Business Value Levels
Strategy Deployment Levels (1, page 75)
Vision | What do we want to be in 5-10 years? Value for customers, position in market, what our business looks like | CEO/ Leadership |
Strategic Intent | What business challenges are standing in the way of reaching our vision | Senior leadership Business leads |
Product Initiative | What problems can we address to tackle the challenge from a product perspective? | Product leadership team |
Options | What are the different ways I can address those problems to reach my goals? | Product Dev teams |
Business Value Types
Framework for thinking about value by Joshua Arnold (1, page 82)
Increase Revenue – Increasing sales to new or existing customers. Delighting or Disrupting to increase market share and size
Protect Revenue – Improvements and incremental innovation to sustain current market share and revenue figures
Reduce Costs – Costs that we are currently incurring, that can be reduced. More efficient, improved margin or contribution
Avoid Costs – Improvements to sustain current cost base. Costs we are not currently incurring but may do in the future
Type of Value (3)
Commercial Value: How much revenue or profit does this work result in?
Market Value: How many new customers will we be able to serve?
Efficiency Value: How much time or money will this save us?
Customer Value: To what extent will this decrease the likelihood that a customer leaves?
Future Value: How much will this save us in time or money in the future?
Project Rather than Product Management Smell
Build Trap (1, page 1)
Build Trap = organizations become stuck measuring their successes by outputs rather than outcomes. […] When companies stop producing real value for the users, they begin to lose market share, allowing them to be disrupted.
Progress Focus Powerful Questions (2, page 80)
For when a company is focusing on percent complete, status, or points rather than value
- Could we achieve all of these measure and still be unsuccessful?
- How are we validating assumptions about the user needs of the market demand?
- What are we learning about value? How I this guiding our product decisions?
- What has changed with our users or our competitive environment since we began this initiative?
Vision
‘Product Vision Box’ Exercise (4) (5)
- Give your product team cardboard boxes and pens
- Ask them to design the box for the product they would buy
Product Vision Venn Diagram

References
- Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
- Mastering Professional Scrum by Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl
- What is This Thing Called ‘Value’? by Christiaan Verwijs (blog post)
- Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller
- Product Box by Innovation Games
- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
One thought on “Business Value/ Vision”