Five Proven Growth Hacks Using Your Value Proposition Canvas
High-growth products start from deep consumer insights. But a lack of time, poor communication and mis-alignment hamper teams' efforts to understand their customers. The value proposition canvas is a powerful tool to discover, iterate and align your teams around customer needs.
Whilst I was growing my product team from 2 to 25 PMs, designers and researchers, I really struggled to get us all on the same page. After lots of painful meetings, I realised that each of the 25 people in my team had a different understanding of our customer. If our product team couldn’t agree on our customers’ needs, then how were the sales team ever going to sell our product?
We started using the value proposition canvas throughout our growth process. At my monthly Launch workshops I help product leaders increase engagement with their product, alignment with their teams and boost their own career trajectories by getting better and understanding and communicating their customers’ needs.
Used correctly, the value proposition canvas is an important enabler to customer understanding and communication. Here are five ways that product teams are using the value prop canvas to grow.
Deepen your customer understanding by updating the profile after each customer interview
Great products start with deep understanding of the customer. Book 5 interviews with current users and 5 interviews with potential customers who are not using your product. Take 45 minutes with each to dig into their jobs, pains and gains, by asking questions like:
- What are you working on? (Jobs)
- What are you trying to achieve (Jobs)
- What will you be able to do when you achieve that? (Jobs)
- What’s stopping you achieving that? (Pains)
- How will you measure success? (Gains)
Update your customer profile after each interview. You’re goal is to figure out the main job, most severe pains and most important gains of your customer.
Increase engagement with your product by focussing on features users love
Once you’ve figured out what your customers’ main job, most severe pains and most important gains are, focus entirely on satisfying them. Go back through your backlog and remove any items that are not directly addressing the things that matter most to your customer.
Find product-market fit by removing features
If you’ve not yet found product-market fit, trying removing some features. Most product teams try to add more features to please users and find fit. But most teams actually find fit when they understand their customers well enough to focus on a handful of features that delight a small segment of users.
Use the canvas to identify jobs, pains and gains that matter most, then remove other features from your app and watch your metrics improve.
Increase conversions by sharpening your copy
Sharpening your landing page and App Store copy will increase your conversions. Experiment with copy that speaks to customers about their goals (jobs), the problems they are facing (pains), the solution you offer to their problems (your product) and the benefit (gains) they’ll receive when they switch to your product.
Align with your team by sharing your profile
Too many meetings and too few decisions being made are an ideal antidote to growth.
Use your canvas to get everyone on the same page and drive agreement on the outcomes (jobs) that your customers truly care about.
How are you using the value proposition canvas?
Got a novel way to use the value prop canvas to grow your product? Let me know about it!
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash