Transform Customer Success with Jobs-to-be-Done

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is often seen as an innovation and product design framework. But its true potential extends beyond just feature development. JTBD represents a fundamental shift in how entire businesses understand customers and market needs. The framework moves from inside-out thinking, focused on what companies want to sell, to outside-in thinking, centered on what customers are actually trying to accomplish.

Customer Success (CS) is one field that can directly benefit from applying this framework.

Customer Success emerged from the SaaS revolution as companies realized that with subscription-based models, customers can leave at any time. Unlike traditional support, which is reactive and problem-focused, CS is proactive and outcome-focused. 

CS Managers work to understand customer goals, identify roadblocks, and guide customers toward value realization. This typically includes things like onboarding, training, and enablement, as well as business reporting and contract renewals. But with JTBD, we can imagine a fundamental shift—away from the solution towards real customer outcomes. Having previously worked in CS for over five years, I’ve seen firsthand how conversations shift and goal-setting changes when applying the JTBD lens. And customers really value the attention it gives to them rather than to your solution, increasing trust and a sense of partnership.  

To learn more, get our Guide: "JTBD for CS"

Whose Success Are We Talking About?

The word "Success" in Customer Success raises a critical question: whose success are we prioritizing, ours or theirs? Traditional CS approaches often optimize for internal metrics like product adoption and feature usage. While these metrics matter, they can create dangerous misalignment where teams celebrate internal activity while customers struggle to achieve their actual goals.

When Customer Success teams adopt a JTBD lens, they fundamentally redefine how they support customers. Instead of asking "How can we get customers to use our product more?" they begin asking "How can we help them succeed at the job they hired us for?" This shift moves CS away from being product evangelists toward becoming progress facilitators.

JTBD and CS in Action

The practical application of JTBD transforms every customer interaction. Rather than leading discovery calls with product features, CS teams start with job-focused questions like "Tell me about your key priorities right now" and "What's the hardest part about achieving this today?" This reveals the customer's real context and constraints, enabling segmentation by actual jobs rather than company size or industry.

While skilled CS managers may already do some of this, JTBD adds systematic structure that everyone can follow consistently across customers and across teams. Instead of teaching features in isolation, teams position tools within the customer's workflow, asking "What part of this process is most painful?" Success milestones shift from feature adoption checklists to meaningful progress indicators like "reduced manual reporting hours by 40%." The trick is to focus on outcomes that reflect real advancement toward customer goals.

Job mapping exemplifies this approach by breaking down what customers are trying to accomplish step by step:

1. Choose the Right Job Performer - Focus on end users doing the job, not just buyers
2. Define the Focus Job - Identify what the job performer is trying to accomplish. Narrow in on the high-impact outcomes they seek. 
3. Draft a Hypothesis Job Map - Map the natural workflow (Plan → Prepare → Execute → Monitor → Modify → Conclude)
4. Validate with Real Users - Test and refine with actual job performers
5. Spot Opportunities - Connect your solution to friction points and unmet needs.

The job map, then, depicts how to understand “success” from a truly customer-centric point of view. Nurturing campaigns and enablement sessions, for instance, can all be defined around gaps identified from the job map. 

Job mapping is just one example of how JTBD can transform CS operations. Jobs stories, four forces analysis, and pain matching are other techniques where JTBD and CS can overlap. 

Or take "Switch" interviews, a JTBD-specific way of interviewing customers. These can be used to find out the root causes of cancellations. CS managers want to prevent churn.

Switch interviews can be inverted to understand why customers leave rather than why they chose your solution. By conducting cancellation interviews using a timeline approach, CS teams can trace back to the "first thought" when customers initially considered leaving—often weeks or months before actual cancellation. 

This technique reveals that the decision to cancel rarely happens overnight but follows a series of events and unmet needs. By identifying patterns in these interviews and addressing root causes upstream during onboarding or purchasing, companies can proactively prevent churn rather than reactively trying to win back individual customers.

A Common Language for Cross-Team Alignment

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of applying JTBD to Customer Success is how it creates a shared language across the entire organization. When Sales, Product, Marketing, and other groups focus on the job to be done, the entire organization operates with alignment. And that alignment begins with customer needs. 

The common language of the JTBD framework breaks down silos and creates coherent customer experiences. Engineering prioritizes features that address job-related friction. Sales conversations focus on progress rather than capabilities. Marketing content speaks to customer challenges rather than company achievements. Customer Success becomes the bridge connecting internal capabilities to external progress.

In a world where competitive differentiation increasingly depends on outcomes rather than features, this outside-in perspective is essential for sustainable growth.

Download our guide: "JTBD for CS" created together with Ellie Wu from CSuiteCX