Value design workshop at Reporting workshop

Value design is concerned with helping companies and teams clarify and agree on what they optimize for. It is a technique for identifying, prioritizing and aligning metrics at the feature, system and business level.

With A/B testing and feature experimentation becoming critical for continuous improvement of products and services, companies need techniques that support continuous development and delivery of customer value.

Value design is a step-by-step technique that help roles and functions at different levels align and that ensure that R&D efforts and resources effectively contribute to overall business goals and visions.

In this workshop, we engage in interactive work and discussions where the participants form groups in which they model the value of a concrete feature. This can be done by forming groups from the same company or forming groups including participants from different companies. The groups are free to select a feature from their own company context or they can use one of three that we offer as fictive cases. However, the goal is to quantitatively model the factors, and their relative priority, that constitute the value of functionality to the customer.

The case examples are listed below:

(1) Online game
In online game development, typical value factors are e.g., revenue, new users, recurrent users etc. In addition, companies monitor product performance using metrics such as loading time, response time, number of current users as well as user-centered metrics that capture user (gamer) activity and behavior. In this workshop, we look to model the value of a successful online game from a business, system performance and/or user perspective with the intent of defining the overall evaluation criteria that can be used in A/B testing.

(2) Adaptive cruise control
Adaptive cruise control is a well-known feature that most of us have experience of. In this workshop, we look to model the value of a successful adaptive cruise control. What are the most important value factors an automotive company should optimize for and continuously improve? In this case, the goal is to identify all relevant factors, to prioritize these and make a selection to focus on and subsequently to define the relative priority of these factors.

(3) Modeling the shift from transactional business models to continuous business models
With digitalization, we are shifting from transactional to continuous business models. This implies complementary services being added to existing products as well as new services being developed based on digital assets. In this workshop, we look to model this shift and what value factors companies look to achieve and monetize when transitioning towards continuous (service-oriented) value and new revenue streams. In short, how does one model and design the value of an alternative business model as a basis for decision in the company.

As a basis for the workshop, we introduce all participants to the concept of value design and we detail each step of this technique. The majority of the time is used for a mix of group work and group presentations. The aim is to develop a full hierarchical value model (for each case) as the result of our discussions.