Observing and Orienting
Are you and your business stuck? Well, you may have learned about the Observe → Orient → Decide → Act (“OODA”) cycle in Decision Making, Learning, and Competitive Advantage. To start getting you unstuck, let’s work on re-observing the world around you in order for you to re-orient. Our goal is to help you make decisions regarding previously un-seen options on your way to taking new actions that will yield new results.
Your Customers and Your Value Proposition
Let’s start at the beginning. To be in business, you need to offer compelling, differentiated value to your customers. So, to get your business unstuck, start by taking a fresh look at the customers you most wish to serve.
Over the course of the coming week, create at least two drafts of your Value Proposition Canvas:
As you can see, the Value Proposition Canvas is a one-page summary of:
- Your customers’ “jobs” or objectives
- The pains they hope to avoid and the gains they hope to achieve, and
- How your (existing or potential) products and services map to your customers’ most significant gains and pains.
The Value Proposition Canvas is like a lightly structured napkin sketch that helps stimulate productive thinking and conversation.
In other words, the Value Proposition Canvas helps articulate answers to three important questions:
- Who are my customers—precisely?
- What do they want and need?
- How do I propose to help them get what they want and need?
We’ve found that the process of creating the canvas helps sharpen our thinking and makes it easier to share and discuss our thoughts with others.
This Section’s Lessons
- How to Ask Better Questions and The Empathy Map Canvasare methods for challenging and clarifying your understanding of your potential customers.
- The Value Proposition Canvas explains how to capture your customer insights. It helps you see—and share—what you say and think.
- Marketing Physics and Shrink the Pond give you a framework for crafting and communicating a strong value proposition.
Additional Reading
If you want to take a deeper dive into the construction of your value proposition, check out Value Proposition Design.
