Jobs-to-be-Done in the Age of AI

When technology, competitors, and customer expectations change every quarter, your customer's job is the one target that holds still.

Technology, your competitive landscape, and your customers' expectations are changing faster than they ever have. If a customer doesn't see you as an AI-partner, forging the future, they will take their business elsewhere. A competitor that did not exist last year can ship an agent that does the work your software only organizes.

Every executive feels the urgency to change. Fewer are clear on what to change toward.

You are a venture investor now

With change comes risk. When a market moves this fast, no single product bet is safe, and standing still carries more risk than a failed experiment.

Whether you are a PE sponsor or a company leader, you are now in the position of a venture investor. A venture investor does not put the whole fund into one company. They spread capital across multiple shots on goal, expect some to miss, and size the portfolio so the winners more than cover the losses.

Operating companies now need the same discipline. That means funding more than one initiative at once: keeping the core product ahead, launching a new agentic product, testing a new pricing model. It also means deciding quickly which shots to back and which to stop.

A portfolio of bets only works if each bet has a clear target. Without one, you cannot tell an early result from noise, and every initiative drifts toward whatever the latest competitor announced.

The job is the stable target

This is why Jobs-to-be-Done matters more now than it did before AI.

Your customer's job-to-be-done is the goal they are trying to accomplish, independent of any product. Products change. Technology changes. The job does not. Kodak's film business ended, but people kept capturing memories, first with digital cameras and then with phones.

The needs within the job are just as stable. A customer need is an action and a variable within a step of the job. For a support leader whose job is to resolve customer issues, "determine the cause of the issue" and "confirm the fix worked" were needs ten years ago and will be needs ten years from now. What changes is how fast and how accurately a product helps the customer satisfy them.

That stability is what makes the job useful as a North Star. When you target the job:

• You measure progress in terms customers care about: how much faster and more accurately they get the job done.
• You see competitor weaknesses as specific needs they serve slowly or inaccurately, not as a feature list to match.
• You can leapfrog, because you are aiming at where customers struggle, not at where competitors are today.

Teams that chase competitor features stay behind.

In May 2023, Chegg's CEO told investors that since March, student interest in ChatGPT had been hurting new customer growth. Chegg's shares fell more than 40% that day (CNBC). The students' job had not changed. They still needed to understand course material and complete assignments correctly. A new product got that job done faster, and customers moved.

You no longer need a 3-6 month research project

The standard objection to Jobs-to-be-Done has been time. Mapping a job, interviewing customers, surveying for unmet needs, and analyzing competitors could take three to six months. In a market that shifts every quarter, that timeline is hard to justify.

That constraint no longer applies.

thrvAI: an agentic platform that does Jobs-to-be-Done for you

thrvAI is our new agentic platform that does Jobs-to-be-Done for you. It is the manifestation of the method we have been refining since 2013 with companies including Microsoft, Google, American Express, and Target.

thrvAI maps your customer's job: the job steps, customer needs, emotional needs, root causes, and job metrics. It identifies unmet needs, measures competitor speed and accuracy on each one, and proposes high-growth strategy hypotheses aimed at a segment that struggles with the job and is willing to pay for improvement. It keeps that analysis current by mapping customer interviews and sales calls back to the job.

Once thrvAI identifies the market opportunity, it builds the agentic platform to seize it. It builds an agent for each job step category (Plan, Execute, Assess, Revise, and Conclude), with a JTBD agent harness that holds the job state, runs the agents, and determines the next action. Then it iterates on the product itself. The same customer evidence that keeps the job map current (interviews, sales calls, customer feedback, and usage data) tells thrvAI which needs the agents still serve slowly or inaccurately, so it knows how to improve their intelligence and what new work they should take on. It runs your evals on every change and ships the improvements, reads the trace when a run fails to find where it went wrong, and trains open-weight models for each job step on your executions and your experts' preferences. Each cycle helps customers satisfy their needs faster and more accurately than competitors do. Because the agents are priced against the economic value of the job rather than the number of seats, thrvAI tracks the cost of each job execution so the product delivers economic value to customers at a healthy margin.

The result is lower investment risk. Each shot on goal starts with a defined target, a way to measure progress against it, and evidence that updates as you learn.

thrvAI is the foundation of two new lines of business: thrvMCP, which companies use to stay ahead of competitors, and thrv Portfolio, which we use to start and buy companies.

thrvMCP: your customer’s job, where you already work

thrvMCP gives Claude, ChatGPT, and other LLMs the context of your customer’s job-to-be-done. The job map is generated automatically in minutes, is available through MCP wherever your teams work, and is continuously updated by customer evidence.

Your teams can use it to improve your current product and to build the new products that will replace it. Legacy software organizes the inputs to a customer’s job and leaves the customer to do the work. An agentic product does the job. It is priced against the labor it replaces and the economic outcomes it improves, not per seat, and it improves daily against evals rather than quarterly against a roadmap. thrvMCP shows you which job steps and needs to target with each.

With thrvMCP and our JTBD skill files, your teams can:

• Prioritize improvements to your current product by the unmet needs they address
• Design new agentic products that do the job steps your customers struggle with most
• Evaluate each idea on whether it gets the job done faster and more accurately than competitors
• Write marketing messages grounded in the struggle customers describe
• Draft sales scripts around the needs a prospect’s current solution serves poorly
• Produce strategy and progress reports for stakeholders

Your current product and your new products are both aimed at the same job. thrvMCP keeps every release and every new launch pointed at unmet needs in that job, instead of at the last feature a competitor shipped.

thrvMCP+ adds thrv JTBD experts: up to 12 customer interviews a month, ongoing competitor validation, continuous skills refinement, and a monthly JTBD training session.

thrv Portfolio: we start and buy companies with thrvAI

thrv Portfolio is where we use thrvAI ourselves. We use it to analyze hundreds of business, consumer, and health markets for complex customer jobs where today’s products leave customers struggling. When a market meets our criteria, we build a new agentic product and take it to product-market fit. Then we go to market by starting a new company or by acquiring an existing company that already serves the target customers.

We evaluate each market against five criteria:

• Complex jobs: a large market where customers struggle to get the job done quickly and accurately with the products available today
• Difficult decisions: the important decisions that determine whether customers succeed are hard to make
• Intelligence and compute: AI can get the job done faster and more accurately
• Large markets: sized by the customer’s willingness to pay to get the job done, how often the job is executed, the number of customers, the economic value of the job, and the opportunity to disrupt incumbents
• Human impact: getting the job done better meaningfully improves people’s lives. We weigh this criterion most.

Each portfolio company follows the same four steps:

1. thrvAI maps the job, identifies the unmet needs and competitor weaknesses, and sizes the market by customers’ willingness to pay.
2. thrvAI builds v1 of the agentic product to validate customer value.
3. We put the product in customers’ hands and iterate with thrvAI until it reaches product-market fit.
4. We fund a new company with Series A capital or acquire an existing company with the target customers. In both cases, thrvAI continues to build the product and supports the go-to-market.

Most new ventures raise capital to find out whether a market exists and whether their product fits it. A thrv Portfolio company is started or acquired after both questions are answered. It begins with a mapped job, a market sized by willingness to pay, measured competitor weaknesses, and a product customers have already adopted. It is priced on the outcome of getting the job done, and the cost of each job execution is managed as a gross margin line.

We run thrv Portfolio as a venture investor would. We analyze many markets, pursue the few that meet our criteria, and take each product to product-market fit before we start or buy a company.

One method, one target

thrvMCP and thrv Portfolio apply the same method to the same target. Companies use thrvMCP to improve their products and launch new ones ahead of competitors. We use thrv Portfolio to start and buy companies around the opportunities thrvAI finds. Both measure progress the same way: how much faster and more accurately the customer gets the job done.

If you lead a software company or sponsor one, tell us your customer, and we will show you the agentic market opportunity: the unmet needs, your competitors’ weaknesses, and the segment to target first. Schedule a working session.

If you are a limited partner, VC investor, PE sponsor, or corporate venture investor, or an expert in a complex customer job, contact us to learn more about thrv Portfolio.