Slow growth can be one of the clearest indicators that something isn’t clicking with your target audience. Maybe conversions are flat, new features are landing with a shrug, or once-loyal customers seem indifferent. When traditional metrics plateau, many businesses begin to look inward – but the clearest answers often come from looking outward, at the people using (or not using) your product.

The Jobs to Be Done framework is especially valuable for businesses navigating these moments of stagnation. Unlike standard demographic profiling or surface-level feedback, JTBD focuses on the unmet needs and motivations that lead people to "hire" your product or service to solve a problem in their life or work.

How JTBD provides clarity during slow growth periods

In periods of slow or inconsistent growth, many teams struggle to pinpoint the root cause. JTBD helps by uncovering the underlying progress your customers are trying to make, illuminating:

• What jobs your product is currently (and unintentionally) solving
• Gaps where customers are making do with poor or partial solutions
• Emerging behaviors or needs that are going unaddressed

This insight translates directly into smarter product strategy, marketing messaging, and investment focus. Instead of building features or campaign ideas in a vacuum, you align efforts with real-world moments of need.

Realignment that moves the needle

Slow growth can often be traced back to misalignment: between the product and the market, the company and the user, or even between different internal teams. JTBD helps recreate that alignment by giving everyone a shared language around customer needs and expectations.

For example, a SaaS tool that markets itself as a “collaboration platform” might discover that customers are really hiring it to "quickly gather team input before client meetings." That deeper understanding not only informs better marketing copy, but also product enhancements that directly support that job.

Industries especially primed for JTBD in slow-growth scenarios

While JTBD can support any sector, certain industries stand out:

• Consumer tech and apps: Where competition is fierce and user loyalty is fragile
• CPG & retail: Especially when innovation pipelines stall or shelf-space is crowded
• Financial services: Where products often sound the same, but customer anxieties differ

When you're asking, "Why aren’t we growing the way we used to?" – JTBD offers both the mirror and the map.

Churn is one of the most painful challenges for any business. Whether it's subscribers canceling, customers switching to a competitor, or users simply going inactive, the underlying message is this: something didn’t deliver.

While many customer success strategies focus on improving touchpoints or speeding up support, the root cause of churn often comes down to an unmet or misunderstood need. This is where Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) becomes a powerful tool for driving deeper customer retention.

Understanding churn through the JTBD lens

Instead of categorizing churn as a metric, JTBD encourages teams to dig into the trigger moments that cause a user to disengage or cancel. What job were they hiring your product to do? Did it fulfill that job? Or did an alternative option solve it better?

By mapping out these "push and pull" forces – what draws a customer toward or away from your solution – brands gain powerful insight into customer decision-making behavior.

Examples of churn triggers that JTBD can uncover:

• “I signed up to streamline X, but it actually made my workflow more complicated.”
• “I needed help with Y, and your competitor made it easier to get started.”
• “Your product solved the initial challenge, but not the next one I encountered.”

These insights go beyond NPS scores or surface-level feedback. They unlock why people disengage and how you can meaningfully re-engage them – or prevent churn in the first place.

JTBD for customer success and retention teams

For retention-focused roles, JTBD is an invaluable tool to:

• Develop more relevant onboarding experiences tailored to customer goals
• Design proactive milestone tracking based on what success looks like for each job
• Spot drop-off points and identify which customer needs aren’t being met

It shifts the focus from "How do we keep customers from leaving?" to "How do we help them succeed in the way they define success?"

Industries that benefit most from churn-reduction strategies using JTBD

JTBD’s focus on user behavior and context makes it especially powerful in high-churn sectors like:

• Subscription services: Media, entertainment, education, and SaaS
• E-commerce and retail: Where competition and price sensitivity are high
• Healthcare and wellness: Where trust, outcomes, and consistency matter most

When retention matters, understanding the real job your product is hired to do – and doing it well – becomes the key to sustainable business growth.

The Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework is not just a theory for innovation teams or product managers – it’s a versatile approach that helps multiple business functions align their goals to actual customer needs and behaviors. As companies navigate 2025 with tighter markets, higher customer expectations, and industry disruptions, JTBD offers a much-needed lens to reframe how teams think about growth, customer retention, and product-market fit.

Product Strategy and Innovation Teams

For product managers and innovation strategists, JTBD is foundational. It shifts thinking from what the product does to why customers use it – the job they’re trying to get done. This mindset is especially powerful when launching new products or evolving existing ones in crowded or commoditized markets.

Instead of guessing at features, JTBD helps prioritize what delivers real value, based on insights rooted in user behavior and daily challenges.

Marketing and Brand Teams

Marketing professionals gain immense clarity from JTBD by understanding how to connect messaging with the outcomes customers care about most – not just features or demographics. JTBD for marketing creates alignment between campaign strategies and the emotional drivers of decision-making.

When marketing knows the true “job” a product is hired to do, messaging becomes more relevant and resonant, increasing conversion and engagement rates.

Customer Experience and Success Teams

JTBD is equally valuable for customer service and success teams aiming to boost customer retention. When you understand the job the customer originally hired the product for, you can better support them in consistently achieving that result. This insight leads directly to better onboarding, improved support touchpoints, and proactive churn reduction strategies.

JTBD helps answer: What would make this customer quit? And how can we prevent that by continuously delivering on their core goal?

Strategy, Insights, and Executive Leadership

Strategic leaders use JTBD to align departments around a shared understanding of what drives customers. It creates a north star for decision-making across business units, especially in times of slow growth or shifting market dynamics.

• Insights teams use JTBD to uncover unmet needs and add depth to traditional market research.
• Executives use it to frame investment decisions or realign teams around what matters most – the customer.

Understanding who should use the Jobs to Be Done framework is about more than titles – it’s about which teams need clear direction from the voice of the customer. When customer needs are mapped to actionable insights, better decisions follow.

Timing is everything when it comes to applying Jobs to Be Done. While it's an incredibly effective tool, it produces the highest impact when used at specific decision points or inflection moments in a company’s journey. From new product development to diagnosing growth slowdowns, there are clear signs that JTBD is the right next step.

You’re Experiencing Slow or Stalled Growth

If your current product has plateaued, or if customer acquisition has flatlined, JTBD offers new lenses on growth. Rather than guessing what to optimize next, it allows you to uncover the underlying struggles customers face in their lives and how your offering can be reimagined to better meet those needs.

Slow growth industries – like insurance, utilities, or mature CPG categories – especially benefit from this shift in thinking. JTBD in slow growth industries helps reframe the opportunity from features to deeper outcomes that re-energize growth pathways.

Your Product Doesn’t Match Customer Behavior

Are customers using your product in ways you didn’t expect – or not using it at all? This misalignment between product intent and user behavior is exactly where the JTBD framework shines. By pinpointing what job customers are hiring your product to do, you can adapt both the product and messaging to how people actually behave.

This is also where JTBD for product teams becomes critical. It prevents wasted development cycles and minimizes feature bloat by focusing only on what matters.

Churn Rates Are Higher Than Expected

High churn is often a sign that the initial promise made to the customer wasn’t delivered – or wasn’t the right job in the first place. So how does JTBD help reduce churn? It uncovers the real reasons customers walk away. Sometimes expectations are mismatched. Sometimes a competitor solves the job better.

Either way, the framework helps guide improvements in retention strategy, support experience, and onboarding flow.

You’re Planning a Major Strategic Move

Whether it's entering a new market, repositioning a brand, or developing a next-gen product, large bets deserve deep insight. JTBD for strategy and innovation teams helps reduce risk by showing what truly drives buyer choices – and how your solution fits into the context of their lives.

If you’re wondering about the best time to use Jobs to Be Done, it’s when you're asking questions like:

• Why aren’t our customers sticking around?
• What should we build next?
• How can we grow when the market seems saturated?
• How do we align our product and marketing vision?

These questions don’t just need data – they need human-centered, action-ready insight. And that’s what JTBD delivers.

Bringing the Jobs to Be Done framework to life means translating it from theory into usable, practical insights. At SIVO Insights, that's exactly what we help organizations do by grounding JTBD in real human stories, behavioral observations, and actionable market research.

With our full-service Consumer Insights capabilities, we partner with brands to design custom research that reveals the underlying motivations behind customer decisions. We don’t just ask what people do – we uncover why they do it, and what they're really trying to achieve.

An End-to-End JTBD Approach

We apply a full toolkit of methodologies – from in-depth interviews to behavioral surveys and journey mapping – to identify and synthesize clear Jobs to Be Done for your business context. Our approach helps teams across your organization connect to the human need behind the market data.

Whether it’s JTBD for customer success, product design, or executive planning, we reveal:

• The main ‘jobs’ customers hire your product or service to do
• Emotional and functional drivers of choice
• Barriers and frustrations that lead to churn or switching
• Opportunities to differentiate by solving unmet needs

Flexible Solutions That Fit Your Team

JTBD isn’t one-size-fits-all. That’s why we tailor our process to fit your industry, your audience, and your team’s current goals. Need to move fast? We can match you with On Demand Talent – fractional research experts who extend your internal capacity without slowing you down.

Need a more foundational strategy or growth framework? Our custom research design is built to deliver clarity across functions without overwhelming your team.

Balancing AI with Human Insight

While AI can help identify signals in large datasets, identifying the right job to focus on requires empathy, interpretation, and human nuance. That’s where our moderators and researchers excel – consciously translating people’s lives into strategy-ready insights that organizations can action with confidence.

Above all, SIVO Insights helps you make Jobs to Be Done truly usable – not just a siloed research report, but a shared compass for product, marketing, and strategy teams who want to build more relevant, resilient brands.