🧠 Deep dive — how to design the strongest possible value prop
My fav tool for crafting irresistible offers? Customer experience maps.
Hey friend 👋
Through facilitating the launch of more than 100 startups, I’ve learned the art of crafting compelling value props.
It goes beyond features and benefits, pains and gains.
Your strongest possible value prop emerges from having an intimate understanding of the customer’s experience before they met you. By mapping it out, you uncover not just what they need, but how they feel in needing it.
This insight is the key to designing an offering that resonates deeply, stands apart, and scales.
In this deep dive, I’ll walk you through how customer experience mapping can generate value props that aren’t just desirable — they’re downright irresistible.
Let’s dive deep 👇
The core problem is that most founders don’t have a process for designing compelling value props.
Instead, they start by dropping random assumptions into a Value Proposition Canvas as they pop into their mind. Then they pull out important few pains and gains here and there, put some good language around their product, and go to market.
Sounds great, except…
The result is often a shallow, weak, and unfocused offering that doesn’t resonate with customers, because they first built a value prop and then validated it with customers’ experience.
You want to do the opposite:
Use the customer’s experience to design an irresistible value prop.
First, some clarity: an experience map is not the same as a customer journey map.
You may have seen journey maps before — especially if you’re in SaaS. They’re diagrams that map out the journey of the customer as they use your product, from when they first hear about you through their use of the product to accomplish a key goal. It’s a great tool that helps identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
But an experience map is completely different.
Whereas a journey map shows what your customer’s experience is like with you, the experience map details their experience without you.
Not before you, but without you entirely.
An experience map starts with the problem you’re trying to solve and the customer for whom you’re solving it, and asks the question:
What does your customer’s life look like without your product?
If you’re solving a real problem, the customer experiences pain.
But more importantly, they are doing something to try to solve the problem — right now, without you.
Remember the early adopter pyramid?
Your first customers are the ones that:
Have a problem;
And they’re aware of it;
And they’re actively looking for a solution;
And they’re so desperate that they’ve hacked something together out of spare parts;
And they have the money to buy your solution.
(In case you’re unfamiliar, or just want a refresher, here’s a quick primer.)
By definition, early adopters are already trying to solve the problem themselves.
Their solution probably sucks — that’s why they need you. But the customer is still doing something. If they aren’t, you’re probably not solving a problem worth solving.
Because they’re doing something already, the customer is comparing your value prop to whatever that is. That’s your competition — whether it’s a competitor or not.
(And yes, you have competition.)
Ergo, to design a compelling value proposition, you have to understand not only why the customer has the problem, but also:
What life looks like without any solution;
What they’ve hacked together to try to solve it;
What their process looks like with their hacky solution;
What about it works well;
What about it doesn’t work well;
etc.
And that’s an experience map.
An experience map is a flowchart, from left to right, that documents customers’ experience trying to meet their needs.
It looks like this:
It’s not complicated, but it does require a pretty deep understanding of your customer. If you want to dive deeper, I have a online course on customer discovery launching soon.
Once you understand your customer deeply, you can map their experience in four steps:
1. Start at the left with their need.
This is the context — the “why”.
Your customer has a problem, they’ve identified it, and this is the point at which they’ve decided to do something about it — right now.
For example:
I’d like to lose weight.
I want to keep track of my to-dos.
I want a consolidated view of all of my IoT devices.
etc.
This is also your opportunity to dig deep. The problem likely isn't new, so:
Why did they finally decide to do something about it?
Why now, rather than yesterday or tomorrow?
In other words, look for a triggering event:
I made a New Year’s Resolution.
I got a bad performance review at work.
etc.
Once you have a starting point, follow it through.
2. Document the process of solving it as you move rightward.
Proceed to document each step along the way as they look for a solution, fail and succeed along the way, and ultimately stop — because they successfully solved the problem; gave up for some reason; just stuck their finger in the proverbial dam temporarily; or whatever.
Each node in the process is one step — it’s basically just a flowchart so far.
Each step should be granular enough that it’s easy to describe in a sentence of two, but not so granular that the map becomes weighed down in minutiae.
Then, for each step in the process, add some detail.
Include a brief description of what happens at each step, and whatever information you need to get a complete view of that step in the process:
Who is involved (customers, friends, colleagues, competitors)?
Where is it happening (at their computer, in their car, at Costco)?
What tools or processes are involved (apps, systems, policies, procedures)?
etc.
This is not a time to skimp. Get detailed!
If you don’t have the detail, go talk to more customers.
3. List out the pain points for each step.
At this point, our map documents the what and the how. But it doesn’t document the emotion.
For each step in the map, interrogate their mental state. As they go through the process:
What are their wants & needs?
What’s working for them?
What isn’t working for them?
What do they fear?
etc.
Don’t just guess! Your offering will live or die based on the empathy you’re able to develop in this step.
If you can’t describe exactly how they feel, using the very words they’d use to describe how it feels, go talk to more customers.
Or, as Steve Blank said:
Cheating on customer discovery is like cheating in your parachute packing class.
Once you have it mapped out, the groundwork is laid to bring it home:
4. Find opportunities in their experience.
For each step in the map, find what to keep and what to kill.
The opportunities lie in your ability to preserve (and even accentuate) the good in their experience and eliminate (or severely curtail) the bad in their experience.
For each step, ask how your product can:
Create the benefits the customer wants;
Alleviate the pain they’re experiencing;
Provide an experience that assuages their fears;
And keep what already works.
And now… congratulations! You’ve just drawn a roadmap to a idea worth testing.
You’ve understood their world, developed empathy for their experience, and discovered how you can fit into it in a way that creates maximum value.
The best part?
This experience map becomes your value proposition.
Your experience map should be impressively robust by now.
In fact, it’s so robust that it contains everything you need to design a compelling value proposition that you can test with real customers.
In addition to the opportunities you’ve identified, you understand customer experience at each step so well that you’re able to leverage that empathy to describe the problem better than the customer could describe it themselves.
In other words: you also have marketing copy. 💥
Bet let’s zoom back out and close on a point I made earlier:
Not only is experience mapping a systematic way to uncover pains and opportunities, but it looks at the value your product can provide to a customer from the same lens they will use to evaluate it: their experience without you.
You’re writing how they’re reading.
And that’s it for this week!
If you want to create an experience map for your product, here’s a free template you can use:
As always, thanks for reading. I’ll see you in the new year my friend.
—jdm