Understanding the customer’s perspective is crucial to designing great value propositions. Here are six techniques that will get you started. Make sure you use a good mix of these techniques to understand your customers deeply.
The Data Detective
Build on existing work with (desk) research. Secondary research reports and customer data you might already have provide a great foundation for getting started. Look also at data outside your industry and study analogs, opposites, or adjacencies.
Difficulty level: ★
Strength: great foundation for further research
Weakness: static data from a different context
The Journalist
Talk to (potential) customers as an easy way to gain customer insights. It’s a well-established practice. However, customers might tell you one thing in an interview but behave differently in the real world.
Difficulty level: ★★
Strength: quick and cheap to get started with first learnings and insights
Weakness: customers Don’t always know what they want and actual behavior differs from interview answers
The Anthropologist
Observe (potential) customers in the real world to get good insights into how they really behave. Study which jobs they focus on and how they get them done. Note which pains upset them and which gains they aim to achieve.
Difficulty level: ★★★
Strength: data provide unbiased view and allow discovering real-world behavior
Weakness: difficult to gain customer insights related to new ideas
“Be your customer” and actively use products and services. Spend a day or more in your customer’s shoes. Draw from your experience as an (unsatisfied) customer.
Difficulty level: ★★
Strength: firsthand experience of jobs, pains, and gains
Weakness: not always representative of your real customer or possible to apply
The Cocreator
Integrate customers into the process of value creation to learn with them. Work with customers to explore and develop new ideas.
Difficulty level: ★★★★★
Strength: the proximity with customers can help you gain deep insights
Weakness: may not be generalized to all customers and segments
The Scientist
Get customers to participate (knowingly or unknowingly) in an experiment. Learn from the outcome.
Difficulty level: ★★★★
Strength: provides fact-based insights on real-world behavior; works particularly well for new ideas
Weakness: can be hard to apply in existing organizations because of strict (customer) policies and guidelines
Never before have creators had more access to readily available information and data inside and outside their companies before even getting started with designing value. Use available data sources as a launching pad to getting started with customer insights.
Google Keyword Planner
Learn what’s popular with potential customers by finding the top five search terms related to your idea. How often are they searched for?
Third-Party Research Reports
Identify three readily available research reports that can serve you as a starting point to prepare your own customer and value proposition research.
Source: Siegel & Davenport, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, 2013.
Social Media Analytics
Existing companies and brands should:
Identify the shakers and movers related to their brand on social media?
Spot the 10 most frequently mentioned positive and negative things said about them on social media.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
List the top three questions, complaints, and requests that you are getting from your daily interactions with customers (e.g., support).
Tracking Customers on Your Website
List the top three ways customers reach your site (e.g., search, referrals).
Find the 10 most and least popular destinations on your website.
Data Mining
Existing company should mine their data to:
Identify three patterns that could be useful to their new idea.
EXERCISE The Journalist: Interview Your Customers
OBJECTIVE
Gain a better customer understanding
OUTCOME
First lightly validated customer profile(s)
Talk to customers to gain insights relevant to your context. Use the Value Proposition Canvas to prepare interviews and organize the chaotic mass of information that will be coming at you during the interview process.
1 Create a customer profile. Sketch out the jobs, pains, and gains you believe characterize the customer you are targeting. Rank jobs, pains, and gains in order of importance.
2 Create an interview outline. Ask yourself what you want to learn. Derive the interview questions from your customer profile. Ask about the most important jobs, pains, and gains.
4 Capture. Map out the jobs, pains, and gains you learned about in the interview on an empty customer profile.
Make sure you also capture business model learnings. Write down your most important insights.
6 Search for patterns. Can you discover similar jobs, pains, and gains? What stands out? What is similar or different among interviewees? Why are they similar or different? Can you detect specific (recurring) contexts that influence jobs, pains, and gains?
7 Synthesize. Make a separate synthesized customer profile for every customer segment that emerges from all your interviews. Write down your most important insights on sticky notes.
It is an art to conduct good interviews that provide relevant insights for value proposition design. Make sure you focus on unearthing what matters to (potential) customers rather than trying to pitch them solutions. Follow the rules on this spread to conduct great interviews.
Get “Ground Rules for Interviewing” poster
Rule 1 Adopt a beginner’s mind. Listen with a “fresh pair of ears” and avoid interpretation. Explore unexpected jobs, pains, and gains in particular.
Rule 2 Listen more than you talk. Your goal is to listen and learn, not to inform, impress, or convince your customer of anything. Avoid wasting time talking about your own beliefs, because it’s at the expense of learning about your customer.
Rule 3 Get facts, not opinions. Don’t ask, “Would you…?”
Ask, “When is the last time you have…?”
Rule 4 Ask “why” to get real motivations Ask, “Why do you need to do…?”
Ask, “Why is ___ important to you?”
Ask, “Why is ___ such a pain?”
Rule 5 The goal of customer insight interviews is not selling (even if a sale is involved); it’s about learning. Don’t ask, “Would you buy our solution?” Ask “what are your decision criteria when you make a purchase of…?”
Rule 6 Don’t mention solutions (i.e., your prototype value proposition) too early. Don’t explain, “Our solution does…”
Ask, “What are the most important things you are struggling with?”
Rule 7 Follow up. Get permission to keep your interviewee’s contact information to come back for more questions and answers or testing prototypes.
Rule 8 Always open doors at the end. Ask, “Who else should I talk to?”
Tips
Interviews are an excellent starting point to learn from customers, but typically they Don’t provide enough or sufficiently reliable insights for making critical decisions. Complement your interviews with other research, just like a good journalist does further research to find the real story behind what people tell. Add real-world observations of customers and experiments that produce hard data to your research mix. Conduct interviews in teams of two people. Decide in advance who will lead the interview and who will take notes. Use a recording device (photo, video, or other) if possible, but be aware that interviewees might not answer the same way with a recording device on the table.
Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test, 2013.
Dive deep into your (potential) customers’ worlds to gain insights about their jobs, pains, and gains. What customers do on a daily basis in their real settings often differs from what they believe they do or what they will tell you in an interview, survey, or focus group.
B2C: Stay with the family.
Stay at one of your potential customers’ home for several days and live with the family. Participate in daily routines. Learn about what drives that person.
B2B: Work alongside/consult.
Spend time working with or alongside a (potential) customer (e.g., in a consulting engagement). Observe. What keeps the person up at night?
B2B/B2C?
How could you immerse yourself in your (potential) customer’s life? Be creative! Go beyond the usual boundaries.
B2C: Observe shopping behavior.
Go to a store where your (potential) customers shop and observe people for 10 hours. Watch. Can you detect any patterns?
B2C: Shadow your customer for a day.
Be your (potential) customer’s shadow and follow him or her for a day. Write down all the jobs, pains, and gains you observe. Time stamp them. Synthesize. Learn.
EXERCISE A Day in the Life Worksheet
OBJECTIVE
Understand your customer’s world in more detail
OUTCOME
Map of your customer's day
Capture the most important jobs, pains, and gains of the customer you shadowed.
PROCESS Identify Patterns in Customer Research
OBJECTIVE
Crystallize your customer
OUTCOME
Synthesized Customer Profile(s)
Analyze your data and try to detect patterns once you have a good amount of customer research gathered. Search for customers with similar jobs, pains, or gains or customers that care about the same jobs, pains, or gains and make separate customer profiles.
2 Group and segment. Group similar customer profiles in to one or more separate segments if you can identify patterns in the jobs, pains, and gains.
3 Synthesize. Synthesize the profiles from each segment into a single master profile. Identify the most common jobs, pains, and gains and use separate labels to describe them in the master profile.
4 Design. Get started with prototyping value propositions after finishing your first attempt at customer segmentation. Design one or more value proposition prototypes with confidence, based on the newly identified patterns in the master profile.
To establish a master profile of book readers, we looked at the jobs, pains, and gains of the different customer profiles from our interviews. We synthesized the most frequent ones into the master profile by using representative labels.
Tips
Pay special attention to outlier profiles. They might be irrelevant, but they could represent a special learning opportunity. Sometimes the best discoveries lie at the edges. Ask yourself if an outlier might be a bellwether and a sign of things to come that you should pay attention to. Or maybe an outlier is different by positive deviance. It may simply be a better solution to jobs, pains, and gains than peers offer.
Pay attention to earlyvangelists when researching potential customers and looking for patterns. The term was coined by Steve Blank* to describe customers who are willing and able to take a risk on a new product or service. Use earlyvangelists to build a foothold market and shape your value propositions via experimentation and learning.
Steve Blank, Bob Dorf, The Start-up Owner's Manual, 2012.
1 Has a problem or need. In other words, there is a job to be done.
Get “Ground Rules for Interviewing” poster
