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Value Discovery

Rethinking Innovation with Value Discovery

Product discovery is one of the hot topics that is beginning to bubble up in business. We’ve been doing product discovery for more than a decade here at Flow Academy but our approach is to put it in the wider context of value discovery.

Here’s our thinking.

Product Discovery

Product discovery is all about deep customer understanding. Over the last decade, techniques like Lean Startup mean companies push too many projects into their product funnels. Now, we realise we have to do much more validation before we begin work. 

Product discovery processes can use customer insight platforms to kick start this process. We use deep customer segmentation and customer psychographic profiles. They are very effective. And we have our value discovery training to help. 

However, these techniques only take you so far. The product team needs to understand how best to relate to the customer around the new product and how customer expectations will influence design and price. That’s another way of saying, product is also strategy.

Value discovery

Value can be discovered in a number of ways so let’s set them out briefly and simply:

Customer
Success

In many instances, innovation is unnecessary. Your key problem may be that your customer does not know enough about your product to use it properly and therefore to acquire value from it. Value is being constrained by how you communicate it.

Customer know-how
and product

In many instances, innovation is unnecessary. Your key problem may be that your customer does not know enough about your product to use it properly and therefore to acquire value from it. Value is being constrained by how you communicate it.

Asset
Discovery

That should set you thinking about the assets you bring to innovation. Time and again we see companies repeating projects they already did years before. Or ignoring key assets. Asset discovery means you know where you truly need to innovate.

Product, price and
revenue choices

Increasingly, the customer’s perception of value is tied up in how you choose to secure revenues. If the product is being designed around a recurring revenue stream then potentially you will be inviting customers to hold you accountable for increasing value over time. 

Customer and
Community

Recurring revenue products generally need community so in a sense “product value” lies in your ability to develop “community”.

Product and
Ecosystem

Products can be platforms that need an active ecosystem. Ecosystem thinking needs to be part of the value discovery process. Who can help you build out a product, service or ecosystem?

We teach these wider elements of value discovery in our product discovery workshop.

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