Understanding the market in which one operates is a crucial part of success of any organization.
The information types and functionality organized under the Market category seeks to help identify and share these types of insights.
Managing market insight has multiple benefits:
In short, managing market insights helps make the go-to-market process a more predictable, transparent and continously improved process.
A study showed that once an organization agrees on
...the organization is is five-times more likely to create a product or service that wins in the marketplace.
Market insight is relevant across multiple departments of a traditional business, including:
In addition to describing the organizations publicly facing solutions, the market functionality can also be used to describe profiles and solutions that are served internally within the organization (internal market) to help gain a better understanding of how each team is set up to support other teams.
The information types are inspired by well-established methodologies like the Value Proposition Canvas and Outcome Driven Innovation.
Here's an overview of how the main market information types are conceptually associated to oneanother.
Note that profiles and solutions are not associated directly, but rather through associations between the outcomes associated with a profile and the benefits associated with a solution. This design aims to reduce the risk of assuming which solutions fit which profiles.
A hypothesis is something we belive might be true, but which we have not been able to prove or disprove (yet).
Although hypotheses are a very common tool in scientific work, they have yet to become popular and operationalized in non-academic circles. The platform aims to change that.
There are a multitude of benefits associated with adopting a hypothetical mindset within a team or an organization, including:
Hypothesis are especially relevant for innovative, growing and high performing teams continually on the lookout for a better understanding of the world around them and a more optimal way of doing things.
This includes, but is not limited to:
If you do not have any hypothesis to test, it's useful to ask yourself if you are doing sufficient innovation within your domain.
Hypotheses can be organized into different groups. In a startup, the hypotheses can most commonly be placed into one or more of the following four categories:
A hypothesis can have one of the following states:
The Organizational hypotheses report provides an overview of the hypotheses that are currently a priority for the organization.
The report displays the hypotheses that are either on the Considering or Experimenting stage, across all teams.
Profiles describe the types of people we are interested in helping.
Motivations for describing a profile includes
If your organization has existed for some time, you have probably already seen a pattern in the people that you are helping, and you'll be able to deduce a set of profiles from that insight. You might also have had specific thoughts or discussions with regards to which types of people you want to help, and which types have proven not to be worth the effort.
If you, on the other hand, are just starting out, these patterns and discussions may not have emerged yet.
In this case, before identifying a profile, aim to have met with at least two people with a similar/overlapping set of desired outcomes before identifying a group of people as a profile. If you don't, you might incorrectly assume that one person cares about the same outcomes as someone else based on relatively superficial characteristics like their role.
The intuition when naming a profile (especially if you're delivering to the B2B market) is to use job titles. In a profile context however, this doesn't give us much to work with as people seemingly in the same role aren't neccessarily focused on the same outcomes.
For better profile naming scheme, try combining these three factors in the profile name:
Here are some examples
Creating more specific profiles helps us narrow down the outcomes and more easily personify and identify with the profile.
Be wary of creating too specific profiles, as there won't be enough people matching it, and as a result it will make less sense to invest time and effort into building out and targeting the profile.
Since creating a profile takes time, it does not make sense to create profiles for anyone and everyone you might encounter or think of.
We want to focus on describing profiles where the benefits of sharing the profile insight with other team members outweights the cost of organizing and absorbing the insight.
When considering adding a profile, check to see if it matches the following criteria:
The intuition when describing profiles is to focus on the people outside our organization that we're looking to help (external profiles). However, most teams within an organization also have a role in helping people inside the organization (internal profiles).
Here's an example:
A product team within a tech company might identify their external profiles as different types of users of their product. However, the product team also needs to satisfy internal profiles, like:
In order to get a balanced view of priorities and stakeholders, make sure to consider both external and internal profiles when deciding which profiles are worth describing.
In order to better understand the needs of the people associated with a profile, the profile makes room for describing the desired outcomes of the people who identify with a profile.
The desired outcomes are grouped into three separate types:
Desired outcomes are reusable across profiles. This means that when you add a new job, gain or pain, the system searches for desired outcomes already defined on other profiles.
A profile can have one of the following states:
Propositions help us systematically improve our understanding of what profiles in our market care about.
The purpose of propositions is to
To get started, you first need to create create a proposition. You can do this by going to the Team > Propositions, and selecting "New proposition".
A proposition is simply a collection of which profiles you think the people you plan to proposition identify with, and the preferred language of the people you plan to propositions.
In most cases you'll probably want to stick with one profile, but at an early stage where you have little to no information about your target market, you might want to experiment with several profiles in order to see which labeling the interviewees most identify with.
A proposition also allows you to select a proposer, meaning the person who is responsible for communicating the proposition to others. Usually, this will be yourself, unless you are constructing propositions on the behalf of others, i.e. the members of your sales or marketing team.
Setting a proposer helps keep track of which individuals are working on which propositions, and better understand the activity and data gathered by each proposer.
If you are interviewing people digitally (meaning you are sending them the consideration survey to reply for themselves), the proposer will also appear as the sender of chat-like messages in the consideration wizard, and will receive an email when someone signals their interest in a proposition.
If you have identified individuals who you want to consider your proposition, you can add these as a new consideration, giving their name and email address. This will produce a unique consideration wizard link in which the person will be greeted by name and you can see to which extent this particulare individual expresses interes in the proposition.
If you have not sourced particular suspects for a proposition, or you want to make available a public link (for instance on a web site) where anyone can provide their consideration, use the generic consideration wizard link.
Considerations are a way to collect feedback on the profiles and outcomes of a proposition.
The feedback collection is done through the consideration wizard.
The consideration wizard gives us the ability to collect feedback on which profiles and outcomes people actually identify with and care about.
The consideration wizard can be used digitally by the interviewee themselves (if you send them a link), or by a researcher calling to survey the interviewee.
Here's a screenshot from a step in the consideration wizard process:
The wizard consists of the following steps:
The interviewee selects which profiles they identify with.
The interviewee rates how important the outcomes associated with the profiles they've identified with are to them.
If they care at all about an outcome (meaning it has somewhat importance or higher), they are also asked to grade their current satisfaction with their ability to acheive the desired outcome.
The interviewee receives a summary of the outcomes they care about and signals their interest in being contacted again in the future.
The input provided by users when considering a proposition is available in different contexts. To learn more, check out Opportunity score.
Opportunity score is a tool that helps to
Opportunity score is the main metric in the Opportunity-Driven Innovation framework created by Anthony W. Ulwick, which aims at “making innovation predictable”.
The score is the result of an analysis of the gap between the importance that customers assign to the expected outcomes of a job-to-be-done, and how satisfied they are with their current solutions.
The formula looks like this:
Opportunity score = Importance + (Importance - Satisfaction)
Opportunity score is calculated based on the data collected by the Consideration feature.
As such, you have to be actively collecting input via the Consideration wizard in order for the opportunity score to appear in relation to the relevant outcomes and profiles.
Opportunity score is exposed in the platform in the following ways:
When listing the relevant outcomese of a consideration, each outcome contains a label signifying how relevant the outcome is to the interviewee. The opportunity score is displayed within the label.
These are the relevancy labels used depending on the opportunity score:
When viewing a profile, the outcomes that have been evaluated (as a part of consideration) include the opportunity score.
Here the opportunity score is presented as a percentage of what is possible in order to better compare the opportunity of different outcomes.
To view the outcomes in descending order of opportunity, select the opportunity view:
This helps you identify which outcomes have better resonnance (opportunity candidates) and which are considered less relevant and should be retired from the profile once you have sufficient confidence in the data.
When viewing a list of profiles, if the profile has one or more considerations, the total opportunity score of the profile is displayed on the profile card:
This helps you identify which profiles have better resonnance (opportunity candidates) and which are considered less relevant and should be rejected once you have sufficient confidence in the data.
Solutions are the products and/or services we are offering to help the profiles we are serving.
Here's an example of what a list of solutions might look like:
The benefits of a solution are broken down in to two types:
A singular benefit can be associated with multiple profile outcomes, tying the solutions offered to the outcomes people care about.
A solution can embed other solutions. Relevant use cases for this might be a software product consisting of multiple modules that are themselves considered separate solutions, or when building a custom solution for a client consisting combining several pre-existing solutions.
A solution can have one of the following states:
In order to be successful, we need to get people to make the switch from whatever they are doing or using today, and over to us.
The more deeply we understand the alternative ways in which our market is getting the job done, the better equipped we will be at building better solutions and communicating the benefits of making the switch.
Ensuring that people are actually using alternatives also helps us to validate the fact that the problem is seen as worth solving by the market, and to refine our understanding of the problem and how it is understood by the people we want to help.
To facilitate this type of insight, the platform supports managing Alternatives as an information type.
Alternatives helps us share insight across the organization into how the market is currently solving the problem, and the advantages and disadvantages of those alternatives.
Alternatives might consist of neatly packaged products and services provided by organizations we consider to be our competitors, but they could just as well be Excel spreadsheets, templates, recurring meetings or other manual processes constructed to help get the job done.
Understanding the alternatives to our offering is valuable, not only to the people working inside the organization, but also to those who are considering investing in us. Being able to demonstrate a deep understanding of alternatives is highly valued by and reassuring to potential investors.