Ideas to Action with Value Proposition Design workshops
I always find interesting when people in an organisation start thinking and talking about new thrilling ideas or projects to create products and services. It is quite common to find a colleague who comes up with a brand-new startup that is going to change the world every week. Or maybe it’s just an add-on to the portfolio of products and services of your company. Anyway, innovation happens and people develop new ideas while doing their jobs, as they find out new user needs or pain points in products. So, how do we address all those ideas and make sure customers would pay for them?
I love structured design thinking methods, and from my point of view, all ideas coming from an organisation need to be tested and validated. There are tons of frameworks out there to do so, however I am familiar with Strategyzer and their Value Proposition Design book and its sequel, Business Model Generation. In this post I will be describing the usual and fun process to prepare and facilitate these internal workshops and the outcomes you should expect from them.
1. Capture and prioritize ideas
Ideas are everywhere. I am pretty sure you might have heard some while having a coffee, during lunch break or during meetings. You should have some way to capture and archive them: maybe an intranet forum or a blank wall with post-its where people go and paste them. Anything should work, but everyone should know how to do it.
Before launching a workshop to work on captured ideas, it is important to prioritize. You can use your company vision and goals to do it on your own, but I recommend you to involve managers so that they can guide you through the process. The workshop should be centered around one idea at a time, and it should be exploratory and focused on debating, questioning and making assumptions.
2. Workshop
Set one day to hold a workshop with around 6–8 people from your company. Make it cross-functional: it’s important to gather both people who might know a lot about the proposed idea and people who don’t know anything at all about that specific market.
To start off, ask the author of the idea to give a 2 minutes pitch about it, where it came from and why he thinks there is value for clients. It is important to describe issues or pains customers face and how we may help them.
Next, split people into two or three teams and make sure groups are balanced (market knowledge, departments, age, gender…)
1. Brainstorming
The first step for the group is to talk and brainstorm about how they see the idea. It is not important being aligned at this point, all ideas should be written down. They should be talking about what kind of customer are we talking about, imagine the product or service, how could it technically work and, maybe, how are we going to make money out of it.
2. The Value Proposition Canvas
Next phase is about aligning and defining exactly how our product brings value to the user. To do so, we will be using the Value Proposition Canvas, as a way of thinking about what does our customer need and what value are we really delivering.
The Value Proposition Canvas has two sides. With the Customer Profile you clarify your customer understanding. With the Value Proposition you describe how you intent to create value for that customer. You achieve Fit between the two when one meets the other.
Make sure you print the canvas so that teams can fill it with post-its and work smoothly.
2.0 Select a Customer Segment
Based on the pitch and the brainstorming, the team should think about the the customer segment they will design the value proposition for. It should be somehow descriptive and concrete. Example: people from 18–30 years who own a car, vegetable farmers between 18–50, etc.
2.1 Start with Customer Jobs
Customer jobs describe the things your customers are trying to get done in their work or life. These are tasks that are trying to perform and complete, problems they try to solve or needs they are willing to satisfy. For example: get meals early at an affordable price, get tailored shirts at a reasonable price, get entertained, relax…
Ask why several times until you really understand customers’ jobs to be done. It’s easy to settle with a superficial understanding, but you really need to ask why a customer wants to perform a certain job. Example: why might a customer want to have tailored shirt? Maybe because the “real” customer job to be done is to have clothes that fit their sizes. Why does he want clothes that fit exactly his size? Maybe because he wants to look good and stylish. Do not settle until you really understand the underlying jobs to be done that really drive customers.
Teams should think about the initial idea and the brainstorm to write all customer jobs related to it. It is important to acknowledge that not all jobs have the same importance to customers. Order them from important to insignificant while putting the post-its on the canvas.
2.2 Customer Pains
Pains describe anything that annoys your customers before, during and after trying to get a job done. These are some trigger questions you may use to come up with your customer pains:
What makes your customers feel bad? How are current value propositions underperforming for your customers? Which features are they missing? How do your customers define too costly? Takes a lot of time, costs too much money or requires substantial efforts? What risks do your customer fears? What common mistakes do your customers make?
Examples of customer pains: expensive, has to wait long time, confusing requirements, overpaying, waste of time, long queues, no convenient show times…
2.3 Customer Gains
Gains are the outcomes or benefits your customers want. Gains include functional utility, social gains, positive emotions and cost savings. Use these trigger questions to find them out:
Which savings would make your customers happy? Which savings in terms of time, money, and effort would they have? What would make your customers’ jobs or lives easier? What do customers dream about? What are customers looking for the most?
Examples of customer gains: can apply with confidence, get recognized by team, applicable ideas, saves money, does not have to wait too much, fair price, arrive on time, comfortable, friends’ reviews…
Common mistakes & Best practices
There are a couple of tips to make sure you are designing a truly useful Customer Profile:
- Make sure you are not mixing several customer segments into one profile
- Do not forget about social and emotional jobs, they are as important as functional jobs.
- DO NOT LIST JOBS, PAINS AND GAINS WITH YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION IN MIND. You should only focus on your customer and what he needs and expects. Forget about what you are offering and go beyond what you intend or hope to address with your value proposition.
3.1 Value Proposition: Product and Services
Now it’s time to think about what you are going to offer. To do so, start by enumerating all products and services your value proposition stands for. This bundle should help your customer complete either functional, social or emotional jobs. These products and services might be physical/tangible goods, intangible (copyrights, after-sale assistance), digital or financial.
Example of Product and Services: Taxi Smartphone App, Daily subscription based meal service, Book, Online course, Dinner in town, Movie home rentals, Online visual art exhibit….
3.2 Pain relievers
Think about pain relievers as how exactly your products and services alleviate specific customer pains. Think about what you try to remove or reduce that is causing your customers suffer while completing their jobs.
You don’t need to come up with a pain reliever for every pain you’ve identified before. Focus only on few pains that they alleviate extremely well. Here’s a list of trigger questions which may help you think about your pain relievers:
Could your products and services… produce savings? make your customers feel better? wipe out negative social consequences? help your customers better sleep at night? fix underperforming solutions?
Examples of pain relievers might be: provide healthy meals, enable direct communication, avoid confusion, minimize risk of failure, be practical and visual, purchase everything online…
3.3 Gain creators
Gain creators should describe how your products and services create customer gains by bringing outcomes and benefits. Use this list of trigger questions to think about them:
Could your products and services… create some kind of saving? produce outcomes your customers expect or even exceed their expectations? make your customers’ work or life easier? create positive social consequences? do something specific that customers are looking for? fulfill a desire?
3.4 Difference between pains and gains from the Customer Profile
It’s quite common at first to mix or repeat pains and gains from our customer profile. However, they are completely different. When describing Pains & Gains for our Products & Services you have complete control of them, whereas you don’t have any control over the ones from your Customers. You decide how you intend to create value by addressing specific jobs, pains and gains in your products, but you cannot decide over what jobs, pains and gains your customers have.
3.5 Bonus: Examples of Value Proposition Canvas
4. Fit
Once every team has their Value Propositions, they need to reflect on their work to see if they achieved ‘Fit’. You achieve Fit when you address important jobs, alleviate extreme pains and create essential gains that customers care about. Customers are the judges, jury and executioner of the value propositions.
Ask every team to go through pain relievers and gain creators one by one and check to see whether they fit a customer job, pain or gain. Teams should put a check mark on each one that does. There might be pain relievers or gain creators which do not fit anything. It is completely normal, you usually can’t satisfy them all.
5. Team Pitch
Every team should now prepare a short pitch stating the user segment they have defined and going through their Value Proposition Canvas. By doing so, you will identify whether there was one or several customer segments. Now join groups by customer segment (if you end up with only one groups is perfectly okay and normal)
With the groups joined, ask them to create a new Value Proposition Design which summarizes, completes and improves the one every group had. This will create debate and alignment over the same customer segments and improve much more the resulting Value Proposition.
Finally, the group(s) can present their work and pitch their final idea, explaining the Fit and receiving feedback from other groups or people in the room. (It’s good idea to bring experts at this point, so they can comment on their work and add points they might have missed)
3. Next steps
After the workshop, you should have turned vague ideas into potentially new products and services with a clear value proposition to your customers. However, the Customer Profile and all of its jobs, pains & gains are completely based on assumptions. Assumptions about what they do, why they do it and what they like or don’t like. It does not mean your assumptions are incorrect: you just don’t know yet. Developing your products and services with assumptions involves risk, so next steps should be all about reducing uncertainty by validating assumptions and diminish risk.
In many organisation, though, to keep on with the testing is important to gain alignment and commitment first by involving managers and other stakeholders. You can use the resulting Value Proposition Canvas to explain the project and get your license to operate, as you will probably need money and time to run tests and experiments.
I will post more information about how to run experiments and validate assumptions soon, so you can keep up with your ideas and be sure you are designing something your customers want.
