My love affair with Val (a.k.a the Value Proposition Canvas)
How it all started
Some years ago I met Biz a.k.a. the Business Model Canvas by Strategyzer at a Google workshop on business models. I found Biz really appealing, cool, smart… it wasn’t love at first sight but I could tell we had something going on.
I went home from the workshop and, because all was very new to me and I lacked the practice, I started basically mapping all business models around me — especially at work — trying to better understand them and how all I knew and did in the company were represented there.
While doing this exercise, I started getting more interested on the value proposition part and caught myself “misusing” Biz for only the value proposition and customer segments.
So life went on and I joined Xing Events. I started talking to colleagues and getting many insights about customers’ needs, problems and expectations. I was overwhelmed with feedback and didn’t really know where and how to document all these insights.
At the same time I got to know Aufie a.k.a. Auftragsklärung (become an expert on Aufie here).
You know, Aufie has these German charms and I had immediately a crush. I started using the Auftragsklärung for the main product I owned and it helped me make sure I tackled and aligned on the most important product and project aspects.
But something was still missing
I was learning a lot with Aufie but still had this problem that I couldn’t really map and document the insights I was hearing in a structured way.
How do I make all this input — about what I learned later to be jobs, pains and gains — visible/structured first to myself and then to everybody I was working with?
Until I found Val (a.k.a. the Value Proposition Canvas)
Then I re-encountered Val, a.k.a. the Value Proposition Canvas (also by Strategyzer). It was love at first sight this time.
The Value Proposition Canvas is a zoom-in of the sections “Customer Segments and Value Propositions” of the Business Model Canvas. It’s where we can focus on which problems our customer wants to solve and how we intend to solve them.
(Biz and Val are practically cousins, so you can imagine how angry Biz was when I fell in love with Val 😁!)
I mapped all insights first in the Customer Profile (above, on the right): customer jobs, pains and gains.
Customer jobs are everything users want to get done (I am not going into the many theories around Jobs To Be Done “JTBD” here — you can find them all over the internet if you get curious 🤓) — they can be functional, social, emotional and supporting; gains are positive or expected outcomes and concrete benefits related to the jobs; and pains are all problems, risks and obstacles the customer may encounter while performing these jobs.
In the Value Map (on the picture above, on the left), you map or define the products and services you offer or want to offer, and how they connect to the jobs by alleviating pains or creating gains.
There are 3 things I really like about this tool:
- You don’t really need to have evidence about anything beforehand, you can work with assumptions and then go out of the building fast to test them before building stuff. For example, I can say a JTBD for an event organiser is to make sure s/he knows who registered for the event (to be able to control who enters the venue). I don’t need to know beforehand if this is true — if this assumption is important for my value proposition and I don’t have evidence on it, I will have the opportunity to test it after I finish the canvas, before I get to develop anything.
- You can use it at any level: feature, app, platform etc. Some people use it even to describe the jobs a frontend application needs to get done 🤓.
- I really like that we can do segmentation in this case through jobs; for example, small and big event organisers may share some JTBDs, pains and gains. In many situations, the same products/services are valuable for both organiser “types”.
There are tons of information on the canvases online — if you also fell in love with them, I really recommend the Strategyzer books “Business Model Generation” and “Value Proposition Design” and the videos on their YouTube channel (this is not a sponsored post 😅 — they really helped me on the topics). These tools are super fun to use and, with practice, I think you will have fun with them like me (and Bela) 😊.
Val and I are super happy together ❤️ and I hope we can get our relationship to the next level soon: we want to validate (or not) the assumptions on the value proposition or the business model canvas with experiments, in order to learn about their feasibility, desirability, adaptability and/or viability and reduce the uncertainty around them before spending (wasting) funds building stuff nobody wants and going to market destined to fail.
But this is content for a whole other post 😉.
If you need any help to better understand the canvas, or just want to share experiences, let’s connect on Xing.
