Jobs-to-Be-Done Customer Interviews and Four Forces of Progress Mapping
You built something people said they wanted. So why aren’t they buying it?
You talked to potential users. They nodded. They said things like “yeah, we’d definitely use that.” You built it. You launched it. And then — nothing. Or not enough. Or the wrong people.
This is not a product problem. It’s a user research problem.
Specifically, it’s the problem of not knowing why customers actually make the decisions they make — not the reasons they give you when you ask, but the forces underneath that are really driving them. That’s what I fix.
I’m Sid Kathirvel, founder of Unlock Growth, and a growth mentor to tech founders through CodeBase TechScaler, Barclays Eagle Labs, Opportunity North East, and Edinburgh Innovations. I work with early-stage and scaling businesses across Edinburgh, the Lothians, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and throughout Scotland.
Working with Sid has definitely had a huge positive impact on WorkPhotos SEO and other marketing areas. Thanks heaps, Sid!
– Craig Parker, CEO, WorkPhotos and Ex. Director of Operations, Skyscanner
The Expensive Guess
The gap no one in your startup is talking about
Too many startups make high-stakes decisions on low-quality evidence.
Most early-stage and scaling tech companies invest heavily in building. They invest reasonably well in running ads or outbound sales motions. They invest almost nothing in understanding the psychology of their users’ buying decisions. And so they guess.
They guess at which features matter. They guess at positioning. They guess at messaging. They iterate their landing page copy five times based on gut feel. They run A/B tests on headlines when the real problem is that they don’t understand what job their customer is truly trying to get done.
Guessing is expensive when you’re burning runway.
A startup with 18 months of funding and a product that isn’t sticking does not have 18 months. It has, however long it takes, for the board and investors to lose confidence. Which is faster than you think.
The founders and marketing leads I work with are not bad at their jobs. Only, they were operating without the pieces of evidence that would make everything easier: a rigorous, unbiased account of what their customers were living through before they purchased, what alternatives they considered, what almost stopped them, and what finally tipped them over the edge.
That account doesn’t come from a survey. It doesn’t come from your NPS score feedback. It definitely doesn’t come from asking your happiest users what they like about you.
It comes from systematically conducted Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) customer interviews. Analysed and mapped through the lens of the Four Forces of Progress. Done by someone who has no stake in the answer being anything other than the truth.
Brands I’ve helped grow:
What Jobs-to-Be-Done user research is
The core idea is this: your customers don’t buy your product. They hire it to make progress on something they’re struggling with. The job they’re trying to get done existed long before your product did — and it will exist long after they churn, if you let them down.
When you understand the job, you understand:
- Why someone bought now — not six months ago, not six months from now
- What they were using before your product appeared, and why that stopped being good enough
- What almost stopped them from buying at all
- What they’re really telling themselves to justify the decision
- What would make them recommend you to someone else without being asked
That understanding is what shapes a positioning statement that lands. A messaging house that resonates. A go-to-market strategy your board and investors will get behind. A product roadmap that reflects what customers are pulling towards, not what your team is pushing out.
It’s also what closes the gap between a founder who thinks they know their customer and a founder who actually does.
The Four Forces of Progress
Every buying decision is shaped by four forces. Two of them are pushing the customer towards change. Two of them are pulling them back.
Push: the frustrations, anxieties, and limitations of their current situation that are making it increasingly impossible to stay still.
Pull: the appeal of the new situation your product promises. The vision of progress. What they imagine life looking like on the other side.
Anxiety: the fears about what could go wrong if they make the switch. The implementation risk, the sunk cost of their existing setup, and the doubt about whether your product will actually deliver.
Habit: the gravitational pull of the familiar. The workaround that’s annoying but known. The status quo that’s comfortable enough that action keeps getting deferred.
When you map all four, you stop guessing at messaging. You know exactly which forces to amplify and which to neutralise. Your landing page addresses the anxiety that was the real barrier. Your outreach campaign names the push that’s been building for months. Your onboarding removes the habit that would otherwise pull them back.
This is not plain theory. It’s the analytical engine behind every positioning and messaging recommendation I make.
Sid provided helpful expertise and data based insights, in an accessible and understandable way, giving me much needed knowledge that will be invaluable to me and my business moving forwards.
– Sarah Gallacher, Managing Director, Purple House Clinic Edinburgh
The Third-Party Advantage
Why I conduct the user interviews rather than you
This is the part founders usually push back on. “We talk to customers all the time.”
I believe you. And I’d still argue you should let me do this.
The problem isn’t that you can’t conduct Jobs-to-Be-Done interviews. The problem is that your customers know who you are. They know what you’ve built. They like you — or at least, they want to. And that changes what they say to you.
When your customer sits across from you, and you ask them what almost stopped them from buying, they do not say, “honestly, I thought your product looked half-finished, and I wasn’t sure you’d still be around in a year.” They say something kinder. They self-edit. They protect you, and in doing so, they protect you from the truth.
I’m a third party. I have no stake in the answer. I’m not going to flinch when your customer says something unflattering about your onboarding. I’m going to probe it. I’m going to follow it.
I also know how to conduct a customer interview in a way that gets to the timeline — the actual sequence of events, decisions, and emotions that led your customer from “something’s not working” to “I’m paying for this product.” Most people who do user research ask about satisfaction. I ask about the journey. The journey is where the insight is.
Sid has been amazing in helping us rethink our website, sharpen our messaging, and get crystal clear on our value proposition—cutting through the confusion and making sure it lands with the right audience.
The whole process of redesigning a new website has still been painful at times, but Sid made it far less so.
– Nassima Brown, Strategy Director, FENNEX
Deliverables
What you get at the end
Everything I produce belongs to you. There’s no proprietary framework that locks you in, no system you need me to run for you. The methodology is well-documented and used by all successful tech companies. The goal is for you to leave this engagement knowing your customer well enough to make the next 12 months of product and marketing decisions without having to guess.
Interview transcripts and recordings: full records of every customer interview, so you and your team can return to the source material.
A Jobs and Four Forces map: a structured analysis of the functional/emotional/social needs, pushes, pulls, anxieties, and habits driving your customers’ buying decisions, written in your customers’ own language rather than your internal vocabulary.
A positioning wedge: the specific angle, rooted in the research, that only you can credibly own. Not the one that sounds best in a pitch deck. The one that reflects something your customers actually care about.
A messaging house: a structured hierarchy of value proposition, benefits, and features, derived directly from what the research found. Built to be handed to a copywriter, a paid media agency, or a new marketing hire without losing anything in translation.
A strategic workshop: a working session with you and your team to present the findings, pressure-test the implications, and turn the insight into a first set of actions.
Sid has been amazing in helping us rethink our website, sharpen our messaging, and get crystal clear on our value proposition—cutting through the confusion and making sure it lands with the right audience.
The whole process of redesigning a new website has still been painful at times, but Sid made it far less so.
– Nassima Brown, Strategy Director, FENNEX
The Process
How this engagement works
A structured process from the first conversation to the final workshop.
01.
Consultation
We start with an initial session to understand your business, your product, the customers you want to speak to, and what decisions you need this research to inform. No generic templates. The questions, the approach, and the focus are shaped around your specific situation.
02.
Interview design
We develop the interview guide together. You know your customers and your business better than I do. I know how to structure a JTBD conversation that gets below the surface. We combine both.
03.
Customer interviews
I schedule and conduct in-depth JTBD interviews with your customers, your churned customers, or your target prospects — depending on what your situation calls for. Each interview typically runs 45 to 60 minutes. I handle all the coordination.
04.
Quantitative validation
Where it’s useful, I design and run a supporting survey alongside the interviews to validate patterns at scale. Qualitative research tells you why. Quantitative tells you how many. Together, they’re much harder to argue with at a board meeting.
05.
Analysis and reporting
I analyse every interview through the Four Forces of Progress framework, identify the recurring patterns, surface the unexpected findings, and write a report that reads like a strategy document — not a data dump. You should be able to read it once and know what to do next.
06.
Workshop
We run a working session with you and your team to go through the findings, ask hard questions about the implications, and build an action plan together. Not a presentation, but a working together session.
Who this is right for
Early-stage tech founders… who have built something and are struggling to explain it in a way that makes people buy it. The product exists. The market exists. The messaging isn’t connecting. This is a research problem, not a product problem, and this is how you solve it.
Scaling tech companies… with a marketing function that’s running campaigns but can’t clearly articulate why customers buy. If your team is optimising spend on channels without a rigorous account of why your best customers chose you over the alternatives, you are building on sand.
Founders before a GTM push or a funding round… who need their positioning and messaging to be rooted in evidence, not intuition. Investors ask about your customer insight. “We know our customer well” is not the same as being able to show them the research.
Marketing leads and fractional CMOs… who need a foundation of customer evidence before recommending a strategy. If the brief is to “fix the marketing,” the right first move is to understand why it isn’t working — and that means going to the source.
Who it isn’t right for
If you’re looking for a survey firm to run a volume study, I’m not the right fit either. What I do is qualitative and analytical. It’s about depth, not scale.
And if you’ve already decided what your positioning and messaging are going to be and you’re looking for research to confirm it — I’m probably not the right fit for that either. The value of this work is that it tells you what’s true, not what you were hoping to hear. If the findings challenge your assumptions, that’s the point. That’s what makes this exercise worth paying for.
I’m trusted by:
One Size Doesn’t Fit Every Stage
Flexible to your situation
Engagements are priced on a time-and-materials basis, starting at £145 per hour. See full rates and preferential packages.
One-off research project
Ideal when you’re preparing for a product launch, a go-to-market push, a rebrand, or a funding round. A defined scope, a clear deliverable, and a defined endpoint.
Ongoing research partnership
Useful when your market is moving fast, you’re iterating on product, and you need a regular loop of customer insight to keep your positioning current. We agree on a rhythm that fits your stage and your budget.
Internal capability building
If you want your team to eventually be able to run this work themselves, I can build that in. I’ll train your people on the interview methodology, sit in on sessions with them, and give them a framework they can take forward independently. The goal is that you stop needing me for this. That’s a good outcome.
Sid has been amazing in helping us rethink our website, sharpen our messaging, and get crystal clear on our value proposition—cutting through the confusion and making sure it lands with the right audience.
The whole process of redesigning a new website has still been painful at times, but Sid made it far less so.
– Nassima Brown, Strategy Director, FENNEX
Start Here
Stop guessing. Start knowing.
Request a free discovery call with me. I’m inviting you for an honest, open conversation.
We’ll discuss your current situation — your product, your users, and what you’re trying to figure out. If Jobs-to-Be-Done research is the right next move, I’ll tell you exactly what that looks like and what it would cost. If something else would serve you better right now, I’ll tell you that instead.
You’ll get a reply from me within one working day. It’s not an autoresponder or sales sequence email. It’ll be a note from me to find a time that works.
Commonly asked questions
The governing question
Here’s the question I come back to with every founder I work with:
Do you know why your last ten customers bought from you — not the reason they gave on the onboarding form, but the real reason? The thing that had been building up for months before they found you? The alternative they almost went with instead? The moment that finally tipped them?
If you don’t, then every pound you spend on your product and marketing is a guess dressed up as a strategy. You need to stop guessing, now!