Experiment around behaviors in an Agile way to validate your Value Proposition
If your product or service performance is not aligned with your expectations, there may be holes in your Value Proposition.
Consider the number of apps you have downloaded, tried for a day, week, month, and never returned to… (in the last year alone)! We are all familiar with products and services that appeal in theory but disappoint in practice, yet too many companies fail to test whether their products provide customers with the differentiated value required to excel in the marketplace.
It’s common knowledge that digital technology has dramatically changed the economy, and companies are attempting to be Agile in an effort to survive amid increasing risk and uncertainty. But too often, teams adopt “Agile” processes (use sprint cycles, Kanban boards, and stand-ups) without adopting the principles that drive their competition.
Let’s have a look at the visual below (figure 1).
The goal of Agile is to minimize waste by managing risk, but processes alone don’t result in these benefits; validating value before acquiring risk does.
Our small team at Johnson and Johnson known as rapidValue Realization believes that experimenting directly with customers to validate a Value Propositions is essential to minimizing spend, reducing uncertainty, and increasing your chance of making a return. Our methodology combines Agile, Lean UX, and Design Thinking to help participants better understand their problems, create Value Propositions that change customer behaviors, and experiment to identify successful solutions that can impact those behaviors as a result delivering value to the customer. We gain learnings by interacting with our customers, and re- plan and prioritize future work based on their feedback. In contrast to the diagram above, we work in Agile sprints like those pictures below, designed to ensure customer needs are being met and that the expected value is delivered.
During rVR’ s six-year-life, we have conducted over 700 workshops to support nearly 150 functional teams across approximately 45 different businesses. In that time, we have learned that creating a customer-centered Value Proposition requires an evidence-based understanding of who the customer is, what their unmet needs are, and the value our product will deliver by addressing those needs in a differentiated way.
Through our work with businesses colleagues across J&J, we’ve come to understand that years in a corporate context, among like-minded colleagues, contributes to biases and blind spots that too often have us putting the needs of the corporation before the needs of the consumer. In order for our 135+ year old company to continue to innovate, we’ve had to adopt a customer-centered test and learn approach.
Let’s begin with an example… In 2018, our sunscreen team approached us with a problem… people weren’t applying sunscreen often enough to ensure its effectiveness, and the team wanted us to help them develop an app that would remind people to apply sunscreen.
A reminder app? Doesn’t everyone have a timer on their phone? What value was being created for the customer? The focus goal of the sunscreen team (to ensure products efficacy to boost sales) had gotten in the way of their ability to see the customer. Anyone with children knows that the challenge of getting kids to apply sunscreen has less to do with memory failure or the inability to tell time and far more to do with the challenge of getting our kids to stop doing something they love to do something they hate…. (Who wants to be the nagging/screaming parent at the public pool? Some battles just aren’t worth fighting…)
To get back to the customer experience (rather than the corporate goal), we begin with a workshop to conduct stakeholder mapping and empathy mapping to explore the pain points and unmet needs of the actors involved. Through this process, we realized that there was a unmet need for parents struggling to apply sunscreen to their children. The group agreed they wanted to do something that turned a bad experience (a beach day that begins with a power struggle and tears) into a memory that they could cherish.
Once we identified the problem we wanted to solve, we were able to create a multi-dimensional Value Proposition Map (reference figure 3) to visualize our assumptions about the Unmet Needs, the necessary Behavior Change, and the Solution we would provide to address those needs, resolving our challenge while delivering value to our Customers.
Once we created our Value Proposition map, illustrating the behavior a solution would need to change to create value for our business and the customer, we got to brainstorming. We took the sunscreen team through a brainstorming exercise, and one of the workshop participants came up with the idea of an app that would use augmented reality to make the child think that we were spraying a super-suit onto them with the sunscreen. They could see the super suit in the app and watch as it began to fade after 70 minutes, when it was time for the sunscreen to be reapplied.
After deciding on an idea to develop we knew we needed to experiment to determine whether our solution would create the intended value.
What does an iterative cycle of quick, low-cost experiments look like? In the case of the sunscreen example, we wracked out brains to come up with an approach that could test if the app would delight the customers (the parent and child) and succeed in turning something that was a bad experience into something the child would be eager to do again. We came up with the idea of testing the concept with J&J parents and their children at one of our daycare centers. We created a comic book with the child as the main character with a story around how they get their super-suit. A simple prototype of an app that could simulate the experience of selecting a super-suit, taking a picture, and then augmenting it with the super-suit. And since we didn’t want to have to get permission to test with real sunscreen we decided to use spray bottles with water to simulate the sunscreen. We went to the day-care center, set up the experiment and let it go.
Often, experimentation doesn’t align with the siloed, internal mindset that most corporations have. It shifts the focus from costs and deliverables to behavior change, requires creativity, and allows things to get a little messy, but there are abundant resources to guide you through the process. (We highly recommend the book Testing Business Ideas as a practical guide for running experiments in support of finding your path to minimize uncertainty and risk before scaling.) And by understanding the customer’s unmet needs in the form of pains, workaround behaviors, and goals, teams can ensure that the solutions they create generate value and exceed the targets they would have achieved without experimentation.
To that end, the customer value we created through the super suit experiment exceeded all our expectations. The kids and the parents loved the experience and one parent said, “I would pay $50 for that app.” Our Agile test and learn approach allowed us to validate our ability to change behavior and create value for the customer before we considered scaling.
Only after we eliminated that uncertainty did we consider moving forward.
A Value Proposition only works if a solution delivers value to the business, the customers, and the key stakeholders, in other words, if there is an exchange of value. The Value Proposition Map provides visibility to whether the solution you’ve identified can deliver value to the customer and business.
So, what do you think? Based on our approach, do you believe your product strategy or business case is backed by a validated Value Proposition?
If not, then take our recommendations and start mapping your Value Proposition to identify your customer’s unmet needs, imagine a solution that addresses those needs, and identify the behaviors a validated solution would have to change. Take a test and learn approach, and experiment with your customers to eliminate ambiguity before scaling. The risk is minimal, and the potential savings are high, but the primary goal is to delight the customer. From our experience with super suits and comic strips, there’s fun to be had in the process.
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Authored and Edited by
Bob Maguire Global Service Owner — rapid Value Realization at Johnson & Johnson
linkedin.com/in/maguirerobert
Isaac LaMothe Director — rapid Value Realization at Kenvue (formerly a Johnson & Johnson company)
linkedin.com/in/isaaclamothe
Nuri Rahkmatova Portfolio and Product Management at Johnson & Johnson
linkedin.com/in/nuri-rahmat/
Alex Gaydos rapidValue Realization
linkedin.com/in/alexandra-gaydos
Images by
Amanda DiDomenico UX Manager, rapidValue Realization at Johnson & Johnson
linkedin.com/in/aolivio/
The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson’s technology organization created a centralized team that provides dedicated counsel and support related to digital strategies and projects. Known internally as rapidValue Realization, this team conducts training’s, design sprints, workshops leveraging agile processes, and UX to assist the organization in managing and scaling digital investments. To learn more about our team check out the following MIT article https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/making-it-easier-to-manage-and-scale-digital-projects/
