Your features have job titles nobody applied for

You could sell your complex project perfectly in one sentence over coffee. So why does your website or your resume need a 12 point list of absolute jargon to say the exact same thing? Right. It makes no sense. Have you ever noticed that? I mean, you sit across the table. You explain what you're building, the person nods, and they totally get it. But the second you face a blank screen to write it down, the human element just vanishes. It is a, well, it's a universal disconnect. I mean, we trade conversational clarity for what we think sounds, you know, professional, professional, exactly. And in the process, we completely lose the actual person we are trying to persuade. And because you are a learner, you're busy, you're juggling a million things and you value information that actually lands. Today's deep dive is pulling from a fantastic article by Harsh Makhwana from June, 2026. Oh, it's such a good piece. It really is. It's titled, your features have job titles, nobody applied for. Yeah. And I mean, the premise alone is a wake up call for anyone who has to communicate value and writing. Yeah. Makhwana isolates this fascinating paradox at the heart of B2B software. He observes that founders and sales leads can close massive deals on a live call just by speaking directly to a buyer's pain. Right. They just get it. But then their company's homepage reads like an entirely different entity wrote it. You know, the features section might be aggressively listing out capabilities and specs, but it isn't actually convincing anyone of anything. Okay, let's unpack this. Right. Our mission for this deep dive is to figure out why these written pitches fail so miserably. Yeah. And how flipping our perspective from what we do to what the buyer wants done completely rewrites the rules of persuasion. Yeah. And Makhwana points out that this jargon doesn't come from like a malicious desire to confuse people. No, of course not. Right. It's a timing issue. He calls it the Giro migration problem. The Giro migration problem. I love that term. It's so accurate because tracing the origin story of a bad feature name reveals so much about internal company culture. Oh, totally. These clunky names are born during the build phase of a product, not the positioning phase. They're coined by engineers and product managers living inside, you know, internal notion documents and Giro issue tracking tickets. Right. Where the priority in that moment is technical precision. Exactly. Technical precision, not market appeal. That makes total sense when you think about the builders mindset. It reminds me of looking at a restaurant menu. Okay. How so? Imagine sitting down and wanting dessert. But instead of saying chocolate cake, the menu describes it as a baked compilation of flour, sucrose and bovine fat. Wow. That sounds appetizing. Right. But the thing is that description is technically 100% accurate to the pastry chef who built the cake. That is the exact chemistry of what sits on the plate. Yeah. The chef is optimizing for the mechanics of the bake. Well, the diner is optimizing for a celebration or just to craving exactly. And when software companies operate like that chef, McWana describes the result as the change log effect. The change log effect. Yeah. Internal teams get so accustomed to their technically accurate terminology like automated extraction module or real time bidirectional sync. Oh man. bidirectional sync. We've all seen that one. Right. We see it everywhere. And that language just becomes invisible to the team. It migrates directly from the engineering ticket to the public home page simply through organizational inertia. So the website stops reading like a compelling pitch and degrades into a list of mechanical updates. Precisely. The home page basically becomes a mirror reflecting the company's internal or chart rather than a window into the buyer's life, which is completely backwards. Yeah. So if technical accuracy actually fails the buyer, we need a better framework. This is where McWana leans heavily on Clayton Christensen's famous jobs to be done concept. Well, yes, a classic. The core idea is that buyers do not buy products. They hire them to do a job. And the most critical nuance of Christian's theory is that this job existed long, long before your product ever showed up on the market. Right. The job is old. Think about it. People needed to communicate instantly across vast distances long before the telephone or the internet were invented. The underlying job is permanent. The technology is merely the newest applicant submitting a resume. Exactly. I love that way of putting it. And McWana illustrates this beautifully with a company called TestBox. Oh, this is a great example. Yeah. So what TestBox actually builds on a technical level are sandbox demo environments for B2B software sales teams. Right. It is a safe, cloned digital space where a potential client can play around with a software demo without breaking any real data, which is incredibly useful. It is. But if TestBox had let their engineering team name the feature, they would have called it exactly what it is. You know, auto populated demo environments. And if we connect this to the bigger picture, naming it an auto populated demo environment forces TestBox to compete on a purely technical access. How do you mean? Well, they would be entering a feature to feature dogfight against massive rivals like reprise or the Moss stack. The buyer evaluates them by asking, who has the faster load times? Who has the better sandbox architecture? Oh, so it commoditizes the product immediately. Absolutely does. You're just another sandbox. But they didn't do that. Instead, they named their core feature for the job. Yes. They called it one click POCs. And POC stands for proof of concept. And that completely shifts the paradigm because a proof of concept is a massive bottleneck in enterprise sales. Right. The client always wants to see it work. They demand proof that the software works for their specific use case. And suddenly the sales team has to beg their own engineers to build a custom demo, which takes forever. It takes weeks, deals stall, champions lose interest. By calling it one click POCs, TestBox isn't selling a sandbox anymore. They're selling a shortcut to revenue. They become a sales velocity tool. They absolutely do. And think about how that changes the internal dynamics of the buyer's organization. A mid-level IT manager buys a sandbox environment out of the software budget, right? And they are going to scrutinize every single penny. Yeah, IT budgets are tight. But a VP of sales buys a sales velocity tool to close a $2 million quarter. They suddenly have an entirely different threshold for price and urgency. So the value of the product skyrocketed simply by changing the words to match the job. Exactly. I want to push back on this strategy though. Okay, let's hear it. Because getting that hyper-specific saying one click POCs, it seems like it comes with a massive risk. Right. If someone visits the site just looking for a generic testing environment to run some QA tests, they're going to see POC, assuming the software is only for sales teams and bouts. Yeah, they'll leave. Isn't the golden rule of marketing to cast the widest net possible to capture the most leads? Conventional wisdom would definitely say yes, cast a wide net. Right. But Mokwana brings in another example, a company called Aeros. To prove that turning people away is actually a feature, not a bug. Wait, really? A feature? Yeah. Aeros built a deal-room software. They could have used a generic wide net name like shared workspace or deal portal, which sounds like a hundred other tools. Exactly. Instead, they named their feature a collaborative space for reps and buyers. Wow. That is incredibly specific about who is allowed in the room. They are naming the specific dynamic they facilitate. Now, addressing your concern about casting a wide net. Yeah, the solo founder. Right. A solo founder looking for a personal prospecting tool will read reps and buyers, realize they are neither and immediately leave the page. And Mokwana says that's a good thing. He explicitly states that losing that solo founder is a victory. Because if you let them in the door, they're just going to be disappointed anyway. Exactly. That is the core friction of casting a wide net. You attract users who specific jobs your product wasn't designed to handle. They get frustrated. They get frustrated. They flood your support tickets. They churn after 30 days and they leave negative reviews. Oh, that's a nightmare. It is. So specificity acts as a filter. A highly specific feature name repels the wrong buyers. So your team can focus exclusively on the people who will actually become successful long term advocates for your product. Okay. Filtering out the wrong buyers makes sense conceptually. But once you have the right buyer in your sites, someone whose job you can actually do perfectly. How do you get them to pay attention? That's the real challenge. Because we're talking about busy professionals who do not have the patience to read thousands of words of sauce marketing copy. Nobody does. Mokwana brings up company cam to illustrate this hurdle. They build photo and communication software for field service teams. Right. Roofers, Plumber, electricians. Yeah. People managing chaotic, real world environments. They're dealing with weather delays, supply chain shortages, and crews spread across multiple zip codes. They are definitely not sitting at a desk leisurely reading home pages. No, they're violently scrolling on their phones in a pickup truck, looking for anything that acknowledges their actual stressful day. So true. So company cam translates everything out of software jargon and into the physical reality of the job site, which is brilliant. Their website headings are phrases like house all project details in one place, seed progress on the ground in real time, and send updates to all stakeholders. Notice the complete absence of product category jargon there. Yes. They don't call their app a multi threaded media consolidation hub or an asynchronous visual sync engine. Thank goodness they don't. Yeah. The contractor reading that page is spared the mental calorie burn of translating corporate speak. Exactly. The job they're desperately trying to get done like making sure their crew is actually at the right house doing the right work is reflected back at them instantly. And here is the tension McWana highlights in executing this well. You cannot simply guess this language. You can't just brainstorm it. No, you cannot put five marketers in a boardroom with a whiteboard and ask them to brainstorm what a roofer sounds like. Here's where it gets really interesting. If you try to guess, McWana says you will inevitably write a caricature of your customer. Oh, absolutely. The difference between a corporate copywriter writing optimized logistical throughput versus a stressed out dispatcher actually yelling stop losing track of where the trucks are. Right. The buyer has an incredibly sensitive radar for authenticity. They really do. If you write your sanitized corporate version of their job, they will instantly feel the gap. They will recognize immediately that the builder does not understand their day to day reality. The causality is brutal. I mean, if you don't possess their exact vocabulary, your written communication will fail to resonate no matter how elegant the design of the website is. So if we accept that we need their exact words, we need a way to diagnose our current message. Right. How do we know if we're failing? McWana offers a brilliant, actionable diagnostic in the text called the three second test. I want to walk everyone listening through it right now. Let's do it. You have a moment, pull up your own homepage, your personal resume, or a pitch deck you are finalizing. Look at the very first feature heading or bullet point. Read it out loud. Then ask yourself, is this what our product does or is this what our buyer is trying to get done? And the timer is ruthless. You get three seconds. The moment you finish reading three seconds. If you have to pause, squint, and mentally untangle the jargon to figure out the answer, that heading is describing the product. It fails. It's a failure. If the answer is immediately obvious, it's describing the job. McWana challenges founders to run this test on their three most prominent headings. Yeah. And if two out of the three fail, you wrote that copy as a comfort blanket for your internal engineering team, not as a tool for your buyer. A comfort blanket. That's such a good way to put it. But this brings us to a crucial psychological barrier. Let's say a founder takes your three second test, realizes they failed miserably, and commits to rewriting their site using the jobs to be done framework. Okay. So they sit down to focus on the buyer's needs. Right. But why do so many of those rewritten drafts still come out sounding completely generic and uninspired? It feels like the framework should be a silver bullet, but it isn't. McWana attributes this failure to what we can call the pipeline epiphany. The pipeline epiphany. Yeah. Founders and marketers constantly fixate on the state of job entirely missing the real job. Oh, this is the deepest insight in the whole piece. The state of job is the rational, sanitized, highly professional reason a buyer gives you on a discovery call. That's what they say out loud. Exactly. It is the logical business justification. They are prepared to put in an email to their procurement department. It's like going to the doctor. Okay. You tell your physician you want to lose 15 pounds to lower your cholesterol and improve your long term cardiovascular health. Right. The healthy answer. That is the state of job. It's a medical, rational and completely respectable, but the real job. What's the real job? The real job is that your 20 year high school reunion is in three months and you want to look phenomenal in a tailored suit when you see your ex. That is a phenomenal analogy. Thank you. Because the stated job satisfies the intellect, but the real job drives the actual behavior. Yes. In a B2B environment, buyers use the stated job as professional armor. They want it to appear logical and data driven to their peers. Of course they do. They will never admit the visceral emotional reality of their daily anxieties to a software vendor on a first call. McWanna plays this out in a brilliant boardroom scenario. Let's walk through it. Let's say I'm a marketing director looking at software. My stated job, the armor I wear on the call is our department needs better marketing attribution. We need to track our multi-channel touch points more accurately. Very professional. The software founder takes that at face value. They will rewrite their website to say the ultimate multi-touch attribution engine, which sounds incredibly professional and entirely forgettable. Totally forgettable. It is just another mechanism. But McWanna strips away the armor to reveal the real job behind better attribution. What is that? The real job is I need to stop getting embarrassed in Tuesday board meetings when the CFO asks me what is driving our sales pipeline and I have to stare blankly at my shoes because I can't answer. Now you can feel the tension in that scenario. Nobody wakes up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat worrying about the theoretical lack of a multi-touch attribution engine. Definitely not. They wake up terrified of looking incompetent in front of the CFO. Yes. Fear of judgment, desire for status, the desperate need for relief from administrative chaos. These are the real jobs software is hired to do. And if you design your messaging around that emotional truth, the resulting feature name is completely different. It transforms. It goes from attribution engine to something highly compelling like the answer to where your pipeline actually comes from. That's so powerful. Right. If I am that stressed out marketing director reading that headline, I am practically throwing my budget at the screen. You're hooked. You are no longer selling me a data tracking tool. You are selling me a shield from my next board meeting. You're providing the exact ammunition they need to survive their professional environment. Exactly. The product exposes the fundamental limitation of the jobs to be done framework. With limitations. Yeah. The framework is just a translator. It is a lens to look through. It cannot magically generate the right words for you. Oh, I see. The engine that actually powers the translation is voice of customer or voc research. You actually have to talk to the people hiring you. Yes. And you can't just send them a multiple choice survey that says rate our multi-touch attribution on a scale of one to 10 that just reinforces the jargon you already invented. Right. Standard surveys are often just confirmation bias disguised as data. Who's true? So McWana issues a very direct mandate. You must get on the phone with three recent customers this week. The re-customers this week. And the key is how you structure the interview. You do not ask them what features they like. You ask them to recall the specific day they realize they needed to find a solution. Take them back to that moment. Exactly. You ask what? You get done the afternoon you finally gave up and started googling for a tool like ours. You are digging for the catalyst. You want to know what broke, what spreadsheet crashed, or who yelled at them that made them seek you out. And as they tell you that story, you only job is to write down the exact unfiltered verbs they use. No, correcting their grammar. Nope. When they describe their frustration to a colleague, do they say they want to optimize visibility or do they say they want to stop flying blind? The flying blind is so much better. Those messy, emotional real world verbs are the raw material. You extract those phrases and they become your new feature names. So what does this whole mean? We have journeyed all the way from the isolated depths of Jira ticket jargon to the emotional boardroom anxieties of the jobs to be done framework. It's been quite a trip. It really has. And the core through line here is that features, software and even human skills get hired. They do. And because they are being hired to perform a task, they must be named for the job they are applying for, not the internal mechanical gears turning inside them to make it happen. And the application of this goes far beyond beat-to-beat sauce founders. I mean, this is a masterclass and professional empathy for anyone listening. Absolutely. If you are drafting a grant proposal for nonprofit funding, you aren't selling the operational mechanism of your charity. You are selling the impact the donor wants to see in the world. If you are sending an email to your boss requesting a new hire for your team, do not list the tasks the new hire will perform. No lists of tasks. Name the specific bottleneck your boss cares about that this new hire will completely eliminate. You have to step out of the kitchen where you are baking the cake and sit at the table with the person who just wants to celebrate. They love that. Takes effort to shed our internal jargon. But the reward is communication that actually stops people in their tracks. It really does. So I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over today, taking these concepts and applying them directly to your own career. Think about your personal resume or your LinkedIn profile as it exists right now. Are you currently marketing yourself as an automated extraction module based purely on a dry list of your technical competencies and past duties? Are you just listing the chemical ingredients of what you do? Exactly. Look at the industry you are in. What is the actual job to be done that your future employer is desperately trying to hire for? What's their stated job versus their real job? Yes. What is the border anxiety keeping your next boss awake at night and how can you rename your own personal features to prove you are the exact answer they've been looking for? Right. If you reframe your skills around their survival, you become indispensable. Next time you sit down to update that resume, don't write a change log of your career. Write the solution to their biggest headache. Until next time, keep learning and keep reframing.