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The Playbook Strategy: How We Grew ARR 50% With JTBD

How we turned around a failing product by productizing the 'hacks' of their power users using the Jobs-to-be-Done framework.

The Playbook Strategy: How We Grew ARR 50% by Ignoring Most Users

(And Listening to Their Jobs)

They handed me a product with flatlining growth and a mandate to turn it around. A year later, ARR was up over 50%. The secret wasn’t a new feature. It was a new question.

The Discovery

The product was Patnap Insights, a powerful patent intelligence platform. And the data told a confusing story. On one hand, our annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth had stalled. Churn was high, adoption was low. A classic failing product. But on the other hand, a small, almost fanatical cohort of users were living in the product. They used it daily. They used it successfully. They couldn’t live without it.

The standard product playbook says to interview the users who are leaving. Find out why. Plug the holes in the bucket. But that’s a defensive game. I’ve always believed that growth isn’t found in the middle of the bell curve; it’s found at the edges. It’s found with the outliers.

So we did the opposite. We ignored the low-adoption customers and focused exclusively on the power users. And we didn't ask them what features they wanted. We asked them what they did. We used the Jobs to be Done framework.1

Jobs to be Done, or JTBD, isn't about user personas. It’s not about demographics. It’s a simple, powerful idea: customers don't buy products; they 'hire' them to get a 'job' done. Your product is a candidate for a job opening in their life.

And what we found was stunning. Our power users weren't just using Patnap Insights. They were hacking it. They were stringing together five, six, sometimes seven different screens in a precise, repeatable sequence to achieve a single, high-value outcome. They were building their own workflows where none existed.

The Strategy

This was our 'aha' moment. The problem wasn't our data. The problem wasn't our features. The problem was that we were selling a box of powerful, disconnected tools, forcing our most motivated users to become their own integration engineers.

We discovered that these user-built 'hacks' mapped to a discrete number of scenarios—about ten in total. And these scenarios, these 'Jobs,' transcended job titles. It didn't matter if you were the Head of IP Strategy or the Director of R&D. If your 'job' was to find a company to license your new patent to, you were performing the exact same workflow.

The strategy became crystal clear. It wasn't about building more. It was about connecting what was already there.

We decided to stop selling tools and start selling outcomes.

We would take these user-defined workflows, these brilliant hacks, and productize them. We called them 'Playbooks.' Each Playbook would be a guided, streamlined experience designed to accomplish one specific, high-value Job to be Done.2

Execution in Action: The Licensee Finder

One of the most common 'Jobs' was what we called the 'Licensee Finder.' A small tech company develops a breakthrough patent and needs to find a larger, established player to license it to. This is a needle-in-a-haystack problem.

The Hack (Before): A user would search for patents in a similar technology space, export a list of the owning companies (assignees), run a separate analysis on those companies, find their existing patent portfolios, and then manually hunt for the right point of contact on those patents. It was a six-screen, 90-minute ordeal. But it gave them information they could get nowhere else.

The Playbook (After): We built the 'Find a Licensee' Playbook. It was a single, guided workflow. Step 1: Enter your patent number. Step 2: We show you a ranked list of potential licensees based on portfolio proximity and business alignment. Step 3: Click a company to see their key IP contacts, pulled directly from their own patent filings. We took a 90-minute hack and turned it into a 3-minute, three-click solution.

We did the same for M&A target identification, competitive intelligence, portfolio valuation, and more. We weren't building net-new technology; we were building intelligent connective tissue. We were paving the cowpaths our smartest users had already created.

The Payoff

The results were immediate and dramatic. By packaging our existing value into job-centric Playbooks, we gave new customers an instant 'on-ramp' to success. The time-to-value plummeted. Adoption soared.

And the business metrics followed. In the first year after launching Playbooks, we turned our flatlining growth into a 52% increase in ARR. And the best part? This entire strategic shift, the research and the execution of the first set of Playbooks, took less than a quarter of our annual product development capacity. It was the highest-leverage project of my career.

Your Playbook for Finding Playbooks

This isn't just a story; it's a repeatable strategy. Here’s how you can apply it:

  1. Isolate Your Power Users. Forget the noisy majority for a moment. Find the small percentage of users who are getting disproportionate value from your product. They are your roadmap.
  2. Interview for the 'Job,' Not the Feature. Don't ask them what they want. Ask them what they're trying to accomplish. Ask 'why' until you get past the tool and to the underlying motivation. Map their entire process, including the parts that happen outside your product.3
  3. Identify the 'Hacks.' Look for non-obvious, multi-step workflows they've invented. Where are they exporting data only to re-import it? Where are they using three screens to do what should take one? These hacks are unintentional feature requests.
  4. Productize the Workflow. Take that successful, albeit clunky, workflow and build a streamlined, elegant, first-class version of it. Give it a name. Turn the hack into a 'Playbook.'
  5. Market the Outcome. You're no longer selling a patent search tool. You're selling the ability to 'Find a Licensee in 3 Minutes.' You're selling speed, clarity, and success. You're selling the job, done.

Conclusion

True product insight rarely comes from a consensus. It doesn't come from asking your customers what to build. It comes from a deeper, more forensic form of empathy. It comes from watching what they do, understanding the progress they are trying to make, and then dedicating yourself to clearing their path. Stop selling the shovel. Start selling the hole.

  1. Clayton Christensen's HBR piece is the canonical introduction to the theory. If you're an executive trying to understand why this framework matters at a strategic level, this is required reading. It reframes the entire purpose of a company. Read it here. ↩
  2. The team at Intercom did more than almost anyone to translate the high-level theory of JTBD into something actionable for SaaS companies and product teams. Their book is a masterclass in practical application. We used their principles to structure our interviews. It's an essential resource. ↩
  3. When you're ready to move from theory to practice, Reforge provides one of the best tactical breakdowns. Their content gets into the nitty-gritty of how to structure user research and map insights back to your product strategy. This is for the PMs in the trenches. See their framework. ↩