KPIs play a big role in helping businesses evaluate performance and set targets. But many traditional KPIs are rooted in operational metrics that overlook the bigger picture – the customer's experience and outcomes.

Common business KPIs like retention rates, click-throughs, or revenue growth offer a surface-level view of performance. They tell us what's happening but not always why it's happening. For example, a marketing team might celebrate an increase in app downloads, while users silently delete the app days later because it didn’t actually solve their problem. The numbers may look good, but customer value hasn’t truly been delivered.

The Gap Between Business Metrics and Customer Value

Traditional KPIs often focus on business goals – efficiency, productivity, and output. But customers don’t think in those terms. They’re trying to complete jobs in their lives, whether that’s planning a trip, staying organized, or managing their finances.

Without a way to measure how well you're helping customers accomplish those goals, performance metrics risk becoming disconnected from genuine success.

Signs Your KPIs Might Be Misaligned:

• You’re meeting KPI targets, but customer satisfaction is slipping.
• Teams are optimizing for activity (like more emails or faster service) without clear insight into customer impact.
• High churn or low engagement despite strong internal performance numbers.

In these cases, the data may not be wrong – but it might be measuring the wrong things. That’s where a shift toward customer-centered KPIs becomes essential. By redefining success based on your customers’ definitions of progress, you begin tracking true outcomes rather than just internal outputs.

To make that shift successfully, you need a framework that connects business activity to customer value in a structured, actionable way. That’s what makes Jobs To Be Done so useful in today’s customer-centric market landscape.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is more than just a theory – it’s a practical framework that helps businesses understand what customers are trying to accomplish in their lives, and why they “hire” products or services to fulfill those needs.

In simple terms, JTBD asks: What job is your customer trying to get done, and how does your product or service help them do it? This shift in thinking reframes the customer relationship. Instead of viewing your offering as a collection of features, you begin to see it as a tool customers use to make progress.

How JTBD Translates Customer Progress Into Measurable Outcomes

At the heart of JTBD is the idea of customer progress. By zeroing in on what people are trying to achieve – not just what they’re buying – businesses can identify the true outcomes that matter to their audience. These outcomes then become a guide for developing more meaningful, customer-centered KPIs.

For example:

• A meal delivery app isn’t just delivering food – it’s helping users save time and reduce stress on busy weeknights.
• A budgeting software isn’t just tracking spending – it’s helping customers feel in control and confident about their financial future.

Once you know what “success” looks like from the customer’s point of view, you can design KPIs that track whether they’re getting there. This is where JTBD shines in aligning business KPIs with customer outcomes.

Using the JTBD Framework to Improve KPIs

Here’s how the JTBD framework helps businesses build more relevant performance metrics:

• Identifies the customer’s core goal: What outcome are they seeking?
• Defines progress milestones: What indicates that they are getting closer to solving their problem?
• Connects product features to value: How do these features help the customer complete their job?
• Measures impact, not just activity: Is the customer accomplishing what they set out to do?

By grounding performance metrics in these JTBD insights, you create KPIs that reflect how well your organization is supporting real user needs. These are not just abstract ideas – they drive product decisions, marketing strategies, and customer success initiatives that are meaningfully aligned.

Whether you’re looking to improve customer outcomes with JTBD or reimagine how you measure product performance, the key is using the framework to bridge internal success with external value. When done right, JTBD doesn’t just improve your metrics; it improves how your business thinks about the people it serves.

How to Define KPIs That Reflect Customer 'Job' Success

Once you understand the core Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) that your customers are hiring your product or service to complete, the next step is translating those jobs into actionable business KPIs. Instead of measuring internal processes or generic activity metrics, these KPIs should directly reflect the customer’s success in achieving their desired outcome.

To do this effectively, teams need to shift their perspective: from asking “How efficiently are we operating?” to “How effectively are we helping customers make progress?” That means redefining what success looks like—not just for your business, but through the lens of the customer.

Start With the Job, Not the Feature

Begin by clearly defining the customer job in behavioral terms. A good JTBD statement describes what customers are trying to accomplish, independent of your offering. For example, rather than “use budgeting software,” the job might be “effectively manage monthly spending without stress.”

With that job in mind, ask: what would success look like from the customer’s point of view? From there, you can design performance metrics that track how well your product or service supports that outcome.

What Makes a KPI JTBD-Aligned?

KPIs linked to JTBD are:

• Outcome-driven – They measure whether the customer achieved their goal or solved their problem.
• Customer-facing – Understandable from the customer’s perspective, not just the company’s operations.
• Progress-focused – Capture movement toward solving the job over time, not merely usage metrics.

Questions to Guide KPI Creation

To define better customer-centered KPIs using JTBD, ask questions like:

• What specific outcome is the customer trying to achieve?
• What does success look like in their world, not ours?
• What signals or behaviors indicate they are closer to progress?
• What would prevent them from making progress – and can those risks be measured?

By integrating these perspectives, your performance metrics become more aligned with real customer value rather than internal goals alone.

Especially in product development or marketing, defining business KPIs with customer jobs in mind leads to insights that are both actionable and empathetic. It's a strategy that not only tells you what's working, but why it matters to your audience.

Examples of JTBD-Aligned KPIs in Action

Translating Jobs To Be Done into meaningful KPIs becomes clearer with real-world examples. Below are concrete scenarios showing how product teams, marketers, and service leaders are using JTBD to create key performance metrics that reflect true customer outcomes – not just internal activity.

Financial Services: Helping Customers Build Savings

Customer Job: "Build an emergency savings fund that I can rely on when unplanned expenses happen."

Traditional KPI: Number of users who opened savings accounts.

JTBD-Aligned KPI: Percentage of users who keep a positive savings balance for 3+ months or hit a savings milestone (e.g., $500 emergency fund).

This shift in KPI connects product performance to the real progress a customer is trying to make, not just account openings.

SaaS Productivity Tool: Reducing Project Bottlenecks

Customer Job: "Monitor and remove blockers so projects get done on time without team burnout."

Traditional KPI: Daily active users or frequency of logins.

JTBD-Aligned KPI: Time-to-resolution for flagged task blockers and weekly completion rate of prioritized projects.

Here, success isn’t just engagement – it’s delivering smoother team workflows, which is the real outcome customers care about.

Retail Health Brand: Supporting Habit Change

Customer Job: "Stay consistent with my supplement routine so I feel better long-term."

Traditional KPI: Subscription retention rate.

JTBD-Aligned KPI: User adherence rate to recommended dosage plan and average time to report a health improvement milestone (e.g., better sleep).

This reflects whether the product is helping people meet their wellness goals, not just if they’re still subscribed.

The Big Picture

In all these cases, JTBD-aligned KPIs help teams track how well their solutions advance customer goals – not just how often they’re used or sold. It’s about replacing superficial metrics with outcome-based ones that reveal actual value delivered. As these insights accumulate, they become powerful tools for iterative product design, targeted marketing, and customer success strategies.

Ultimately, this approach supports better business performance by making metrics meaningful – tying internal success directly to improved customer outcomes.

Best Practices for Tracking Job Progress Over Time

Once you’ve defined KPIs that reflect job success, the next challenge is measuring how customer progress evolves over time. Without long-term tracking, even the best JTBD-inspired metrics risk becoming snapshots rather than trendlines. By committing to ongoing measurement, your team can see not only whether customers are making progress – but how consistently, and under what conditions.

1. Build Metrics Into the Customer Journey

Think about where in your product or service lifecycle you can capture signals of job progress. Are there natural checkpoints, milestones, or actions that indicate customers are advancing toward their desired outcome?

For instance, if your JTBD metric is “ability to complete projects faster,” you might embed timeline tracking tools throughout the customer journey and benchmark progress at regular intervals.

2. Use Mixed Methods for Measurement

Relying on either qualitative or quantitative research alone can leave blind spots. Instead, pair hard performance metrics (time saved, frequency of feature use, success rate) with contextual qualitative inputs (customer interviews, in-app surveys, or open feedback).

At SIVO Insights, we often combine qualitative interviews with follow-up surveys to evaluate changes in customer perception, behavior, and satisfaction – giving our clients both the 'what' and the 'why' behind job progress.

3. Track Across Segments for Deeper Insight

Jobs To Be Done can vary in urgency, complexity, or frequency across customer types. Tracking KPIs across different audience segments – by need state, usage pattern, or stage – helps uncover which groups are seeing meaningful progress and which need additional support.

4. Iterate Based on Results

JTBD-aligned metrics aren’t static. Use early results as a springboard for learning. If customers aren’t progressing as expected, it may signal the need to refine the product, simplify touchpoints, or reframe communications around what's truly helping them.

This process turns your KPIs into more than just data points. They become a live feedback loop guiding innovation and customer success.

5. Revisit Jobs Periodically

Markets shift, needs evolve, and even core customer jobs can change. Re-validating user goals and updating KPIs accordingly ensures your performance metrics continue to align with what customers genuinely want – not outdated assumptions.

By reliably tracking how well you help customers make progress over time, you make the JTBD framework a living part of your measurement culture – propelling innovation, retention, and long-term growth.