Follow the steps on this page to identify your ideal hungry customer, their burning problem, what clear-cut value is provided to them, and what meaningful metric they will use to measure the value our product provides them.
See the burning problem, clear-cut value, and meaningful metric here Problem, Value, Metric
Calibration Steps Summary
Step 1: Establish your customer software stack | |||||
Software Stack Type | Reasoning | ||||
Business Apps and service | Saas portal that hosts customizable Compliance Portfolios that linguistically analyze and compare compliance requirements across different compliance documents aka standards, regulations, best practices, etc in order to simplify compliance initiatives | ||||
Tech infrastructure and tools | |||||
Step 2: Identify Your Customer Subtypes | |||||
User | Type | Reason & Example (linked in profile, etc.) | |||
Compliance Professional | Biz User | ||||
Policy Manager | Biz User | ||||
Buyer | Type | Reason & Example (linked in profile, etc.) | |||
Chief Compliance Officer | Biz Buyer | ||||
Chief Risk Officer | Biz Buyer | ||||
Step 3: Map Relevant Value Frameworks | |||||
User | Type | Framework | Reasoning | ||
Compliance Professional | Biz User | Jobs To Be Done | Identify and analyze external compliance requirements to include in their compliance framework | ||
Policy Manager | Biz User | Jobs To Be Done | Analyze gaps and coverage of their internal policies and external compliance requirements | ||
Buyer | Type | Framework | Reasoning | ||
Chief Compliance Officer | Biz Buyer | Biz Value Chain | Decrease human resources cost, increase compliance initiative implementation/maintenance speed and reliability | ||
Chief Risk Officer | Biz Buyer | Biz Value Chain | Decrease human resources cost, increase gap analysis speed and reliability | ||
Step 4: Anchor Value Drivers for Each Customer Subtype | |||||
Ideal Customer | Type | Value Framework | Burning Problem | Clear-cut Value | Meaningful Metric |
Compliance Professional | Biz User | Jobs To Be Done | Achieve and maintain compliance | Decrease human resources cost, increase compliance initiative implementation/maintenance speed and reliability | Human resources cost, Regulatory compliance expense, mean time to issue discovery |
Policy Manager | Biz User | Jobs To Be Done | Identify, understand, and mitigate compliance risks | Decrease human resources cost, increase gap analysis speed and reliability | Human resources cost, risk severity gap, risk mitigation timeframe |
Chief Compliance Officer | Biz Buyer | Biz Value Chain | Identify and understand necessary external compliance requirements | Reduce time required to identify and analyze compliance requirements | Compliance requirements identification and analysis efficiency, speed, and reliability |
Chief Risk Officer | Biz Buyer | Biz Value Chain | Identify and understand gaps and coverage of between internal policies and external compliance requirements | Reduce time required to identify and analyze gaps and coverage between internal policies and external compliance requirements | Gap and coverage identification and analysis efficiency, speed, and reliability. |
Establish Customer Software Stack
Where does your product and company fit in your customers' SW stack?
Who are you
Competing with
Complementing
Building for
Stack Types
Business apps and services are consumed directly by the business.
This includes niche SaaS offerings covering various business processes and Business-specific data AI solutions.
Examples: Salesforce, Marketo, Adobe, Netsuite, SAP, and Oracle.
Tech infrastructure and tools are consumed by technologists either within the company or on behalf of the company. Tools targeted at tech builders and practitioners and that don’t touch the business user directly.
This includes cloud software stacks for developers to build cloud native apps; data platforms for data engineers to build data pipelines, reports, and monitoring; and AI
Business platforms bridge the two categories. Here, the software stack acts as a platform that serves both the business users with some ready-made apps as well as the developers who can use lower-level primitives (e.g. APIs and open source frameworks) to build custom use cases.
Examples include the Stripe payment platform for merchants, industrial IOT stacks for frontline manufacturers, gaming stacks like Unity for gamers, and marketing stacks like Adobe for marketers.
Customer Subtypes
User Subtype | Question to Answer | Examples | Job Titles |
Business User | What business job will the user hire your product for? | file an expense report, approve a purchase order, hire a candidate, increase sales, grow leads, etc. | Employee, customer, partner |
Tech User | What technical job will the user hire your product for in the SDLC and/or IT environment? | By a cloud deployment engineer, to upgrade a software system; by a security ops user to reduce security incidents; by an IT sysadmin to provision IT services for new hire; infrastructure engineer to provision app development team, etc. | Developer, data engineer, data scientist |
Builder | What job will the builder hire your product for? What is the builder building with your product? For whom? | A designer hires Figma to build designs for Business Users, a developer hires API products (Stripe, Twilio) to build apps for Business Users, a data analyst hires Tableau to build dashboards for Business Users. Etc | Developers, Data Engineers, Data Scientist, Analyses |
Buyer Subtype | Question to Answer | Job Titles | |
Business Buyer | How to get business value (ROI) from the product? | Functions: marketing, sales, finance | |
Tech Buyer | How to scale production of software value streams with right economics (TCO) | IT: network, infrastructure, app, data | |
Value Frameworks
Customer Quartet | Cares About | Relevant Framework |
|---|---|---|
Business User | How to get a job done by the tech product | Jobs to be Done JTBD framework to identify the jobs the user can accomplish and personal benefits of getting the job done. |
Business Buyer | How to get business value (ROI) from the product | Business Value Chain framework with focus on the business process, where and how value gets created, the ROI generated, and business metrics affected. |
Tech User | How to build better software faster | Agile and DevOps software methodologies, where the user fits in the development lifecycle, and how the product assists the users. |
Tech Buyer | How to scale production of software value streams with right economics (TCO) | Flow Framework* (Milk Kersten) that shows how IT departments of companies are building and running software factories and what the key software value artifacts being products and managed by companies at scale are. |
Value Drivers
INPUT | Customer Type | Value Framework | |||
A | Biz Buyer | Biz Value Chain | Business Problem | Business Value | Business Metric |
In 10 words or less | Describe Ideal Buyer Champion Profile (copied from above) | Describe what business value process or chain does the buyer own or care about | Describe the business problem | Describe business value of solving the problem with your product | Name the metric the buyer cares about that you will improve |
B | Biz User | Jobs To Be Done | Job Pain | Job Progress | Job Gain |
In 10 words or less | Describe Ideal User Persona (copied from above) | Describe what is the job to be done for which the user employs your product | Describe the pain the user faces in getting the job done today | Describe the progress user makes in their job to be done with your product | Describe the gain user faces in their job with your product |
C | Tech Buyer | SW Value Stream | SW Problem | Tech Value | Tech Value Metric |
In 10 words or less | Describe Ideal Tech Buyer Champion Profile (copied from above) | Describe what in the software value stream does the buyer own or care about (infra, dev, ops, etc.) | Describe the problem in the software value stream | Describe technical/software value of solving the problem with your product | Name the metric the Tech Buyer cares about that you will improve (Value, Cost, Quality, etc.) |
D | Tech User | JTBD in SW Dev Cycle | Job Pain | Job Progress | Job Gain |
In 10 words or less | Describe Ideal Tech User Persona (copied from above) | Describe what is the tech user operating within the software dev or ops lifecycle | Describe the pain the user faces in getting the job done today | Describe the progress user makes in their job to be done with your product | Describe the gain user faces in their job with your product |
E | Builder | JBTD in Builder LifeCycle | Builder Pain | Builder Progress | Builder Gain |
In 10 words or less | Describe Ideal Builder Persona (copied from above) | Describe what is the builder building within the software dev or builder lifecycle | Describe the pain the builder is facing to build today | Describe how your product helps the builder build better | Describe the gain to the builder in using your product (personal or social, community |
Resources
https://anuragwadehra.substack.com/p/who-is-the-customer-in-business-marketing
https://www.anuragwadehra.com/p/who-are-your-champions
https://www.anuragwadehra.com/p/creating-champion-developers