4 steps to clarify your offering
There I was at a conference in Ohio, giving a talk on innovation processes. Part of my talk discussed the importance of starting with what I call the “Future Voice of the Customer” (FVoC). To me the FVoC is what the customer will want at a later time 𝜏C. After my talk I sat with an executive from one of the largest chemical companies, who said, “Your point about starting with the customer was good. It’s what we’ve always done however. We always start by asking for what the customers want, and we listen closely.” Shortly after that, I was speaking with another speaker in the hallway. She said, “I enjoyed your talk. It wasn’t news to us however. We’re always seeking what the customer wants, and send out LOTS of surveys to find out!” And I realized that I had failed in my presentation.
Figure. An “offering” describes the whole before-during-after purchase experience of your customer. It is multi-dimensional, with some key dimensions shown here.
In fact I don’t recall ever speaking to a customer of mine or an audience who says in surprise, “Oh! Wow! So you’re saying you think we should find out what our customer wants! Great idea! Never thought of that!” Instead they reply, often with an air of derision, “Of course! Who doesn’t ask what their customer wants?” From my experience, the failure to clarify the Future Voice of the Customer (including a launch time), to express and test it as a prototype, and to iterate rapidly … is the biggest reason for low innovation throughput. Let’s move beyond the simplistic to four important steps for Service:
Choose a launch time. Decide when you plan to provide your Offering to your customer or customer segment. Choose a particular date. It might be in 3 days, 3 months, 3 years -- you decide. Longer gives you more time to outdistance your competitors, and potentially deliver something much better, but there is of course more uncertainty in the future.
Hypothesize a Future Voice of the Customer (FVoC). Based on what we know at the beginning, we hypothesize a model of what Service the customer will want or need, for their life to be better, have fewer frictions, entail less pain, be more convenient, have more opportunity. We are not innovating for today’s customer voice, since that will not be the same customer voice as exists at a future time. Rather, we’re hypothesizing (educated guessing) where our customer will be at the time chosen in the first bullet above. We don’t want to get to where the ball was instead of where it is, nor do we want to be too far ahead of the play.
Test the FVoC with a prototype. We next express our FVoC as a full prototype, or as a minimal viable product (MVP). Include all the key parts of the FVoC vision into the prototype, and test it with customers, or if possible, in the open market. This is usually more a task of something complex, than of something complicated. But first we must consider the prototype in full context. For example, Does it integrate into the customer’s life easily? Is the cost low enough? Can they buy it at a convenient location? How often is maintenance work required? Does the product need protective or aesthetic packaging?
Iterate prototypes to reach your final offering. Our final offering must simultaneously satisfy the FVoC along all relevant dimensions (Figure 1-1). We must repeat this process until we have a final offering, which should occur before the chosen launch time, and do so as rapidly as we can. Future blogs will contain ways to increase the speed.
In summary, in your innovation work, consider all the dimensions of an offering, not just the product or service at hand.
