Running My First Value Proposition Canvas at Gordi.id
Gordi had been operating for 2 years by the time I was hired and tasked with reenergizing their online business. Initially launched as the first coffee subscription in Indonesia they extended their line of product & service to curated online shop selling brewing tools and an Instagram-worthy retail cafe.
Things picked up pretty quickly during the early days of Gordi with help from social media and traditional media coverage. But not long after hitting the one year mark though they experienced stagnation in traction and user retention. It was also not helped by the fact that experimentation cycle on their product was very slow.
Although retention and traction issue can come from anywhere, digging a little deeper usually reveals that the issue comes from us as a company not understanding what the user really wants. To uncover where the mismatch between what Gordi believes to deliver and what the user expects I decided to redefine our value proposition.
Why value proposition canvas?
Now what exactly is Value Proposition Canvas (VPC)? Essentially as a product person you always strive to create a product that people want, but often times we don’t have a clear picture of who our customer is, what his/her lifestyle looks like, and what his/her real needs are. Recalibrating our view of the user is something that needs to be done time and again, Value Proposition Canvas is one of the many ways to do this.
Recalibrating our view of the user is something that needs to be done time and again
The main purpose of VPC is to provide a simple way to understand your customers needs, and design products/services they want. But rather than coming up with ideas alone structured group brainstorming like VPC gives the added benefit of strengthening shared understanding and increasing collective ownership by harnessing a pool of knowledge from different functions.
The canvas has itself has 2 sides, the company and its users and what we’re trying to as a team is to identify where the match or gap is between the two.
All team members from different function needs to participate in the activity, whether you’re an engineer, marketing, product or a finance admin you need to speak with the customer to paint a picture in your mind of who we are serving.
A full day of brainstorming reveals that the team considers the values (gain creators) we deliver to the customers are multi payment options, flat pricing structure, freshly roasted, variety of beans/roasters and a postcard with complete information about the coffee . Simultaneously we also make their lives easier (pain relievers) by providing custom grind size, saving time & effort, never run out of coffee stock, curated & saves time+effort. At least we thought we were :)
To uncover the true motivation of our customers (right side of the canvas) we invited 5 active subscribers & 5 past or ex-subscribers of Gordi. Personally this is the most exciting and the hardest part of the research. Every team members took turns as an interviewer & note writer, which meant everyone was required to learn to be a good interviewee and be an active listener (another crucial skill to have).
During that part of the exercise we uncovered some very interesting facts such as the fact that our users can’t decide what recipe to use when they purchase coffee beans, they find it difficult to find coffee beans because they live outside of Jakarta and that they consider our postcard is a collectible itmes! not to mention there were so many JTBD that we did not account for.
As the image above shows we uncover a lot of gaps between what we think to be the truth and what is actually true, some bigger and more important than others. Reevaluating previous assumptions about user needs as a team can be a powerful and humbling moment. There’s no shame in admitting that we still don’t know that much about our customers, what really matters is what we do with that information.
Making empathy a core element of our product development process is so crucial, but what’s even more important is to turn these insights and ideas into actionable items and prioritise them. I use this simple matrix I found from Intercom and challenge the whole team to locate where an action plan resides in its order of priority. Items in the top left matrix are considered low hanging fruit that must be done within the short term.
Update: an alternative matrix to achieve the same goal is the Eisenhower Decision matrix or Urgent-Important matrix
As you can see from this exercise alone product manager should have enough information to reprioritize the backlog, run more experiments, ask new questions and eventually build a solid roadmap. The benefit that a company can get with VPC or any other structured brainstorming method is immense and I hope you get the chance to try it out with your team.
