Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series)

How good is this book? Well not only should you read this book, but everyone at your company should read this book as well. It is a game changer.Value Proposition Design is a sequel to the authors' previous book, Business Model Generation.If you're not familiar with their previous book, its worth a read, but I'll be honest... Not everyone at your company needs to read their first book. I'm a firm believer in their book, at this point I would rather see a Business Model than a Business plan. So I want the business and technical leadership to read Business Model Generation. But Value Proposition Design is the book I want everyone to read.The new book focuses on the most important part of any product, crafting the value proposition; in other words, why a customer should use your product or service. And it does a fantastic job.It can be very difficult to get people to start thinking about their product from the customers point of view. But just the templates the authors posted to their website changed how I promoted my ideas. Their book is just incredible. Its a guided tour in how to make great products. It starts with a guide to how to think about your product from the customers point of view and communicate that around your company.In fact, you can get that guide for free from their website. It's the first 100 pages of the book.If the book just did that it would be worth the cost and time. But their book goes beyond that to discuss how you can actually make that product happen as you test your product with customers, adjust to the slings and arrows of the market.In other words, its not just how to think from the customers point of view to create great products, but its how to bring those products through the development pipeline. It's filled with tips and tricks that people have used; expect to keep the book on your desk going forward as you bring your products to market. It's basically a cookbook for making great products.I can't recommend this book highly enough. Try the first half free from www.strategyzer.com . Then buy it. Your company will be glad you did.

Alex Osterwalder & team have created the definitive easy-to/must-uses guide on how to create a compelling value proposition. Yes, definitive. Any business is first and foremost about the customer, even though it seems so many have forgotten that. If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, you don’t need a business model because you won’t have a business.Value Proposition Design (#VPDesign) clearly teaches how to discover customers’ real needs – the needs they have for and by themselves, not the needs we want them to have or the needs we want to solve…even if they aren’t really the customers’. The VPDesign toolkit – which is easy to follow, use and adopt – makes it difficult to retain your own biases and see reality.It’s not just the words. The fabulous visual and symbolic style of the book makes it easy to follow, to use as a handbook and daily tool for prototyping, testing, iterating and creating meaningful and valuable solutions for customers. The icons are memorable and can become part of your team’s lexicon for thinking about customers. Just as in Business Model Generation, this book is a tool to use daily to think about your business – internally and externally. I’ve used the VPDesign extensively with entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and for customers outside the organization and inside the organization.So, you MUST get this book (and Business Model Generation) and start using it. It will change how you view your business, your customers – for the better, in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.In full disclosure, I helped co-create Alex & Yves’ first book, Business Model Generation and was a pre-reader for Value Proposition Design.

Need the book for school but ended up really liking it!

This is a great extended view of one part of the Business Model Canvas. The detail and design is really great. However, I will take issue with the cheap printing job. I got a drop of water on a page and it smeared the ink when I tried to rub it off. Seriously, take a page in the back of the book, put a drop of water on it, and wipe it off: smear city. The old BMC book was matte; this one is gloss like a magazine--the old version printmaking was better. I mention this because this is a long-term reference book for me and for the money, I want something that will last long. I don't plan on taking the book out on rainy days or spilling water all over it, but I was a little disappointed that the pages can be ruined so easily. But content-wise, this is good. I like the title, but the concept also ties in the Customer Segment category (customer discovery).

I have red the second book of Alexander Osterwalder and his colleagues with the perspective of a consultant helping existing companies designing new growth engines.I love this book and its online compenion because it helps me doing my consulting jobs for my clients in business model innovation projects.This is a MUST READ not only for startups going for their next big thing, it is also very helfpul if your context of innovation are large and existing companies.Looking forward to reading the next book of Alexander Osterwalder, then maybe about business model environments or about more zoom-in-tools such as the value proposition canvas. Thank you very much for relasing this book to the world.I can definitely recommend it, if hands-on innovation is your topic of interest as well.

If you like business model canvas, you’ll love this book - it’s the most important part of the business model canvas - the value prop.