‘Conditional Value Realisation’- The Missing Bit in Your Value Proposition?
If you want to know how to put together a value proposition, do some Googling — there are many resources out there, and they don’t specifically mention what I am about to. Maybe there is a really good reason for this, but either way, I felt the need to put my thoughts into words:
Part 1: the customer profile/persona bit
Value propositions require that you have an idea of a customer profile that your potential product should (hopefully) match with in terms of product<>market fit. E.g. you have a product idea for car drivers, and you go through the value proposition process to figure out and visualise how your product would actually deliver value for them and to what extent. In this case, ‘car drivers’ is your customer profile.
It is perfectly fine to start with a high-level value proposition that is based on a high-level customer profile. Normally, however, as part of the product process, you will start to refine that profile and break it down into subgroups- running with the above example; ‘car drivers’ become:
- a luxury car driver
- a sports car driver
- an electric car driver
and so on.
Then, the ‘luxury car driver’ is made more real through the persona-creation process and all of a sudden, you have:
‘John drives a Porsche, has 1 kid, lives in the city, is a management consultant, dislikes cyclists, loves the countryside, wakes up around 5 am, uses an Android phone but has a Mac laptop’ and so on.
Side note: if you haven’t been through this process before and wonder how you come up with refined subgroups and personas: primary and secondary research. Primary is always better than secondary, but do the best you can regardless: challenge assumptions and try to start from an informed perspective.
In a very basic form, personas generally read like so:
I am <user persona name>, and I can be represented by <a quotation> and <some demographic/behavioural information- job title, location, salary, hobbies, social media activity, device/software usage, etc.>
Part 2: the value matching bit
Continuing from the above- your persona will have some pains, gains and jobs-to-be-done that your product should ‘match with’ to deliver value.
Again, in very basic form:
I have some <pains, gains and jobs to be done> and the product being proposed reduces/solves my pains by <list of pain-relieving functions & services>, supports/optimises my gains and jobs-to-be-done by <list of supporting/optimising functions & services>
And that’s basically it in terms of the whole value proposition bit. Regardless of whether you manage to refine high-level customer profiles into subgroups and personas: the value-prop concept is about validating how your product delivers value to people. It enables you to realise quickly if your product has any chance of working in the real world, it allows you to ideate on how your existing product could better deliver value; it can and should be maintained and utilised throughout product development cycles- from early-stage discovery to the 100th iteration.
Part 3? ‘Conditional value realisation’?
What is ‘Conditional value realisation’?
‘We think our product will deliver value for <persona name> because they struggle with <pain description> and our product relieves that pain by <pain relieving function> but this value will only be realised if <condition 1, condition 2 and condition 3> are satisfied’.
To make this more concrete:
‘We think our drone delivery service provides value for <Mary> because she struggles with <slow deliveries due to heavy road traffic in her area> and our product relieves that pain by <avoiding road traffic and delivering faster> but this value will only be realised if <the drone isn’t slowed down due to bad weather>’.
Another example:
‘We think our virtual office solution will deliver value for <Bob> because he would love to <be able to work from home more> and our product supports that gain by <enabling Bob to run his large meetings from home> but this value will only be realised if <it can function as needed with the internet bandwidth in both Bob’s office & home, if it allows Bob to whiteboard stuff and if he can share his screen>’.
This all sounds really simple, and that’s because it is. It is basically forcing us to consider the conditions which need to exist if our intended value is to be realised in the real world.
It could reveal technical, marketing, environment, design or functional requirements early on. I am using this thought process at the moment, in an MVP situation, and already it has revealed:
- our intended value will be eroded if we market the product a certain way
- our intended value will be eroded if we don’t place a strong focus on good data quality
- our intended value will be eroded if we have inflexible pricing options
- our intended value will be eroded if we don’t protect a certain relationship dynamic
The interesting bit is that, without doing this, I am pretty sure we might have fallen into some traps. Up until this point, it wasn’t clear that marketing the product in X way would actually negatively impact intended value for multiple personas. The data quality element of the product was always there, but since running through this process it has increased in priority and will need more consideration than previously thought.
Now, this is all just a prioritisation game in the end. You could do this exercise and it might reveal 100 conditions that need to be met in order for value to be ‘fully’ realised- this doesn’t mean your next (or first…or second…or 100th) iteration needs to tackle any or all of these conditions! You will need to dig into your prioritisation methods to figure out if you want to do something with the revealed conditions and when (Agile iterations yay!)
My suggestion is that maybe we should extend the conversation facilitated by the value proposition canvas- take a few minutes to extend it and see what it reveals; it took me 5 minutes of time to reveal around 6 ‘conditions to value realisation’ which will influence (to varying extents) upcoming ideation and prioritisation discussions.
Thanks for reading!
