Elements of a Value Proposition: A recap from Google’s Design Sprint Conference 2018

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at Google’s annual design sprint conference. The second one of it’s kind, this invite-only conference provides a unique opportunity for practitioners and thought-leaders in the world of design sprints, design thinking and innovation to come together to share and learn, with the goal of evolving the methodology and expanding the practice.

Conference topics covered this year ranged from seeking mastery in facilitation, factoring for our biases, adopting new methods, storytelling in sprints, the importance of inclusivity in design and running design sprints at scale in large enterprises.

A mix of workshops, talks and panel discussions, all shared a common theme throughout the 3 days — adopting a mindset of experimentation, questioning our assumptions and being flexible in our practice.

The talk I gave was all about focusing on outcomes and being mindful in our choice of tools for the problems we set out to solve (a topic I am very passionate about). I also had the opportunity to run a workshop on the Value Proposition Canvas; a tool we frequently use at N5 when working with clients.

I was motivated to share out what we did in the workshop, with the hopes that anyone reading this could start incorporating the canvas in their own work.

Before I give you an overview of the canvas, let me first elaborate on why the canvas exists and in what instances you might want to use it.

Why this canvas?

A value proposition explains how your products and services create value for your customers. There are several products out in the market that don’t really make a difference in anyone’s lives and that’s a big reason why so many products fail. The value proposition canvas exists to serve as a platform to visualize, design and test how a product or service creates real value for target customers. This canvas can be used in many ways. You can use it to iterate and define the value proposition of brand new products, improve the value prop of existing products or even fix broken value propositions. In general, this is a great alignment tool that can create a shared language to help define how your products and services provide value to it’s intended audience and help identify areas of improvement. It also makes for an effective positioning tool.

Overview

The canvas is composed of 2 parts: the customer profile (circle on the right) and the value map (square on the left). The customer profile helps you define who you’re creating value for and the value map helps outline how you’re creating value for them. By creating a clear connection between the two sides of the canvas, you can visualize how your product or service achieves problem-solution fit. Of course, this will only be true if your canvas has been thoroughly validated and is grounded in reality. Make sure to create a different canvas for each customer segment as the variables and value propositions may significantly differ for different groups of customers.

If you’re new to the canvas, the best way to understand it is to look at it from the lens of an existing product you’re already familiar with. In this workshop, we deconstructed AirBnb’s value proposition looking only at the core product. AirBnb is a 2 sided marketplace and has two main customer segments: holiday travelers as well as homeowners looking to rent their homes. In the workshop we decided to focus on the holiday traveler segment.

Jobs

Customer jobs are the foundation for the canvas and a good place to start. Jobs theory is based on the premise that people hire products to get a job done. Because jobs tend to stay fairly constant over time, it’s better to focus on what people are trying to get done as opposed to what they may want. Jobs can be functional, social, emotional or supporting.

For a holiday traveler, a functional job may be booking travel accommodations, a social job could be a desire to fit in with locals and an emotional one could be making memories. In the workshop, we talked about the different types of jobs and each participant came up with several ideas for jobs a holiday traveler is looking to accomplish.

Here are questions that will help you come up with jobs for your own canvas:

• What tasks are your customers trying to perform in their work or their personal lives?
• What emotional needs are they trying to satisfy?
• What functional problems are your customers trying to solve?

Pains

Pains are things that prevent customers from successfully getting a job done. Pains can be problems, dislikes, risks, challenges or obstacles customers experience before, during or after getting a job done. A holiday traveler could experience pains like waiting in long check-in lines at hotels, not having enough options for hotel rooms during high season or traveling on a tight budget.

In the workshop I broke down the different types of pains with examples; following which each participant came up with several ideas for pains holiday travelers experience. We came up with pains like needing multiple rooms so kids can have their own space, hard to find availability that matches travel times and staying too far from local attractions.

Gains

Gains are benefits customers are looking for when fulfilling a job. These are positives outcomes from successfully accomplishing a job. A gain a holiday traveler might be seeking could be privacy, a local experience or getting a good deal on price.

In the workshop we talked about different categories of gains; following which each participant jotted down gains that holiday travelers might be seeking.

Pro Tip: When filling out pains and gains, you can either look at individual jobs and decipher pains and gains related to those specific jobs or you can just brainstorm freely.

Pain Relievers

Once you’re done with the customer profile, it’s time to move on to the value map. Pain relievers outline how your product or service alleviates a customer’s pain. This section of the canvas highlights which customer pains you plan to address and how you plan to address them.

In the workshop, we listed ways in which Airbnb relieves customer pains. No value proposition addresses all customer pains and you will usually address pains that are important to your customers and align with your company strategy.

Gain Creators

These are the benefits your products produce in the context of the jobs your customers are trying to get done. Some of the gains Airbnb creates for holiday travelers are a variety of options to choose from as well as a stay experience that’s a lot more unique than a typical hotel.

The best products and services are pain relievers as well as gain creators so you want to strike a good balance between the two.

Products & Services

These are the products and services that customers use to help them fulfill their jobs. This what you build a value proposition around. For Airbnb, this is the marketplace which holiday travelers hire to help them fulfill a job like finding unique or affordable accommodation while traveling.

Achieving Fit

The goal of this canvas is to help you build a foundation around which you can iterate on problem-solution fit. You have fit when there is a clear connection between the customer profile and the value map. You achieve fit when your products and services directly address specific customer jobs, pains and gains in creative ways.

Since AirBnb is a double-sided marketplace, they need to achieve fit for both customer segments in order to build a successful business.

Closing Thoughts

This tool is only as good as the data behind it. Filling out the canvas is only the first step. Each part of the canvas needs to be validated with real data. At the end of the day, what matters is that your product addresses a real customer need and does it in a way that brings value to your customers and business. To provide a leap in value to customers, your solution needs to be a lot better than existing alternatives and you can use this tool as a way to test your assumptions and improve your value proposition.

What you saw here was an introduction to get you familiar with the canvas. There are many ways to fill this canvas and creative ways in which you can flex this tool to gain alignment within your organization. You can also combine it with other tools as you seek to improve or decipher your product’s true value proposition.

If you have questions or are trying to adopt this into your organization, feel free to drop me a line.

N5 is an innovation & design strategy studio. We help innovators solve tough challenges, validate ideas quickly and launch products with confidence. Our mission is to empower teams with the strategy, tools and insights to innovate with velocity and get to market faster with winning outcomes. We use a combination of problem discovery, business model innovation and design sprints to help drive impactful results quickly. Each engagement moves our clients an order of magnitude ahead in progress in a ridiculously short amount of time.