Starting With The Customer

Written by Frederic Etiemble 🙌

We use the value proposition canvas to help innovation teams design products and services customers actually want. Although one question we get all the time (especially from new users of the value proposition canvas) is:  Do you always start with the customer?

The last couple of decades have seen an overwhelming focus on customers. I have yet to advise a company whose vision or strategy doesn’t include an acute customer focus. And this plethora of customer-driven organisations rely more and more on methodologies such as Design Thinking which starts with an empathetic and exploratory approach toward the customer. But a good idea doesn’t have to become a dogma.

In this post we explain why you don’t always have to start with the customer, but you always have to end with the customer — especially the validation of fit between the customer (as mapped in your customer profile) and your product/service (as designed in your value map).

1 -  Fishing for customer insights

The innovation journey of many teams starts with a customer discovery process and a large number of customer interviews. In many corporate innovation programmes, it has become a design principle that teams cannot advance to the next stage of the programme and access more funding before having completed a large number of customer interviews, sometimes as high as 100 interviews in a 6-12 week window.

Why this focus on customer interviews?

There are many benefits to doing many customer interviews early in the innovation process:

1. Consistent customer feedback helps innovators to not fall in love with their initial ideas, and thus avoid one of the most dangerous pitfalls facing entrepreneurs.

2. Customer interviews are the simplest form of testing innovators can do. When done properly, these interviews  can provide early evidence on the most critical assumptions.

3. After a while, these interviews will lead to a deeper customer understanding and to critical insights for designing a product or service that customers want.

The insights that innovators need to get from this discovery process are:

• What are the most critical jobs, pains and gains of customers.

• And are any of these important enough that customers would be willing to pay for your product or service?

When teams start their innovation process with just a business idea, the customer is a pretty good starting point. In this case, we coach teams to work on the circle — the customer profile — and map the critical jobs, pains and gains.

2 - Making the most of what’s available

Many of the teams we coach in large organisations have much more than just good ideas. These organisations might have key resources such as patents, capabilities or access to technologies that innovation teams can use to prototype new value propositions and business models.

A classic example of reusing an existing capability to build a new business model is Amazon with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon leveraged its IT expertise and infrastructure, which was initially built for its e-commerce business, to create AWS - a suite of cloud computing services sold to enterprise customers.

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