StrategyCAD Guide - Choice 4 How to succeed

Your customer^* offerings

It is essential for product teams to establish a clear, compelling and complete customer-centric product vision that enables the business and customer aspirations. This vision should be communicated clearly and consistently to all team members and stakeholders. Additionally, the team should regularly revisit and refine the product vision as they gather more data and feedback. By doing so, the team can stay focused, motivated, and aligned towards creating a product that successfully fulfills the Unique value blend and the Customer aspirations.

Product teams can get lost without a clear product vision because they lack a shared and unified understanding of what they are trying to achieve. When there is an insufficient product purpose, vision, and success criteria team members may have different ideas of what the product should look like, what features it should have, and who the target audience is. This can lead to confusion, conflicting priorities, and wasted resources. Without a product vision, product teams may struggle with:

Prioritization: Without a clear product vision, it can be difficult to prioritize which features to build first or which customer segments to focus on.
Alignment: Team members may not be aligned on what the product is supposed to achieve or what success looks like, leading to miscommunications and misunderstandings.
Innovation: Without a clear product vision, it can be challenging to come up with new and innovative ideas for the product.
Accountability: Without a shared vision, it can be difficult to hold team members accountable for their work and measure progress towards a common goal.

You can use the Offering canvas to design your offering to fit your other strategic choices. Common to all StrategyCAD entities, you can first capture the title, description, status, and the team that will or owns this offering.

Subsequently, you can use the Offering canvas to focus on strategic outcomes before becoming disoriented in the details. These outcomes include the Purpose of the offering, its success criteria, what relative price it will participate at and why the customer will buy it and ideally preferentially from your business.

An offering within a strategy will be a classification or category of product or offering rather than each individual product. So, for sportswear the offerings maybe something like:

Athletic / workout wear
Casual sportswear
Fashion sportswear

That is products that perhaps target different customer needs, rather than each type of garment.

If a business is providing Customer Relationship Management Software, it may have offerings such as

Small to medium enterprise
Enterprise

As distinct offers, there may be different configurations of those but at the strategy level unless they are focussed upon different market segments, promoted, sold or supported in different channels, consumption chains, relative pricing and so forth there is no need to differentiate between individual variations. A sample of the offering canvas and a description of how to use it, is below.

You can create an offering canvas directly from the Strategic choices canvas or the side menu.

From the canvas - visit the offering section of How we succeed in the Strategic choices canvas.

Click the Add icon
Complete the title and description in the dialog that appears
Then use the link icon to add that offering to your offerings section of the Strategic choices canvas.

Why this offering? What purpose and objectives will it accomplish?

The offering canvas captures the purpose, intents and objectives of an offering at the most conceptual or strategy level. It is the blueprint for why the offering needs to exist, what it needs to achieve and what it needs to offer to fulfill the value proposition, customer and business aspirations.

need icon — Create clarity of your offerings, by defining the purpose and success criteria of the offering.

Customer motivations captures the vision and benefits of the offering specifically from the customer viewpoint. Vision and benefits can be packaged into a narrative that describes a customer in the target segment's life before and after having access to this offering.
Here you identify - What is in it for members of the target segments. Why will target segments want / need this offering. What impact does it have on their lives? Why will they buy preferentially from your business. Finally, you have 15 seconds to capture the customers attention and let them know why they should want your offer - what is the 15-second Unique Selling proposition?

offering customer motivations element in strategyCAD

Why the target segment would be willing to buy / pay and why they buy from your business

To fulfill the needs, desires and provide the benefits identified in the Customer motivations, what features are necessary?

You can partition features into one or more of the four categories, shown in the screenshot and available in the table below.

Defining the necessary feature categories to fulfill the offering purpose, objectives and contribute to the Unique Value Proposition.

To augment the features and meet the customers needs, improve the customers' situation and fulfill aspirations, consider differential quality attributes required of the offering.

You can partition quality into one of the four categories. In StrategyCAD you can rename any of these to custom the quality attributes to be what you need.