Life Cycle Use Case

The JTBD framework is very helpful in this regard. Once you understand the problem, you can start to intelligently map out the full life cycle use case. Creating a visual representation of the full life cycle of your product enables you to see how the product will fit into the customer’s value chain and what barriers to adoption might arise. Just showing how the customer uses the product (the typical definition of “use case”) is valuable and should be done, but it will not provide an accurate enough picture to fully understand what obstacles will come up when trying to have your customer adopt your product.

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As with all of the 24 Steps, your goal is to spend enough time, effort and thought to get a useful first draft, but you will continually update this information as you move to future steps, especially Step 13, Map the Process to Acquire a Paying Customer. You also want to keep using primary market research to fill out this information, rather than guessing or extrapolating based on existing research or intuition. With a grounding in PMR, you’ll end up with a valuable set of information that will prove a competitive advantage—don’t give away this information!

To map out the Full Life Cycle Use Case, first use the Sketch of How the End User Currently Solves the Problem (or Doesn’t) worksheet to sketch out a visual diagram or flowchart showing how customers currently attempt to solve their pain, or what processes result in their customer pain. Without understanding customers’ current workflow, you will have a hard time getting your new product in their hands, because people don’t like to change how they go about things, especially if they are satisfied with their current workflow.

Next, you will use the Full Life Cycle Use Case worksheet to map out everything related to the end user’s discovery, acquisition, and use of your product. Here is an overview of the 10 stages of the Full Life Cycle Use Case.

For each stage in the cycle, explain who will be involved in that step, when and where the step occurs, and how it happens, as well as other details that seem relevant. Entries in the worksheet will have dramatically different complexity. For business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, the entries may be very simple, even trivial, but for business-to-business (B2B), the answers will likely be much more complex in certain areas.

How the end user actually uses your product will likely be the most complex part to describe. Give some brief bullet points on this worksheet, and then use the Sketch of How End User Will Use Your Product worksheet to provide a visual overview with diagrams, flowcharts, and pictures.

The result of this step will be a body of information about the end user’s interaction with the potential product so that your team is on the same page before starting to design the product itself. If the team is not in alignment on the workflow sketched out here, individual team members will pull the product in different directions, reducing the clarity you’ll have around whether your product is effective at solving the end user’s customer pain.

Before you start to fill out the worksheet, start with a blank sheet and draw how the customer solves or does not solve the job that needs or wants to get done today. Make sure you review this with your target customer.

Then complete Worksheet 6.1 and then take another blank sheet of paper and draw how the customer could transition to a new offering from you and what changes it would take in their process. This will scope your challenge pretty well for you and give you the core of your full life cycle use case.

Content will be published as it becomes available.

Content will be published as it becomes available.