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

3.1What to Test

Testing the Circle

Prove which jobs, pains, and gains matter to customer most by conducting experiments that produce evidence beyond your initial customer research. Only after this has been done should you get started with your value proposition. This will prevent you from wasting time with products and services customers don’t care about.

Provide evidence showing what customers care about (the circle) before focusing on how to help them (the square).

Start with jobs, pains, and gains

In the design section we looked at a series of techniques to better understand customers. In this chapter we go a step further. The objective of “testing the circle” is to confirm with evidence that our profile sketches, our initial research, our observations, and our insights from interviews were correct. We aim to know with more certainty which jobs, pains, and gains customers really care about.

Possessing evidence about customer jobs, pains, and gains before you focus on your value proposition is very powerful. If you start by testing your value proposition, you never know if customers are rejecting your value proposition or if you are simply addressing irrelevant jobs, pains, or gains. This is less likely to happen if you have evidence about which jobs, pains, and gains matter to customers.

Of course, this means you need to find creative ways to test customer preferences ...