Table of Contents

• Why Traditional Roadmap Prioritization Destroys Equity Value
• The Hidden Cost of Misaligned Product Development
• Our JTBD Method for Strategic Roadmap Prioritization
• How We Categorize and Prioritize Product Roadmap Items
• Our AI-Powered Approach to Roadmap Optimization
• Case Study: Target Registry's Roadmap Transformation
• Implementation: Our Tiger Team Approach
• Measuring Success: From Features to Equity Value
• Our Platform: Scaling Roadmap Excellence
• Superior Returns Through Strategic Product Focus
  
  
  

At thrv, we transform how portfolio companies prioritize product roadmaps to create superior equity returns for Limited Partners. We use our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method to ensure product teams focus on features that drive measurable growth and valuation improvements.

Why Traditional Roadmap Prioritization Destroys Equity Value

Traditional product roadmap prioritization methods consistently fail to create equity value despite talented teams and innovative technology. The fundamental problem isn't execution capability—it's prioritization strategy that focuses on features rather than customer value creation.

We use our proprietary and patented Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method to transform how our portfolio companies prioritize their product roadmaps. Instead of building features based on internal opinions or competitor matching, our method ensures every development decision directly contributes to accelerated revenue growth and equity value creation.

What Causes Roadmap Prioritization Failures?

The number one reason for new product development failure is failure to satisfy customer needs. Research published independently by Harvard Business School and CB Insights shows that 95% of all companies do not have an agreed-upon definition of a customer need.

Companies destroy equity value through common prioritization mistakes:

• Feature-driven development cycles that prioritize technical capabilities over customer needs
• Reactive competitor matching without understanding underlying customer jobs
• Internal opinion-based decisions that ignore measurable customer value
• Resource allocation to low-impact projects that don't move growth metrics

The Target Registry Success Story

When Target's Registry team faced declining revenue and was losing market share to Amazon, they were trapped in exactly this cycle—reactively matching Amazon's features without achieving significant growth. Our JTBD method changed everything, helping them achieve over 25% top-line growth annually and transition from market follower to leader.

The Hidden Cost of Misaligned Product Development

Most companies unknowingly destroy equity value through misaligned product development. Product teams build features that seem logical internally but fail to address the actual jobs customers are trying to get done.

How Customer Need Definition Failures Destroy Value

Failure to define customer needs accurately is the root cause of the growth problem. In a study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, 95% of all companies do not have an agreed-upon definition of a customer need.

The traditional approach creates several critical failures:

1.  Feature-driven roadmaps prioritize what seems technically interesting rather than what customers need
2.  Reactive development cycles waste resources matching competitor features without understanding customer impact
3.  Disconnected success metrics measure feature delivery instead of customer value improvements
4.  Resource waste allocates engineering capacity to projects that don't improve business metrics

The True Cost of Poor Prioritization

The real cost isn't just wasted development time—it's missed growth opportunities while competitors who understand customer jobs capture market share and achieve multiple expansion necessary for superior equity returns.

Our JTBD Method for Strategic Roadmap Prioritization

Our approach fundamentally changes roadmap prioritization by starting with customer jobs rather than internal feature preferences. The foundational JTBD insight is that customers are hiring products to get jobs done.

Step 1: Define Markets Using Customer Jobs

We define markets using stable customer Jobs to be Done rather than changing product categories. All product-based market definitions can be redefined using an action verb and an object to describe a customer goal independent of any products.

Examples of JTBD market definitions:

• Navigation Apps: Get to destinations on time
• CRM Software: Acquire new customers
• Phlebotomy Tubes: Obtain a blood sample
• Car Marketplaces: Buy/sell a used car
• Maintenance Software: Ensure aircraft airworthiness

This job-based market definition provides a stable foundation for long-term product strategy because customer jobs remain constant while products change.

Step 2: Identify Job Steps and Customer Needs

Our process identifies all steps customers must complete to get their job done successfully. Every customer job has between 10 to 20 different job steps and 50 to 100 needs that measure the speed and accuracy of executing the job.

In our JTBD method, a customer need is a metric customers use to judge how quickly and accurately they can execute their job. Every need in a job is defined by an action a customer must take and a variable that must be known for the job to be executed successfully.

Customer needs are defined by:

• Action verbs (determine, identify, gather, calculate, reduce, ensure)
• Variables that are information, actions, and decisions required to get the job done
• All variables in customer needs are independent of any products, technologies or solutions
  
  

Step 3: Measure Customer Effort Scores

We measure Customer Effort Scores for each job step to identify prioritization opportunities. A customer need is unmet when the existing solutions satisfy the need slowly or inaccurately.

To assess the speed, accuracy, and effort for customer needs, we use qualitative interviews and quantitative survey tools in our proprietary and patented software. The percentage of customers who say it is difficult to satisfy a job step is the Customer Effort Score (from 0% to 100%).

High Customer Effort Scores indicate unmet customer needs that represent growth and equity value creation opportunities.

Step 4: Identify Underserved Customer Segments

We identify the most underserved customer segments using unmet needs. The customers who struggle the most to get the job done and are willing to pay for a new solution represent the target customer segments most likely to accelerate revenue growth and create equity value.

How We Categorize and Prioritize Product Roadmap Items

Effective roadmap prioritization requires systematic categorization of all potential development work to ensure optimal resource allocation across different types of product investments.

Our Five-Category Roadmap Framework

We categorize every potential roadmap item using our proven framework:

1. Tech Debt

Infrastructure improvements necessary for platform stability and scalability

2. Customer Commits

Features promised to specific customers for contract renewals or major deals

3. Maintenance/Bug Fixes

Necessary work to maintain current functionality and customer satisfaction

4. On Strategy Product Ideas

Features that directly address unmet customer needs in target segments

5. Off Strategy Product Ideas

Features that don't align with customer-centric growth strategy

Strategic Evaluation Criteria

To determine if a feature idea qualifies as "On Strategy," we answer questions related to the strategy:

• Does the idea help the target customer segment get the job done?
• Does the idea satisfy a need for a high-priority job step in the strategy?
  
  

Customer commits and On Strategy Product Ideas are not mutually exclusive. A customer request for a feature could fit well with the strategy. But we assess if customer feature requests are off strategy for the portfolio company.

Resource Allocation Guidelines

We ensure that a portfolio company allocates the necessary resources to On Strategy Product Ideas. We assess if the customer feature requests that are off strategy can help the company get short-term revenue, but they can throw the company away from growth strategy and cause them to miss the biggest opportunities to create equity value in the market.

Our AI-Powered Approach to Roadmap Optimization

Our AI capabilities transform roadmap prioritization from subjective decision-making into a data-driven process that accelerates insights and improves prioritization accuracy.

How Our AI Platform Works

Our AI platform processes multiple data sources to identify patterns revealing unmet customer needs. We use AI to group thousands of support tickets or user reviews into job-based themes. Our tools integrate with support systems to transform this data directly into structured job statements.

AI Analysis Capabilities:

• Extract structured job statements from unstructured customer feedback
• Identify emotional jobs alongside functional customer needs
• Find behavioral patterns that reveal hidden customer struggles
• Analyze willingness to pay and market sizing opportunities
  
  

Speed Advantage Through AI

This approach scales JTBD research exponentially. Rather than conducting dozens of interviews, product teams can analyze thousands of customer interactions, turning what was once anecdotal into statistically significant patterns.

Our AI technology doesn't replace JTBD—it supercharges it. Portfolio companies that adopt our AI-powered research not only move faster but uncover patterns humans often miss.

Case Study: Target Registry's Roadmap Transformation

Target's Registry team demonstrates how proper roadmap prioritization creates measurable equity value through systematic application of our JTBD method.

The Situation

In 2016, Target's Registry team faced declining revenue and was losing market share to Amazon. The team found themselves in a reactive position, continually trying to match Amazon's features without achieving significant growth. This approach led to stagnation, with the team struggling to differentiate Target's offerings in the competitive retail landscape.

Our JTBD Implementation

To address these challenges, Target collaborated with thrv to implement the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology. This approach shifted the team's focus from competing on features to understanding and fulfilling the underlying jobs that customers aimed to accomplish. By identifying these core customer needs, the team could develop solutions that directly addressed them, moving beyond the cycle of feature imitation.

Measurable Equity Value Creation Results

The adoption of the JTBD framework led to significant transformation within Target's Registry team:

Revenue Growth

Within 12 to 18 months of implementing JTBD, the team reversed the declining revenue trend, achieving over 25% top-line growth annually.

Customer Satisfaction

There was a 20% increase in Net Promoter Score, indicating enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Market Leadership

Target transitioned from being a follower to a leader in the market. Notably, Amazon began replicating features that Target introduced, signaling Target's innovative edge.

Team Alignment and Focus

The JTBD approach fostered a unified vision within the team, leading to better alignment and more effective execution of strategies.

By centering their strategy around the actual jobs customers sought to complete, Target's Registry team not only revitalized their growth but also established a sustainable competitive advantage in the retail sector.

Implementation: Our Tiger Team Approach

We execute roadmap prioritization transformation through our Tiger Team structure that works alongside portfolio company teams to ensure proper implementation of our JTBD method.

Tiger Team Structure and Leadership

Each thrv Tiger Team is led by our CEO, President & COO, and Technology Partner. A thrv Executive Partner, two Growth Strategists and a user interface designer create the product strategy and product roadmap using the thrv App. Developers report into our Technology Partner and engineer the software.

Our Tiger Team establishes the critical baseline metrics for equity value creation: the return on investment and growth acceleration from new product development, the number of marketing qualified leads per month, and the sales close rate.

Our Implementation Process

Developing The Optimal Growth Strategies

When we begin our work with a portfolio company, we start by identifying two growth strategies: one to sell more of the company's current product faster and one to invest in a product roadmap to build new product features that have a higher probability of accelerating the company's growth.

We develop both growth strategies starting with the customer's JTBD from our JTBD Database. We conduct quantitative and qualitative research to identify the unmet customer needs in the market and size the most attractive customer segment to determine the optimal growth strategies.

Testing and Validating New Product Ideas: JCABs

Once an idea is likely to be faster and more accurate than competitor solutions, we test it with customers in a JTBD Customer Advisory Board ("JCAB"). Our JCABs are different than traditional customer reviews because we are testing and validating if a new solution that gets the customer's job done for them by satisfying the unmet needs in the job and improving the metrics in the job would be valuable to the customer.

We also test and validate what the customers would be willing to pay to get the job done better. Because our prior strategic work validates the revenue opportunity of the strategy, product roadmap investments that lead to satisfying on-strategy needs faster and more accurately than competitors are likely to realize the revenue opportunity of the strategy.

We also assess the company's current pipeline to determine which sales leads have the unmet needs the roadmap features target. This enables us to develop a revenue estimate for the feature because if the features satisfy leads' unmet needs, they are more likely to close.

Measuring Success: From Features to Equity Value

Traditional product metrics focus on feature adoption and technical performance rather than the customer value creation that drives equity returns. Our measurement approach directly connects product decisions to equity value creation.

Our Customer-Centric Success Metrics

We track the following key metrics of the growth strategy:

• The number of job beneficiaries
• The prioritized customer needs
• The size of the underserved customer segment
  
  

We monitor the following key new product development metrics:

• The acceleration in the company's growth rate from new product development
• The improved product roadmap return on investment
  
  

Measuring Customer Value Creation

Customer value is getting the customer's job done faster and more accurately and thus requires less customer effort. Our JTBD method and platform enables us to assess a portfolio company's current product features and product roadmap feature ideas based on the value they create for the target customer segment and the likely revenue growth if they build, market, and sell the feature.

We validate the customer value of a portfolio company's product roadmap features ideas by asking the target customers about their perceived effort to satisfy the need with the feature idea at the concept stage. We provide quantitative analysis of customer value for each feature to our portfolio companies.

Connection to Equity Value

The connection between reduced customer effort and equity value creation is direct. Customers who can get their jobs done better are more likely to continue using the product, recommend it to others, and pay premium prices for superior value. This drives the accelerated revenue growth and improved unit economics that create multiple expansion.

Our Platform: Scaling Roadmap Excellence

Our proprietary and patented software aligns our portfolio companies' product, marketing, and sales teams with unmet customer needs in order to accelerate growth.

Core Platform Architecture

Each instance of the thrv software includes a customer Job-to-be-Done with 15 to 20 steps and 100 needs from the thrv JTBD Database. Our software enables our portfolio company teams to centralize research, analysis, insights, and execution around the person who matters most to equity value creation: the customer.

Quantitative Analysis Capabilities

Our software includes a survey tool to identify and quantify the best opportunities for growth in a market. The survey displays the amount of effort it takes customers to get each job step done. Higher effort scores represent unmet customer needs that our portfolio companies target to accelerate growth.

Our software identifies the optimal growth strategy in a market based on the customers who struggle the most and who are willing to pay to get the job done faster and more accurately. Our software prioritizes the most underserved job steps and unmet customer needs that define the growth strategy for the portfolio company.

Roadmap Assessment Features

Our software enables our portfolio company teams to quickly identify the customer needs that the company's current product satisfies. Our software enables our portfolio company teams to assess the growth probability of their product roadmap.

In our software, teams assess each feature on the roadmap against the underserved job steps and unmet customer needs. Our portfolio company product teams use our software to identify which features will deliver the most customer value and the highest return on the product roadmap investment.

Cross-Functional Alignment

Our software helps our portfolio company product, marketing, and sales teams stay aligned with the customer. Team agreement is built into our software. It helps teams work through disagreements by focusing them on the target customer.

By aligning our portfolio company teams on the growth strategy and target customer segment, optimizing sales and marketing messaging, prioritizing the product roadmap, and gaining team agreement, our software enables each thrv Deal Team to monitor team alignment, keep the teams on track, accelerate revenue growth and create equity value.

Superior Returns Through Strategic Product Focus

Strategic product roadmap prioritization represents the foundation for creating superior equity returns through systematic portfolio company growth rather than relying solely on financial engineering or cost reduction.

The thrv Advantage for Limited Partners

Our JTBD method transforms product roadmaps from reactive feature lists into strategic equity value creation engines that deliver measurable returns through customer-focused development prioritization.

For Limited Partners seeking superior equity returns, our JTBD method offers a practical path to:

• Reduce waste
• Align teams
• Accelerate growth
• Create superior equity returns
  
  

Systematic Execution Across Portfolio

At thrv, we execute this roadmap prioritization approach across every portfolio company through our Tiger Team methodology, ensuring consistent application of proven methods rather than hoping individual teams discover effective prioritization independently.

Our platform and method lower the growth investment risk for portfolio companies because our JTBD growth strategies determine the appropriate capital allocation to product, marketing, and sales. Our growth strategies increase the likelihood that the CEO's investment of the company's capital will accelerate growth and create equity value.

Measurable Results

As markets become more competitive and customer expectations continue to rise, the companies that win will be those that most effectively identify and address the jobs their customers need done. Our proprietary JTBD method provides the structure and tools to do exactly that—turning customer insights into measurable business results.

At thrv, we don't just advise—we execute. Our proprietary JTBD method and AI-powered platform transform how our portfolio companies create equity value through product innovation. For Limited Partners seeking superior returns, our operating approach delivers accelerated growth, multiple expansion, and reduced investment risk through systematic application of our JTBD method across every aspect of business operations.