they should spend their product development budget.
      • Matt Kuo, AQ's Head of Product, talk about the benefits of having a common language for the customers' goals and problems. 
      • Mark Haidet, Chairman of the AQ Board (and Luminate Capital Operating Partner), describe Jobs-to-be-Done as a framework for making capital allocation decisions and mitigating investment risk.
      • Dave Ulrich, AQ Board Member (and Luminate Capital Partner), discuss how the Job Steps help those who don't talk to customers every day understand how the roadmap will drive customer value.

      AutoQuotes is an online foodservice equipment marketplace. It connects foodservice operators (restauranteurs, cafeteria managers, operations executives of chains) with dealers and manufacturers who sell the appliances, supplies, and equipment needed to serve food. 

      When AQ began its engagement with thrv, it had deep market penetration and needed to find new ways to provide customer value and grow revenue. It had an ambitious roadmap, and in the words of Jim Contardi, "It seemed good, but how did we know it was worth investing a half a million dollars?"

      thrv kicked off the engagement with a Product Strategy Workshop during which we identified the key customers in the market, distinguished between Job Beneficiaries and Job Executors, defined the customers' jobs-to-be-done, and assessed the competitor landscape across the job steps.

      The workshop led to qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey to validate the customer insights. Throughout the research, thrv and the AQ leadership team got buy-in on the insights from the Luminate Capital board. This led to the team and the board being fully aligned on the market opportunity we identified. 

      With the team focused on clearly articulated customers, jobs, and unmet needs supported by data, they were able to generate better product ideas, filter through the noise of off-strategy suggestions, and make faster and more accurate roadmap, M&A, and go-to-market decisions.

      And of course, Jim Contardi was able to answer his own question about how to invest a half million dollars in product development, "Once we did this work, it became obvious."

      2020 was extremely challenging in our market and yet we were able to grow our business. New products contributed to 30% of our new bookings.

      Over the course of 2020, AutoQuotes implemented Jobs-to-be-Done with thrv. The training and research led to a new product roadmapping decision-making process that aligned the operating team, the board, and the employees with their customers' problems and generated revenue growth from new products.

      In this video, you'll hear:

      • Jim Contardi, CEO of AutoQuotes, explain how Jobs-to-be-Done helped them look at their market in a whole new way, identify opportunities they didn't see before, and..
      View Detail

    Learn How to Grow Faster

    Learn how to use JTBD to accelerate your growth and create equity value faster.

    CONTACT US