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

2.3Understanding Customers

Six Techniques to Gain Customer Insights

Understanding the customer’s perspective is crucial to designing great value propositions. Here are six techniques that will get you started. Make sure you use a good mix of these techniques to understand your customers deeply.

The Data Detective

Build on existing work with (desk) research. Secondary research reports and customer data you might already have provide a great foundation for getting started. Look also at data outside your industry and study analogs, opposites, or adjacencies.

Difficulty level: ★

Strength: great foundation for further research

Weakness: static data from a different context

The Journalist

Talk to (potential) customers as an easy way to gain customer insights. It’s a well-established practice. However, customers might tell you one thing in an interview but behave differently in the real world.

Difficulty level: ★★

Strength: quick and cheap to get started with first learnings and insights

Weakness: customers Don’t always know what they want and actual behavior differs from interview answers

The Anthropologist

Observe (potential) customers in the real world to get good ...