When Sunita Mohanty advises and angel invests in early-stage teams, she often finds herself repeating the same advice: Do the work upfront to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable.

That's because she's felt the pain that comes from building products that fail to tackle a clear problem firsthand. Right after grad school at Stanford, Mohanty found herself in the middle of her first startup: a failing K-12 analytics company. Despite an inspiring mission in the up-and-coming edtech space, she and her team were stuck in circles of decision-making and couldn’t build traction.

Now, as a seasoned leader with experience building products at Lumosity, Oculus, and Facebook's New Product Experimentation group, Mohanty has the perspective to spot why it went sideways. "Looking back, it’s easy to diagnose that we had a hard time focusing on which problem to solve first because we didn’t understand the actual problems of our audience well enough — we only assumed we did," she says.

"If you don't put in the work upfront, you risk charting the wrong course towards product-market fit, which you may not discover until you’re facing struggling retention numbers or battling high user churn," she says.

But what does "putting in the work upfront" look like? There’s a range of philosophies out there on how to approach early-stage customer development, but Mohanty has come to rely on one framework: JTBD (jobs-to-be-done).

Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework

If you're not familiar, JTBD posits that customers “hire” a specific product or service to help them complete certain “jobs,” “firing” existing solutions that are no longer up to the task. Popularized by Clayton Christensen, the JTBD theory is by no means a new approach. But in Mohanty's experience, the heavy corporate strategy jargon, consulting vibes and different interpretations of this framework can make it confusing to get started with — or downright off-putting to product-driven founders with a specific vision.

There's tons of deep-dives out there on JTBD theory and how others apply it, but Mohanty's here to cut through with a more practical path for startups specifically. Today on The Review, she's sharing the lightweight, simplified approach to JTBD that's used by product teams at Instagram and Facebook.

From the exact 4-step process Mohanty relies on in her day job, to her advice for how teams can cascade this framework down into the everyday work of crafting value props, scoping PRDs and testing go-to-market tactics with these templates, it's a must-read for founders, product leaders and marketers at any stage.

We're sharing a snippet of her wisdom below as a preview, but hope you'll head on over to The Review to read the full piece.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

-The Review editors
 

Here's an excerpt from Mohanty's article today:

"The basic JTBD statement framework is specific about the context people are in today, the barriers in the way of achieving their goals, the goals they want to achieve and their desired outcome. To put that into practice, here’s a JBTD statement template that I find helpful:"

• When I…… (context)

• But…… (barrier)

• Help me…. (goal)

• So I….. (outcome)

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