A tool to fit, model and test part of your sustainable business model and or product with the gains and pains of a customer target group. It helps you establish the value hypothesis.
The canvas helps you discover or think about customer and visualises the value your product will offer to these customers.
Make sure to prioritise and focus on the critical parts, do not fall in the trap of trying to address all pains, gains and all jobs-to-be-done. Don’t strive for perfect.
It directly helps by figuring out which features are valuable and which ones are a waste so that cutting (wasteful) features can improve a product.
Prioritisation
To make sure we don’t have scope creep and we can focus on the core of the business it’s important to prioritise everything in this canvas. The following have a profound impact on the priority of a gain/pain creators/relievers.
- Impact
- How significantly does this affect customers?
- Frequency
- How often does this happen?
- Market size
- How many of this segment will feel this?
- Implementation effort
- How complex / time consuming is it to deliver this solution or address this.
Customer profile
For every segment of customers, you should create a customer profile, which exists out of 3 parts: jobs to be done, pains and gains
These profiles will help you understand your customer segment better by figuring out what they need to accomplish, what makes them feel bad and what will give them a feeling of success. This will make it easier to build strong relationships with the customer.
Jobs to be done
What jobs are these groups trying to achieve? These jobs could be functional, social, emotional or just basic needs.
- Moving a desk
- Impressing colleagues
- Have clarity while working
Pains
A pain is something that is disadvantages to the jobs to be done, from annoyances to risk, challenges, costs or anything negative really.
It is beneficial to classify the pains as light, moderate or severe. As well should you try to incorporate the frequency of such pain.
Some questions that can help you get started
- What is expensive for my customer (in time, cost, effort, …)
- What makes my customer experience negative emotions (annoyance, disappointment, physical pain, social loss)
- What is my customer unhappy about in current solutions.
- What will have bad consequences for my customer?
- What worries my customer
- What makes my customer hesitant to adopt new solutions
Gains
Gains are metrics the customer uses to measure how successful a job was, things that made them feel good having the outcome or how the achieved that outcome.
These are usually concrete outcomes but could be any benefits or aspirations for the customer.
Again ranking the relevance and noting the frequency can be helpful.
Some questions that can help you get started
- What savings makes my customer happy (time, cost, effort, …)?
- What results do my customers expect and what would amaze them?
- What would make the jobs to be done easier?
- What positive end results do the customer expect?
- What does my customer think success is like for the jobs to be done?
- What would make them less hesitant?
Value proposition
Products and services
Here you write down all services and or products you are able, and are going to, deliver.
MVP Focus & Core offering
When listing these products and services, focus on the core of the business and when starting out on the minimum feature set.
When we do not prioritize or bloat the canvas with too many features, feature creep will set in. Remember to be resilient against feature requests even when they come from yourself.
Examples: Moving furniture from A to B, Picking up the furniture and storing it securely, Offering an insurance if furniture breaks.
Ask these for each service
- Will this service/product accomplish a job-to-be-done?
- Is this tangible, digital or financial?
- Is it crucial or trivial, how relevant is this.
- How frequent will the customer use this product/service?
Pain relievers
How will your product or service relieve pain from customers. Does it directly direct the pains from the profile? Ranking these relievers could help you give a new insight again.
Any reducing, minimizing or even eliminating is important and to keep in mind anything that makes their life easier.
Gain creators
How do the product or service increase, maximize or even create beneficial outcomes. These could either be expected or desired by the customer or they could also be surprised about new gain creators.
Ranking these could also provide insights.
Keep in mind: Anything that makes the job to be done a job well done.
Measuring
For each of the pain relievers and gain creators we can define measurable outcomes or metrics. Try to answer the following for each:
- How will we measure success
- What customer behaviour will indicate this
- What metrics would show our value and or success
- What are the metrics values for success.
Coordination takes too much time
- Reduce coordination time
- When was the latest change to the organisation
- When the coordination time trends downwards
- Reduce coordination time from X to Y.
Make sure your metrics are meaningful and not vanity.
Validation and testing
This is a tool to create hypothesis, the outcome should be testable and or measurable, it is also important to iterate on these canvases and update them while you go.
Be sure to use your customer feedback to iterate on these canvasses, using metrics, analysis or even customer interviews.