Venture Design I: Achieving Customer Relevance

Successful ventures are built on a strong foundation understanding of the customer. In this session you’ll learn actionable practices from the discipline of ‘design thinking’. These practices will teach you how to organize and focus your understanding of the customer in a vivid, compelling, and testable structure. We’ll close with techniques to go out and discover who your customer really is, what they really want, and how to successfully interact with them.

TAKEAWAYS

• Hands-on experience using personas, problem scenarios, alternatives and value propositions to structure your understanding of the customer
• Use of storyboards to operationalize your personas and think through life-of-the-customer and the customer journey with your product
• Techniques to structure customer interviews, acquire and engage subjects, run interviews and make decisions based on your results

About the Venture Design Series

In this workshop series, you’ll learn a structured approach for successfully creating new products. This is a five-part program where you will learn how to use design-thinking and lean to articulate a testable product idea, then come back after two weeks of customer discovery to formulate your business model and action plan. For alumni of the workshop, there’s also a session III, Focusing & Validating Venture Progress.

By the end, you will know if your idea is worth the further investment of your time, and you will have learned a repeatable process for brainstorming and structuring new product and business ideas.

This class applies to entrepreneurs creating new ventures, ‘intrapreneurs’ working within existing companies, and coaches of product teams.