Mastering User-Centric Value: A Guide for Time-Pressed Entrepreneurs

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company?

You can only create business value when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business.

Ed Biden explains how to solve this:

Even though there are many ways to understand what your users will value; when it comes to working on a tight timeframe, these two techniques are incredibly valuable:

1. Jobs To Be Done
2. Customer Journey Mapping

If you want to find out even more, check out the full deep-dive here.

1. Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)

“People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”
– Clayton Christensen

The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly.

In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view.

This allows you to think about more innovative solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value.

To use JTBD to understand your customers, you should think through five key steps:

1. Use case — what is the outcome that people want?
2. Alternatives — what other solutions are people using now?
3. Progress — where are people getting blocked? What does a better solution look like?
4. Value Proposition — why would they use your product over the alternatives?
5. Price — what would a customer pay for progress against this problem?

2. Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals.

In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into multiple steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel.

The touch points can be any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow:

• Website and app screens
• Notifications and emails
• Customer service calls
• Account management / sales touch points
• Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime)

Users’ feelings can be visualized by making a note of:

• What they like or feel good about at this step
• What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step
• How they feel overall

By mapping the customer’s experience to the reality of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align your stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.