Show Notes
Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I might pass since I'm the chief executive officer. At quality events and I am so happy to have you back for the seventh installment of our design thinking series. And today we're going to delve into problem solution fit and how we achieve that through getting really into the pains and the gains of our.
Users. And in the last episode, we sort of defined who those users were and how we can kind of share that story. Now we're going to start making our way to the product or service that we might build. And today I get to introduce to you this idea of a value proposition canvas, and that is a fantastic. Uh, two that kind of forces us to really simplify all of the potential, uh, product ideas that we have.
It's sort of a forcing factor structures and organizes our thinking and becomes a reference point. Um, when we really work on the pains and gains, um, we then have to ask ourselves, are we relieving them and are we creating the gains? So let's. Delve into the value proposition canvas, and let's see, not only what it does to help us finding out the problem solution fit for our product or a service.
Let's see how this helps us launch product and build a team to do it. How to build a great company. All right, let's stop. Let's go right back to basics. The value proposition canvas effectively has. I want you to imagine it's got two parts and it's all about balancing them together. The first side, it's all about the customer and their wealth.
And on the other side, it's all about the proposition of without given product or service. Now, remember we're in the really early days of our entrepreneurial journey. So it really is. The product really is just a proposition. You know, we don't have, um, a fully working product. We're not servicing hundreds and hundreds of customers.
It's an idea. And so. The first thing we do is we frame this as a proposition and this proposition is, Hey, we're out here to solve the weld. And if we go back onto the other side, it's all about weighing up whether that actually helps the customer. So I want you to think of the value proposition. Canvas is essentially weighing up what the customer wants, what we want to build as a product and trying to actually create fit.
To create harmony and synergy between these two things, because frankly, the reason most products fail. Is that they don't solve a problem worth solving. And so this is a critical step in making sure hang on. We want to go build this big, fancy, exciting, exhilarating product or service, but let's just check in and make sure it's the right thing.
Something that delights and satisfies. Yeah. Customer and importantly, it's something that's doing a job that they're willing to pay to get some help getting done. So. At the core of this, we define on the customer side, we define the customer's pains and the customer's gains. Now the pains are said differently.
What are the things that block me? Or cause friction, when I'm trying to get a job done. Now this is introduced, introducing another part of the customer. So we've got the pain, but importantly, it's a pain that is related to getting a job done. Now, the jobs to be done would be getting the kids to school.
Um, a job to be done could be, uh, learning a new skill, a job to be done could be paying the mortgage. Whatever, whatever is irrelevant for your product is the jobs to be done. That are related, uh, to this area, uh, of the given product or service. What are the jobs that the user is trying to get done? And then what pains?
What blockers, what humps, what, what hurdles do they face trying to get it done? And you'll often, uh, find that it's related to specific pains around time. Around money around effort and convenience. And you will often find that these are where the pains are framed. Now, the gains that they're looking for would be, be essentially the benefits.
In their life when the pains are removed and when the job is completed, having a clear reference point, um, what gains they're looking for, what pains, um, do they currently, uh, encounter when they try and get this job done is a fantastic world, too. A way to zoom in on the customer's universe. As it pertains to the product or service that you have in mind.
Okay. So the jobs should be very specific to the category, the area, the industry, or wherever you're working within, it should be inside of it. Okay. And then you simply look at what are the blockers and what are the benefits, um, that, uh, they experience or desire. So this is the customer world. And then over on the other side, What is the connective tissue here is what are the pain relievers that the user requires and what are the gain creators that they're looking for?
And then you have these as reference to the given product services and features that are inside of your offering. So you have to make sure that a given feature of your product or service either creates again or relieves pain. And so what you then do is you have framed your product and said, okay, here's our product.
It's got three main features and it has certain gain creators because. And helps people enjoy more of this, uh, more of these lifestyle benefits, all of these wonderful things they get to enjoy. But on the other hand, there's also the pain relievers, which is specifically how our product or service addresses the pains of time, effort, and money.
I mean, those are your classics. You can, you can add a lot more, but these are really important. Cornerstones that you need to create. So what I want you to imagine, you've got your list of features in your product, but then the, the job you have to do is ask yourself, how's it creating a game or how's it relieving a pain, and then you have to match those with the gains that your customers.
Desire and the pains that they actually experience, and you need to be able to map these. You need to be able to literally draw a line between those and say, this given feature in our product, we're going to go, you know what we'll do, we'll go left from left to right. In in the canvas right now. So you've got your given product with its features.
A particular feature has to have a pain relieving characteristic. You draw a line across and make sure that relates to specifically if your customers have an issue with time that you have to a, be able to connect those two together and that when you actually address and relieve that pain, this enables going right to the far right side, this enables the customer, the user to get the job done.
Now, just because you've met to this day actually mean that we're finished our job here because yeah. Do you have to test and validate the date that the assumption that said feature relieves the pain for the customer. Who's trying to get a job done and they would be satisfied. This is something that you have to go back to our surveys.
You have to go back to our interviews and what's really exciting is going forward. This hypothesis is something that you would prototype in real life in situation in order to actually have the highest form of the problem solution fit what we've done here by weighing out what the customer needs and what we're offering as a proposition in our product or service.
If we test and experiment and we validate these assumptions, we can then say, you know what? Guys we've got problem solution fit. We know the pains and gains. We're able to address them. This is a product worth building. Now, once you get there, this is something that I have learned, um, from years and years of work, when you know the pains and gains of the customer, you can then go and create some use cases of different features, products, and services, build them into user stories, epics, and themes, and then you prototype them.
Once you validate your prototype, you then build an MVP. And then from your MVP, you really least versions one, two, three, four of your product. So if you're familiar with design thinking and agile development, this is exactly how modern apps are built in terms of best practices. But here is a little bonus special for you.
What I've also discovered is that the best marketing and storytelling, the best customer engagement when you're marketing and selling to customers comes from speaking to their pains and gains. So what we have here is the unearthing of the pains and gains not only helps us build the product. But it helps us build the marketing too.
And that means that you can build your product and marketing consistently and in an integrated fashion from day one. And this is really good because right now, most product teams walk around to the marketing department, knock on the door and say, Hey guys, we're finished this product. Can you find a way to sell this in someone to sell it to.
Here we are in 2020, the way it has to be done going forward is that the marketing proposition and the product should be built together and rooted in these powerful insights around the pains and gains of customers. Yeah. If you know the pain and gain that your customers, either the pains they experience or the gains they desire, you can then find out that when we relieve the pain, when we create the gain, what emotional, uh, characteristics are unlocked, is it delight, happiness, satisfaction, calm, serenity, whatever that emotional frame is, you can then make your proposition testing through the emotions.
That your users desire. This is the, how come this is the whole reason they're trying to get this job done. So what you then do is you have a secret sauce, which is the emotion. So you can propose the gain, uh, creation or the pain relief, but through the right emotional lens. And once you know that, then you can prototype.
Different types of interactions on how they might enjoy and delight and engage with marketing and sales materials. But here's the last thing you can even prototype. How a customer might talk about use word of mouth and share an advocate, your given product or service to other people. So you can actually prototype a customer to customer advocacy.
It is so powerful and you can do all of this before you launch your product. So once again, this bottom up philosophy of de-risking before you launch your product, not only the actual given product service or feature, but also you can de risk the marketing, which is often a big expense on the P and L.
But just to take this to a whole nother level, if you've identified a huge. A pain that your users experience and, uh, they really want to relieve these pains and they weren't really wanting to experience these gains. This can become your North star. This can be a. Organizational North star can be a lighthouse for the sort of culture that you want to build, because you're in the business of helping your customers achieve this a better world to have impact on their life, to have a meaningful role in their life.
And so what you can then do is create this North star for the, for the mission that you're on and the culture that you want to create and inside of your culture. You can define the behaviors of your team, the systems and the symbols, so that it all comes cohesively together. The product, the organization, and the marketing all comes back to the central point of understanding your users, pains and gains who I know.
Okay. That one is a lot in there. There's probably 1,000,001 questions that you have. No problem. Just jump over to bottom up.io. You can get our free design thinking master class. You can hear us going deep into this. You can get the slides. Uh, you can really go back to this and go really, really deep in the masterclass.
So I hope you've enjoyed this journey into using understanding the pains and gains of your youth in order to get a problem solution fit and a whole lot more. Okay. That's a wrap of the bottom up skills podcast. I'll see you next time.