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Value Proposition Design
Book

Value Proposition Design

How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda and Alan Smith
Wiley, 2014
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Editorial Rating

7

Recommendation

This manual serves as the sequel, or attendant workbook, to the bestseller Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, who are co-authors here with their Strategyzer software colleagues Greg Bernarda and Alan Smith. Their value-design workbook reduces the process of creating a product or service to its basics. Its PowerPoint-style text and accompanying info-graphics illustrate a clear-cut process for developing “products and services consumers want,” and will buy, use and enjoy. The authors focus their instructional guidebook on practicalities while leaving R&D theory to others. Their repetition of “jobs, pains and gains” forms a mantra supporting one singular purpose: following a straightforward process for creating offerings that sell because they help clients with their jobs, ease their pains and give them the gains they seek. The bullet-point format supports concepts that feel intuitively self-evident – information you may already know but haven’t codified or harnessed. Even experienced readers will benefit from this back-to-basic primer’s systematic approach. getAbstract recommends its information package – clear illustrations, sharp methodology, exercises, discussion questions and checklists – to designers and developers.

Summary

Designing Your Value Proposition

You and your team work hard creating products and services you believe your customers need and want. You devote time and resources to product development. You define and refine a business plan according to customer-specific data. You debate the pros and cons of different ideas until you reach an agreement.

Unfortunately, this process can veer off the track. Sales and marketing can fall out of the loop, and confusion can unsettle team meetings. You start to worry that your efforts and ideas don’t address the core of what your customers really want.

The “Value Proposition Design” process enables you and your team to analyze and organize customer information to reveal what your clientele does and doesn’t want. Focus your team’s efforts on creating customer value, and don’t sidetrack into designing features or technologies that miss the mark. Test your ideas continually instead of watching them fail at the final launch.

Put the “Value Proposition Canvas” tool at the center of your value proposition design process. Use it in concert with the “Environment Map,” which will help you define your context, and the “Business Model...

About the Authors

Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda and Alan Smith work for Strategyzer, a software company. Osterwalder and Pigneur co-wrote the bestseller Business Model Generation.

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