Alexander Osterwalder - Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

How to create products and services customers want.
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Written by

Alex Osterwalder

Yves Pigneur

Greg Bernarda

Alan Smith

Designed by

Trish Papadakos

Cover image: Pilot Interactive

Cover design: Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos

Copyright 2014 by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Greg Bernarda, and Patricia Papadakos. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-97310-3

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• There should be better tools available to help you create value for your customers and your business.
• You might be pursuing the wrong tasks and you feel insecure about the next steps.
• Its difficult to learn what customers really want.
• The information and data you get from (potential) customers is overwhelming and you dont know how to best organize it.
• Its challenging to go beyond products and features toward a deep understanding of customer value creation.
• You lack the big picture of how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

• Lacked a shared language and a shared understanding of customer value creation.
• Got bogged down by unproductive meetings with tons of unstructured blah blah blah conversations.
• Worked without clear processes and tools.
• Were focused mainly on technologies, products, and features rather than customers.
• Conducted meetings that drained energy and ended without a clear outcome.
• Were misaligned.

• Were big bold bets that failed and wasted a lot money.
• Put energy into polishing and refining a business plan until it perpetuated the illusion that it could actually work.
• Spent a lot of time building detailed spreadsheets that were completely made up and turned out to be wrong.
• Spent more time developing and debating ideas rather than testing them with customers and stakeholders.
• Let opinions dominate over facts from the field.
• Lacked clear processes and tools to minimize risk.
• Used processes suited for running a business rather than ones for developing new ideas.

Get From Failure to Success poster

Organize information about what customers want in a simple way that make the patterns of value creation easily visible. As a result, you will more effectively design value propositions and profitable business models that directly target your customers most pressing and important jobs, pains, and gains.

Gain clarity.

Equip your team with a shared language to overcome blah blah blah, conduct more strategic conversations, run creative exer- cises, and get aligned. This will lead to more enjoyable meetings that are full of energy and produce actionable outcomes beyond a focus on technology, products, and features toward creating value for your customers and your business.

Get your team aligned.

Relentlessly test the most important hypotheses underlying your business ideas in order to reduce the risk of failure. This will allow you to pursue big bold ideas without having to break the bank. Your processes to shape new ideas will be fit for the task and complement your existing processes that help you run your business.