There is a need for more awareness and a deeper understanding about the target customers and the job that a startup is helping them accomplish. It is this endeavor to completely understand one's customer, that allows a startup to build a great product, outstanding user experience, and ultimately a successful company.
Seed accelerators are primarily investment vehicles. They have to make money. Accelerators control the return on investment by controlling the quality of the incubation process and leveraging media attention to attract outside investors to boost traction of the incubated startups.
Just because there is a better product or a better way of doing something, it doesn’t mean that customers will embrace the new solution. If a new offering doesn’t fit with ingrained behaviors and expectations, customers will be reluctant to change and will look for reasons not to shift to a new solution.
It is well-known that a large percentage of Startups fail. The same is true of new product development in established organizations too. The entire venture capital industry is based on this premise of failure. Failure is widely celebrated, scars of wars fought and lost. And yet it doesn't have to be that way. There is a better way, one that offers structure and rigor and predictable success -- Jobs To Be Done and the Product Success® framework.
Product Management is the art and science of getting under your customer's skin. There is no tool better than JTBD to accomplish that. JTBD encourages understanding the complete user experience and the various components that make up the situation surrounding the "hiring" and "consumption" of a product. Product management is less about the product, it is certainly not about maintaining a feature backlog, but solving the right customer problems (jobs) in the most effective way.
