Where do you start when diagnosing problems with delivering value to your customers?
I often hear my customers talk about tough problems and challenges they have with delivering products or services their customers value. A commonly used phrase when talking about these problems and challenges is “Flow of Value”. To me, Flow of Value includes creation of value and a method for validating that value with internal or external customers (Value Creation Validation) and delivery of that created value (Value Delivery). Bundling Value Creation Validation and Value Delivery together makes looking at and evaluating problems more complex. Each takes a different perspective and approaches to understand and address which can simplify your starting point.
I will address Value Delivery first. I want you to think about Value Delivery as the conveyor belt that delivers your organization’s products or services to internal or external customers. The problems and challenges associated with delivery are hard and complicated but can be understood and addressed with holistic and lean approaches (such as Value Stream Management, Kanban, etc.,). Your goal with this approach is to optimize the end-to-end flow or delivery of your products or services (i.e., identifying inefficient processes, hand-offs, dependencies, insufficient competency, etc.,) and redesigning to remove or improve them.
With Value Creation Validation, you must take a different approach. This approach is hypothesis-driven. In other words, an approach that acknowledges you are making assumptions about what is valuable to customers which must be validated. These are problems and challenges associated with understanding and creating products or services that help customers solve important problems, accomplish important jobs, or bring delight. These are hard and complex and must be discovered because people, organizations, and ecosystems adapt and change. An example of a simple product that demonstrates this is Pet Rocks. This product came in and out of style. On the surface it is not obvious that this product, for a period, would be a winner - but it was. What products or services are valuable to customers is not a given and not straightforward – they must be discovered.
Using Value Creation Validation and Value Delivery perspectives as a starting point, my goal in future articles is to provide practical approaches, frameworks, and tools to simplify how you think about and diagnose problems and challenges, determine options and trade-offs, implement, evaluate, and reevaluate solutions to move forward. It connects how to use these perspectives, approaches, frameworks, and tools from organizational strategy to delivering to customers. This connected view and how to evaluate and implement it effectively will not lessen your challenging problems. What it will do is give you ways to simplify your understanding and formulate a way forward that is practical, measurable, and outcome-based. This journey will require a mindset of rethinking and reevaluating how you think about and approach growing and running a successful organization. I know this is a high bar I have set for myself and one I am excited to begin exploring with you.
Understanding that context matters, the approach that follows provides general guidelines that can help you simplify your starting point and understanding of what to focus on given your current reality. If your situation is:
You can deliver product and service changes and new features quickly, but customers are not finding them valuable, then you start with diagnosing your Value Creation Validation.
Customers love your products and services, but you can’t deliver changes or new features quickly or your competition is able to launch new features faster than you, then you start with diagnosing your Value Delivery.
You are having trouble both delivering products and services your customers value and you can’t deliver them fast enough, then you start with Value Delivery because you need to increase your speed of delivery to increase your speed of learning what is valued by your customers (Value Creation Validation).
You are creating a new product or service, then you start with Value Creation Validation. Creating products or services that customers don’t value is a huge challenge for both startups and established organizations alike.
