TEI 123: A product management view of Value Proposition Design

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next
episode of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister,
PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation
and managing products become more successful, grow their careers,
and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: This interview is
rather meta. It’s a discussion about a book; not about the book
itself, but about the product management decisions for creating the
book. This is the story of recognizing a problem a target market
has and addressing it with a product. You likely already know my
guest, Alex Osterwalder, as the inventor of the Business Model
Canvas — a one-page business model — and author of the related book
Business Model Generation. He is also the 2015 winner of the
prestigious Thinkers50 Strategy Award and is ranked as the #15 most
influential business thinker by Thinkers 50. Further, in 2013 he
won the inaugural Innovation Luminary Award by the European Union.
He more recently co-authored the book Value Proposition Design,
which in a way, is the topic of our discussion. However, I didn’t
want to ask him the same questions he has been asked a hundred
times that you can find in other interviews. Instead, I asked him
to discuss the book from the perspective of a product manager —
identifying the need for the book, its target market, the value it
creates for customers and for his organization, as well as how the
name was chosen. So, you not only get some insights into what Value
Proposition Design is, you also get to see the book as a product
and the product management thinking that went into its creation. If
you are new to Value Proposition Design, think of it as the third
leg of a stool consisting of Lean Startup and Design Thinking as
the other legs.