MISC Magazine. Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles. In my last post I described a new business tool, the Value Proposition Designer Canvas. In this post I outline how you can use the tool to not only design Value Propositions, but also to test them. You’ll learn how you can supercharge the already powerful Lean Startup and Customer Development principles to design, test, and build stuff that customers really want. The Value Proposition Designer Canvas (VP Designer Canvas) allows you to zoom into the details of your Value Proposition and the Customer Segments you target.
You can use it as a poster (cf image below) to design better Value Propositions with sticky notes. However, to make sure your customers really want what you design, you'll need to test all the assumptions you make with the VP Designer Canvas. We already now know how to do this kind of designing and testing for business models: by combining the Business Model Canvas with the Customer Development process. Supercharge the Lean Startup Process 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Achieve Product-Market Fit with our Brand-New Value Proposition Designer Canvas. I’m a big fan of the Lean Startup movement and love the underlying principle of testing, learning, and pivoting by experimenting with the most basic product prototypes imaginable - so-called Minimal Viable Products (MVP) – during the search for product-market fit.
It helps companies avoid building stuff that customers don’t want. Yet, there is no underlying conceptual tool that accompanies this process. There is no practical tool that helps business people map, think through, discuss, test, and pivot their company’s value proposition in relationship to their customers’ needs. So I came up with the Value Proposition Designer Canvas together with Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith. The Value Proposition Designer Canvas is like a plug-in tool to the Business Model Canvas. The Canvas with its 9 building blocks focuses on the big picture. In this post I’ll explain the conceptual tool. The Value Proposition Designer Canvas Achieving Fit Customer Jobs Ask yourself: Customer Pains Customer Gains. Achieve Product-Market Fit with our Brand-New Value Proposition Designer Canvas. Founders First: Grand St. Seth Godin. Seth Godin (born July 10, 1960) is an American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker.
Background[edit] Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Godin received his high school diploma from Williamsville East High School in 1978 before graduating from Tufts University with a degree in computer science and philosophy. Godin attended Camp Arowhon, where he was a valued canoe instructor. He still frequents the camp to tell ghost stories. Godin often refers to his camp days in his writings. Godin earned his MBA in marketing from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.[1] From 1983 to 1986, he worked as a brand manager at Spinnaker Software.[1] After leaving Spinnaker Software in 1986, Godin used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in New York City.[2] It was in the same offices that Godin met Mark Hurst and founded Yoyodyne.
Viewpoints[edit] Business ventures[edit] Yoyodyne[edit] Squidoo[edit] Other projects[edit] Three reasons not to build a Minimum Viable Product. By Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits On February 4, 2013 f you are like most entrepreneurs, you should build a “minimum viable product.” Let’s get the definition out of the way first; Eric Ries defines MVP as “…that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” As we detail in “The Lean Entrepreneur,” famed entrepreneur Bill Gross created an MVP in 1999 that validated that car buyers would be willing to by autos online sight unseen. The customer would choose a car on his website, describe the options desired and then pay for the car. Bill then would go buy the car from a dealer (losing money in the process) and deliver it the customer.
That MVP grew into CarsDirect.com. Nick Woodman noticed surfers strapping disposable cameras to their arms to take pictures of themselves surfing. If you don’t need validated learning however, you should not build MVPs. 1. The problem and solution are knowable. Why? Reliability vs. Validity. A couple of weeks ago in Detroit, I had the delight of sitting in the cockpit of a brand new Pontiac (GM) Solstice. What a beauty: a drop-dead gorgeous convertible roadster listing at a mere $19,995. The Solstice is destined to be a hit. When my mind came back from the imaginary thrill of driving up to our cottage with this little baby's roof down, I realized that the Solstice brought into high relief a burning question concerning design: If you can have great design without a significant cost penalty, why do so few companies use design to win?
It has nothing to do with a trade-off between great design and cost effectiveness. Rather, it stems from the largely hidden trade-off that every CEO should address -- the one between reliability and validity. The Trade-off between Reliability and Validity Reliability is the result of a process that produces a consistent and predictable result over and over. The problem is that IQ doesn't serve as a particularly great predictor of anything. How to design breakthrough inventions - 60 Minutes.
Design innovator "schools" Charlie Rose. The design innovator whose company is responsible for the first stand-up toothpaste tube and Apple's first computer mouse talks to Charlie Rose about the field he helped pioneer that gave birth to such ingenious products in a 60 Minutes profile to be broadcast Sunday, Jan. 6 at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT. David Kelley takes Rose on a tour of his Palo Alto, Calif., company, IDEO, the place where thousands of inventions have been created through the concept of design thinking -- incorporating human behavior into design.
He demonstrates how the most brilliant designs are those that simply pay attention to human behavior. He sits Rose down in a new classroom chair IDEO designed for the venerable Steelcase company, furniture makers for over 100 years. And attached to that support stem where it meets the floor is a set of wheels. Says Kelley, "The big thing about design thinking is it allows people to build on the ideas of others.
. © 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. How Apple's "Little" Approach Leads to Big Wins - Michael Davies. By Michael Davies | 9:57 AM October 23, 2012 For a news industry addicted to page views, Apple is the gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps it’s because people are caught up in the drama of whether the company can keep its momentum post-Steve Jobs. Some see Apple as invincible, its success as inimitable and its shares as undervalued, while others claim it has already peaked, or even that its decline is inevitable and demise imminent. (Given its current approximate market cap, we could call this the $640 billion dollar question.)
In any case, the headlines on business pages have moved in rapid succession from its billion-dollar court battle with Samsung, to the iPhone 5′s launch, to the controversy over the Maps app in iOS 6. While I’m not above the feverish speculation about what exactly will be unveiled, the phrasing of the message struck me as having something to say about Apple’s approach to innovation deeper than just one product launch. For customers, that focus simplifies choices. Enterprise innovation articles. How to Understand the Notoriously Irrational Consumer. Companies put in lots of Market Research efforts to nail down the needs, wants, wishes and whims of the elusive consumers. But, how reliable are the results? Are there logical – or illogical – reasons why consumers sometimes say one thing and still do the other? In this blog, Bengt Järrehult uses the findings of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate in Economy 2002 to understand more of this in the area of innovation.
Sometimes we come up with an invention which we believe is a no-brainer. The Endowment Effect You overvalue what you are given by roughly 3 times. In this case a test was conducted where one group of people was given a sum corresponding to 15 dollars and told to keep the money for a week, but they were not allowed to spend it. The Status Quo Bias You overvalue what you have and your final choice is not reflected by your initial preference. A group of 100 persons was presented with a choice of getting coffee cups or chocolate bars, both roughly worth the same. Two lessons learned. The Five Stages Of Early Adopter Behavior. Early adopters serve an important role in the world of Web services and technology gadgetry. helping to act in a multi-pronged position that can blur the line between journalist, customer and partner.
The best early adopters not only help spread the word about a new product, but they can help argue its features, they are eager to offer feedback to its developers, and at times can be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing team. But with time, if not coddled, this crowd can often turn against the very service they helped champion, as they move on to the next new thing, sometimes taking an army of followers with them.
This relationship between service and early adopter is a healthy one, assuming the Web service has, in the interim, grown to the point they no longer need the initial proponent's efforts, having expanded to a more mainstream audience, or achieved sustainable organic growth. But if this doesn't happen, it's a very short trip from promotion to abandonment indeed.