The Product Was Live, But Something Didn’t Add Up

Upfront, a VC-backed, early stage home electrification startup had just launched a product that surfaced incentives for EV chargers and heat pumps at the point of sale. The Founders saw regulatory tailwinds for energy-efficient appliance rebates, growing homeowner interest in electrification, and market trends in EV adoption and home charging (80% of charging is done at home). Their first focus was to make government, utility, and new IRA legislation rebates for energy-efficient upgrades (e.g., heat pumps, EV chargers) easier for residential customers to understand and redeem. Through this process, they iterated their initial product:

• 1st Iteration – Rebate Estimator & Instant Rebates: First iteration focused on making these rebates instant at the point of sale.
• 2nd Iteration – Buy-Now-Pay-Later for Energy Efficiency: Second iteration introduced a payments product to allow homeowners to finance energy-efficient upgrades through a BNPL model.
• 3rd Iteration – “Upfront Companion”: Third iteration provided white glove help to claim rebates after purchase.

This last iteration was the most challenging to find a path to scale and justify continued investment.

Activation of the rebate estimator  was solid, but drop-off after rebate discovery was too high. Conversion from interest to appliance installation to white-gloved rebate processing lagged.

The team struggled to understand and optimize each touchpoint their product had across their user’s purchasing journey, and how their GTM channel stakeholders fit into this journey, who were direct-to-consumer retailers selling energy-efficient products. 

That’s when they brought in Josie-Dee.

Josie-Dee is a rare blend of domain expert with a product-led mindset. She has experience in EV charging and home automation,which was immediately valuable to the company. She wasn’t hired to optimize UI or write stories in JIRA. She was brought in to apply product-led fundamentals to figure out why an MVP wasn’t unlocking real traction.

Here’s how Josie-Dee and the team did it…

Discovery Revealed What the MVP Missed

Josie-Dee had seen this before. In climate tech, where incentives, urgency, and engineering collide, it’s easy to ship something that should work but doesn’t quite land or scale. Too often, teams move quickly to build around a policy opportunity, only to find out later they’ve solved a problem customers don’t care about or understand enough. Or worse, only part of a problem that leaves them stuck when the policy changes.

With years of experience leading product at a large B2C organization to mission-driven SaaS startups, Josie-Dee knew that intuition wasn’t enough. She needed to reframe the problem. To do that, she reached for a structured system: the Product Model for Climate Tech. The model breaks product development into five clear phases: Strategy, Discover, Prototype, Launch, and Iterate. She used the model to quickly identify where the team was and what they needed to do next. They had already launched an MVP and the team knew it was time to further improve their MVP (Iterate). However, a skilled Product Leader knows that product development isn’t a linear process. Rather than Iterate, it was a time to move back to the Discover phase.

She suspected the rebate tool was playing the right game, just on the wrong field. To find out, she pulled two of the most powerful artifacts from the Product Model’s Discover phase: Jobs to Be Done and Customer Journey Mapping.

Uncovering the Hard Truth

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is more than a product exercise. It’s a way of understanding the customer’s progress. The core idea: people “hire” products to make progress in specific situations. JTBD reframes product value away from features and toward outcomes. Best practice is for product teams to hypothesize what they believe the JTBDs are for their target customer and then go validate them. This is one of the best ways to build real intuition for your customers. 

That’s exactly what Josie-Dee did to kick off the project. She used the existing insights the founders had collected from real homeowners by asking not what they wanted in a tool, but what they were trying to accomplish in their lives. She transformed those insights into clear jobs that homeowners were hiring Upfront to do to lower the total costs of energy-efficient upgrades

One pattern emerged again and again: people wanted certainty. When they decided to electrify their homes—whether buying an EV charger, a heat pump, or adding solar panels or battery storage —they weren’t just looking for rebates. They were looking for confidence that the work would get done right, on time, and without surprises or hidden costs. 

One homeowner said,

“The rebate is nice, but I don’t even know who installs these things. I don’t want to pick someone random off Google.”

In order to help the team understand how their product could facilitate certainty across the entire customer journey,she created a Customer Journey Map (CJM). This is a visual tool that outlines the steps a user takes to achieve a goal, capturing their actions, emotions, and pain points along the way. It’s powerful because it reveals hidden friction, builds team empathy, and helps prioritize what to fix or build next based on the user’s real experience. She sketched out every single step the customer takes in the appliance purchasing journey and how that interacted with Upfront’s platform, including the friction, emotions, and interactions across each phase. She tackled both the happy path and the edge cases / less common scenarios.

Here’s another pro move: Josie-Dee pulled product analytics and overlaid that data onto her CJM. The biggest drop-off happened right after the rebate surfaced! Customers didn’t know what to do next. They needed trusted contractors, scheduling clarity, and reassurance that the install wouldn’t become a headache.

That’s when it all clicked.

The rebate tool wasn’t solving the wrong problem—but it wasn’t solving the most painful one. Josie-Dee framed it to the team this way:

“We’re helping customers find the savings, but not helping them actually get the job done. That’s where the real pain is.”

Rebuilding the Product Around the Pain

Armed with this insight, Josie-Dee synthesized her findings and incorporated them into the founders’ new product narrative. Rather than scrap the MVP tool and subsequent iterations, the scope was expanded from a rebate discovery widget to a full-service home electrification platform—one that connects customers not only to incentives, but also to vetted contractors, scheduling tools, and real-time support throughout the install process.

The team proceeded to develop “Upfront Local”, an SMS-based AI assistant that matched homeowners with small, independent pros, where pros only paid for jobs they won instead of “leads” (the status quo) as our counter positioning. 

Using the Product Model, Josie-Dee helped to redefine the product outcomes: reduce time to installation, increase homeowner trust, and grow successful rebate completions.

When Product Thinking Rewrites the Future

The shift worked. Homeowners who had stalled began moving through the purchasing journey faster, once the most painful step of vetting and coordinating an installer was facilitated by Upfront.The company vision grew sharper: the company wasn’t just a rebate tool anymore. It was a trusted electrification guide.Customers loved that Upfront sifted through hundreds of installer reviews on their behalf but they were still the ones to make the final call on who they would trust to enter their home to install their new appliance with certainty.

For Josie-Dee, this wasn’t about helping the company pivot—it was about delivering clarity. She used the Product Model not just to discover what customers needed, but to put that in the context of their end to end purchasing journey and zero in on the most painful, frictionful steps in that journey. She helped organize the team around building something that addressed this friction head-on.

This case isn’t just about a smarter rebate experience. It’s about what happens when a product leader reframes the problem, centers the user, and applies the right tools at the right time. That’s what the Product Model was built for—and that’s how Josie-Dee helped improve the company’s roadmap and end user experience.