INTRODUCING THE CUSTOMER PROGRESS CANVAS

Discover the Value in Giving Progress To Customers

Customer job is to make progress (move from a less desired “Now” state to a more desired “To Be” state.) 

And that job never changes, it’s the context of progress that changes and requires our understanding and diligent discovery activities. 

A product or service is simply a tool used by the customer to cross the gap between those two states and achieve progress. 

The customer progress canvas is designed to help you apply jobs to be done theory into practice. 

The canvas is designed to include three main parts. The NOW, the TO BE, and the GAP.

NOW:

In this part your focus is to describe the current observable state of your customer. It is descriptive in nature and relatively easy to figure out.

TO BE:

In this part your focus is to logically deduce the customers’ potential desire.

Once you have finished that first exercise, you need to prepare exploratory questions and use them to conduct customer interviews that can help you see the NOW in more depth and give shape to the TO BE part.

Once you have these insights, you will need to go back to your canvas and update it with your findings.

Now comes the time for the third part on the canvas.

The GAP:

In this part of the canvas, you will consider what is stopping customers from moving forward to their desired state and what can make it smooth. Because you have the NOW and the TO BE, it is will be safe to deduce those two factors.

Once you have accomplished that, you will need once again to prepare questions and use them to conduct another round of customer interviews. Your aim is to discover more about constrains and catalysts for customers journey of transformation.

Use the newly discovered insights to update the canvas and finally you come to your last activity: What can you design that can fill the GAP better than anything else? What kind of product or services can you think of, that has features that smooths in the transformation of the customer by removing the customer perceived constraints and hope for catalysts?

Once you have that, you are ready to start using it as a blueprint for prototyping your new product or service and test it with your potential customers.