Customer Job Prioritization Criteria
Five tests for choosing which customer job to lead with when research surfaces more than one.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 90%
Research typically surfaces two or three distinct jobs your product gets hired for. Trying to serve all of them makes your messaging and product experience mushy. Laudi uses five criteria to pick the single job to lead with — willingness to pay, problem urgency, retention/expansion potential, marketability, and unfair advantage — with a sixth practical filter: whether your go-to-market motion (product-led vs sales-led) matches the hand-holding that job requires.
Origin
Georgiana Laudi's prioritization step inside the Forget The Funnel process, sitting downstream of Jobs-to-be-Done research (Bob Moesta lineage).
Core principles
- 01Prioritizing one job is sequencing, not exclusion — the other jobs get served later.
- 02Sell a painkiller, not a vitamin: urgency may be the single most important criterion.
- 03Match the job to your current go-to-market capability, not the one you wish you had.
- 04An unfair advantage in reaching one segment can outweigh a slightly better fit in another.
How to run it
- 1
List the candidate jobs from research
From your best-customer survey patterns, articulate each distinct job as a separate statement. Usually two or three emerge.
Watch out These are jobs, not personas. Demographic segments are for ad targeting, not for this decision.
- 2
Score willingness to pay
For each job, ask whether there is any question that this customer would pay for a product like yours. Prefer jobs where paying is obvious.
- 3
Score problem urgency
Is this an urgent problem that needs solving now, or a problem they might have six months down the line? Prefer the painkiller.
Pro tip Urgency is Laudi's candidate for the most important of the five criteria.
- 4
Score retention and expansion potential
Does this customer have a long-term need, and could that need grow or evolve in a direction your product can follow? Prefer jobs with expansion headroom.
- 5
Score marketability and unfair advantage
Do these customers congregate somewhere that makes them easy to reach? Do you have an unfair advantage — audience, brand, distribution — with this market specifically?
- 6
Sanity-check against your go-to-market motion
Estimate the hand-holding each job needs. If you have no sales team today, prefer the lower-touch, more product-led job. If you have a robust sales team, the higher-touch job may be the better bet.
Watch out Choosing a high-touch job without the sales infrastructure to serve it is a slow-motion failure.
In the wild
Two jobs surfaced — one from marketers and service providers, one from data purists who wanted verifiable data. SparkToro (via Rand Fishkin's existing audience and brand) had a clear unfair advantage on the marketer side.
→ They led with the marketer job, and everything downstream — messaging, milestones, onboarding — was built for it, doubling trial-to-paid.
Laudi's classic recurring case: a product serves both brands and agencies, whose jobs differ slightly. Rather than split messaging, you start with the one where you have an advantage.
→ One job served extremely well first, the second added as a deliberate later phase rather than a diluted simultaneous effort.
Common mistakes
Solving for every job at once
As Laudi puts it, if you set out to solve for all the different customer jobs you end up not being as resonant and cannot be as effective for anyone.
Founders hearing 'never' when you say 'not yet'
Founders often resist prioritization because they read it as permanently abandoning a segment. Explicitly frame the deprioritized job as a later phase to get buy-in.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and growth leads whose customer research has surfaced multiple viable segments and who need a defensible way to pick one.
Not ideal for
Single-job products with one obvious customer type, where the prioritization exercise is theatre.
From the transcript
“so willingness to pay it's really obvious maybe the most important one is that they have an urgent problem so the whole painkiller versus vitamin…”
“so sometimes you might want to prioritize One customer job over another it those customers congregate in a way that make them really easy to…”
“if you start you know right off the bat like okay we're going to solve for all of these different customers jobs then you end…”
From the episode
Customer-led growth
Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)