How can you create and use value streams and propositions effectively?

1 What are value streams and propositions?

A value stream is a sequence of activities and interactions that deliver value to a customer or stakeholder. It describes how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value for a specific segment or persona. A value proposition is a statement that summarizes the benefits, costs, and differentiation of your offering for a target customer or stakeholder. It explains why they should choose you over other alternatives.

2 How to create value streams and propositions?

To create value streams and propositions, you need to understand your customers and stakeholders, their needs, pains, and gains, and how your offering meets them. You can use tools such as customer journey maps, empathy maps, value proposition canvases, and business model canvases to capture and visualize these insights. You also need to identify and map your capabilities, resources, and processes that support your value streams and propositions. You can use tools such as capability maps, value stream maps, and service blueprints to document and analyze these elements.

3 How to use value streams and propositions?

Value streams and propositions can be used to guide and evaluate your business strategy, design, and execution. You can use them to align your vision with customer and stakeholder needs, identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement, communicate and collaborate on value creation and delivery, measure performance against value propositions, and validate assumptions with customers and stakeholders.

4 What are the benefits of value streams and propositions?

Value streams and propositions can help you create and deliver more value to your customers and stakeholders, increasing your competitive advantage and sustainability. Improved customer and stakeholder satisfaction and loyalty, increased efficiency and effectiveness of processes and resources, enhanced collaboration and alignment across the organization and ecosystem, reduced waste and risk of failure, as well as increased innovation and agility are some of the benefits.

5 What are the challenges of value streams and propositions?

Value streams and propositions are not static, but rather dynamic and evolving, due to factors such as customer behavior, market conditions, technology, regulations, and competitors. This presents certain challenges, such as keeping your value streams and propositions relevant and up to date, balancing the needs of multiple customer and stakeholder segments, integrating and coordinating capabilities across your organization and ecosystem, managing the trade-offs between value creation and value capture, and experimenting with failures and successes.

6 What are the best practices of value streams and propositions?

Creating and using value streams and propositions effectively requires following some best practices. Start with customer and stakeholder needs and expectations, not a solution or offering, and use a customer-centric, holistic approach. Involve customers and stakeholders in the co-creation and co-delivery of value, using simple language instead of jargon or acronyms. Additionally, use visual and interactive tools rather than complex or static documents. Finally, iterate and refine your value streams and propositions based on feedback and data, not assumptions or opinions.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?