Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix

Business Objectives

The second column is for Business Objectives. Determining business objectives requires assistance from your Product Manager or Business Analyst. The intent is to map each of the customer needs to one or more specific business objectives. Likely, most customer needs will meet one or two business objectives. If a customer need addresses more than two business objectives, consider narrowing that customer need.

Sometimes you won’t be able to map a particular customer need to a business objective, perhaps because either

• that customer need is not relevant to the business—which happens quite often, because great products focus on solving specific problems
• there’s a business opportunity that your company has previously overlooked—which is also quite common

The latter case could indicate there’s an opportunity for a new product or an enhancement to the current product.

Proposed Features

Now, this is where your powers of insight and intuition really come into play: What features would be useful in meeting customer needs and furthering the identified business objectives? What features did customers like when you were testing competitor sites?

The best way to answer these questions is to do some creativity exercises. Invite people with complementary strengths and skill sets to participate, but keep the group small. This is a brainstorming exercise, but you’re already armed with a lot of insights into your customers. When adding Proposed Functionality, use those insights.

Multiple features can meet each customer need, and one feature can meet multiple customer needs. That said, associate a particular feature with a customer need only if it directly addresses that customer need and business objective. That can be a tough call sometimes. On the other hand, listing only one feature in every row likely makes the whole document meaningless, because it probably means you’ve defined the feature too broadly.

One other tip: Be prescriptive rather than descriptive. Describing how a product or service will work is for the design and business teams to flesh out later.

Success Metric

The Success Metric is my latest addition to the Value Matrix. It describes how to measure a feature’s success. In some ways, this could be redundant to the Business Objective column—assuming, of course, that business objectives define specific targets—but you can also include a number of expected uses, repeat uses, and other things that might fall out of the scope of—or expand on—the business objectives.

In filling out this column, work with your Business Analyst and Web Analytics teams. (The Web Analytics team will love you for including them so early in the process.)

Priority

While Priority is the first column in the document, it’s the last one you’ll complete. Prioritize each customer need as it relates to business objectives. You can judge the most important customer needs only in the context of the business objectives. So, you must consider both when defining priority. Note that no technological requirements factor in this prioritization. That comes later. But brace yourself—not everything you’ve defined here will make it into the first release.

Negotiate with your Business Analyst or other stakeholders to determine priority. If you’ve been working closely with them all along, this shouldn’t be a tough negotiation—or, if it is, at least you’ll know the sticking points before the negotiations begin.

Once your prioritization is complete, you’ll notice something: This looks suspiciously like a roadmap. Or, if it’s not quite thorough enough to serve as your company’s or team’s official roadmap, it can at least inform the creation of the official roadmap.

Adapting the Value Matrix to Your Needs

I’m certain the Value Matrix I’ve defined isn’t perfect for everyone’s needs. In fact, I’d venture a guess that no document format would satisfy the needs of every situation. This document need not replace any existing documentation your team creates, but it could provide a summary of various documents and a bridge between them. Here are some potential improvements to the Value Matrix I have considered that you might find useful:

• References—A column for references to other documentation for business objectives, customer needs, and so on. This would let people see the source material you used in creating the Value Matrix.
• Market Research—A column for information gleaned from market research. Market research tends to be broader, but has a much higher sample size than customer research and usually offers insights of its own. However, when market research is available, I prefer to list it in the Customer Need column.

The main benefit of the Value Matrix derives from the process of its creation. To create a Value Matrix, different team members must work together and, through their collective insights, you’ll make your product or service stronger.