You should visualise customer jobs on a pedigree chart . Here is how.
Imagine you’re (in case you are not) an entrepreneur or work in a big company. Your boss asks you (or you ask yourself) to come up with a new product offer in order to create a new income stream.
Competition is on the rise and you need to act fast …
You get to work: make stakeholder maps, draw customer journeys, visualise customer pains and gains, go out in the field, draw value curves, etc.
But what is in fact the right exercise to get started with, when you should come up with a new offer for your existing markets?
You should definitely think in terms of customer jobs and find out what job the customer is willing to pay for (most).
But there are so many customer jobs you are helping the customer with, on so many different levels, right?
Make a pedigree chart of your customers’ jobs just like this:
List customer jobs and connect them to the customers’ options. List all of them. The assumptions made during the visualisation of the pedigree chart can be validated through customer observations later on.
The pedigree chart is a great tool to make customer jobs and current offerings or opportunities discussable with colleagues.
Continue the exercise by tagging new customer jobs to the listed options of the previous job. Like this:
You get it. Doing this exercise results in a pretty big overview with on the left side a list of true customer needs. On the right side, customer jobs will be more related to certain options or paths taken down in the decision process.
This said, here you have an overview of all of your customers jobs and options. Yes, your product is only one of their options. The question is however, can you move up the pedigree chart and offer more value? Or could you design new options customers might tend to choose?
If the company we work at would be a manufacturer of rooftop-boxes, we might be missing the opportunity to serve also people who won’t pay 500 euros for a rooftop box, or don’t have a friend who already owns a roof box they could lend? Maybe we could offer them a new service:
Through Hyperspace I pursue new market opportunities and design ventures for corporates and private investors. I focus on reducing risk by putting market validation first.
Contact me through LinkedIn for more information.
