The Value Proposition Canvas: How to Create Value for Your Customer
Updated: Nov 28, 2022
It is now increasingly common to see companies putting their customer first. Those that have not thought about how to generate more and more value for their customers are missing out on great growth opportunities. For this reason, it is essential to have methodologies that help us to create products, features or develop improvements that effectively solve customer pain, such as the Value Proposition Canvas.
The Value Proposition Canvas is divided into two parts: Customer Profile and Value Map. These two parts are also contained in the Business Model Canvas, a tool that helps in structuring businesses and creating and delivering value to customers.
The Value Proposition Canvas, even though it is already present in the Business Model Canvas, helps to identify whether we are developing something that is linked to the customers' pains. We can be more certain about this when the Customer Profile and Value Map match each other.
Customer Profile
To define the customer profile, we need to reflect on 3 points:
Jobs: Describe the actions people perform in their work or personal life. It can be divided into four categories:
Functional: Specific activities to be performed such as: mowing the lawn, eating healthily or writing a report.
Social: Actions that will bring a good appearance or gain status perceived by other people.
Personal/Emotional: Actions that will give you a good feeling, such as feeling secure in a new job or making an investment.
Support: Activities that are complementary to others, such as comparing offers, waiting in line, posting a product review, or canceling a subscription.
Pains: All pains before, during or after the work performed.
Problems or Unwanted Results: Related to not achieving an expected result or dissatisfaction along the process, such as not feeling comfortable in an outfit, needing to be physically in a place when it doesn't seem essential or performing irritating or boring activities.
Obstacles: Anything that prevents or hinders the performance of an action, such as lack of time, lack of resources and malfunction of a product feature.
Risks: Points that make people uncomfortable during the action, such as the possibility of loss of credibility or data leakage.
Gains: Describe the expected results or benefits from performing the actions.
Mandatory: Minimum expected gains in carrying out activities, such as making a call in the case of a telephone, or going from point A to point B in the case of a transport application.
Expected: These are not minimum requirements, but they are in people's expectations, such as the good appearance of the device in the case of Apple cell phones.
Desired: Goes beyond customer expectation, as the integration of settings and applications between different devices.
Unexpected: Gains that are not even imagined by customers, such as the case of touch screens. Before the first version developed by Apple, this was not even dreamed of by people.
It is essential that all points raised regarding work, pain and gains are prioritized, in order to facilitate the relationship of the most relevant factors of users with the values to be developed by the solution.
Both the survey and the prioritization must be based on the perceptions and words spoken by the users, not just the personal perceptions of those who apply the methodology.
It is also important to avoid raising vacant points, such as: Waiting in a queue. For this pain, it is important to understand in people's perception as of how long they start to feel uncomfortable when waiting in line.
Value Map
In a very similar way to the customer profile, in order to consolidate the value map, we must raise the following 3 points:
Products and Services: All products or services offered that help users perform their functional, social, personal/emotional and support work.
Relievers and Pain: Describe which pains and how they are relieved through the products or services offered.
Earnings: Describe the results obtained and benefits to users through the use of products and services.
As for the customer profile, each of these 3 factors must be prioritized from the most essential to the least essential.
The fit between customer profile and value map is achieved when users are excited about the value proposition, which occurs when the solution acts on relevant work, alleviates great pain and creates great gains.
To get even deeper into the subject, we recommend reading the Value Proposition Design Book. In addition to explaining the methodology, the book presents further details on the application and evolution of the value proposition developed for customers. Therefore, it is a very interesting book for those who want to delve into the method and application in the development of products and services that customers really want to buy.
Source: Value Proposition Design book.