Whether discovering a new value stream for a still-to-be-launched product or seeking to improve existing value creation in the face of new uncertainty, the task may seem daunting. The Value Stream Discovery Loop and Moves the Needle is available to help. The tool provides an intuitive progression to enable both value stream discovery and optimization.
A product’s value stream provides an opportunity for organizations to identify inefficiencies, redundancy, bottlenecks, and other types of waste in their processes. Unlike most company cost-cutting efforts, mapping, analyzing, and improving the value stream leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, reduced costs, and increased profitability, without sacrificing value creation.
Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product). “Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation. But what if the value isn’t there? Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating?”
The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective.
People often aren’t conscious of their needs or how to address them. This explains why we buy a lot of things we don’t need. Because of this, if one wants to create value in the world, it’s up to product managers to understand needs. In other words, they shouldn’t be asking customers what they want or asking them to predict how they might behave in the future.
Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)
There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.
we need to double down on understanding our customers deeply in order to build products that provide value. Old market research techniques just aren’t effective in the face of massive uncertainty. Product managers should be out doing this. Designers should be out doing this. Engineers should be going along for the ride. Build exploration into your regular work to improve efficiency of execution. Running experiments helps reduce risk and waste, not to mention that it provides real-world data to enable high-confidence decision-making.
On this episode of Disruption Proof, we're discussing uncertainty in the market and how to go about it. The default nature of a new business is . There is no blueprint yet for building, marketing, selling and delivering new value for customers. The first step is (or ought to be) understanding the market needs. This requires interviewing potential customers and running experiments all before building any of it. In this episode, you'll learn how to undergo this exploration.
This episode covers how you can properly 'survey' your customers so you can better understand them. We often lead customers on and are looking for confirmation bias when making decisions. Brant Cooper, NYT bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle will go through how to properly pull data and make customer-centric decisions.
This podcast covers, what is opportunity discovery and what it means to find new opportunities within your organization.
Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you and what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation “No One Cares” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.
The better you understand customers and their needs, the more likely you will be to develop a product that not only provides need-addressing utility but also resonates at an emotional level.
