Most service and software marketing copy reads like it was written by pointing a camera at the product and describing what's visible: 'cloud infrastructure, automated backups, 24/7 monitoring.' It's accurate. It's also written entirely from the inside, describing capabilities instead of the problem those capabilities are quietly solving for someone who's never going to read the technical spec.

Clayton Christensen's 'jobs to be done' framing has a well-worn but still useful example: a fast-food chain trying to sell more milkshakes learned that a large share of them were bought by commuters, alone, for a boring drive — the milkshake was 'hired' to make a long commute less tedious and to hold off hunger until lunch. Nobody buying it was evaluating ingredients. They were solving a specific, unglamorous problem, and the milkshake happened to be a good fit for it.

Applied to IT and software services, 'cloud infrastructure' isn't actually what's being purchased. 'Not getting paged at 2am because a server fell over' is what's being purchased. 'Database design' isn't the job. 'Not finding out about a data problem from an angry customer' is. The feature is the mechanism. The job is the reason anyone cares.

Rewriting a service description from feature language to job language is a smaller edit than it sounds and a bigger difference than it looks. 'Cybersecurity and hardening' becomes 'so you're not finding out about a breach from your customers.' The service didn't change. The reason someone would pay for it got a lot easier to recognize.

The test we use on our own copy: read it and ask whether a customer would describe their actual problem this way, out loud, to a colleague — not whether it accurately lists what we technically do. Those are two different bars, and only one of them sells anything.