Fit-For-Purpose (F4P)
(a 2-day workshop on strategy, product management, service design, and customer experience)
Do you know who your customers are, what they need, and why they choose you and your products and services?
How to decide and choose new product features, functionality, and classes of service that your customers truly need? How to understand whether what you just changed in your product or service is actually an improvement, leading to the growth and loyalty of your customer base? What metrics should you use and not use for that? How to manage a portfolio of products and services as well as the market segments your business is serving? How to find, select and grow these market segments? How to identify the market segments you could be serving better and the ones you're better off not serving at all?
This workshop will help you find answers to these and other questions. It will also give you clear, pragmatic actionable guidance on improving your products or services. The workshop is based on a recent book by David J Anderson and Alexei Zheglov, Fit-for-Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers. Understanding why your customers use your product or service and how to make it fit for their real needs, will help you optimize your business, increase your brand loyalty, market share, revenue, profit, and thus assure survival of your business.
Who Is This Workshop For?
The Fit-for-Purpose workshop is intended for senior managers in charge of business development strategy for their company's products and services. The class is appropriate for those involved in strategic planning, strategic marketing, market research, product management, service design, portfolio management. The workshop will also be useful to anybody wanting to understand how to choose the right metrics and targets in a way conducive to effective behavioural patterns in their company. It is useful also to those who want to improve their product or service.
The Fit-for-Purpose training class doesn't have any prerequisites. We recommend that participants have knowledge and experience in business, marketing, strategic planning or portfolio management. Experience with tools such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD), Objectives and Key Results (OKR) and Goal-Directed Design is useful.
Agenda
The workshop includes many practical exercises for leaders and managers responsible for strategy and managing their portfolio of products and services. All exercises assume applying the material in the context of your company, to your products and services. We dedicate the first day to exploring problems, understanding customer behaviour, and ways to find their true needs. We spend the second day on various technical practices to capture customer requirements, fitness criteria and related metrics.
Day One:
- Introduction, three components: design, implementation, service delivery
- Fitness criteria and their threshold values
- Four types of metrics (KPIs and three others): which of them to use, not to use, when and what for
- Commonly occurring fitness criteria: time, functional and non-functional quality, conformance, optionality
Day Two:
- Market segmentation by purpose, different classes of service for different segments
- Narratives and F4P Cards and Box Scores: two main methods to discover new segments and fitness criteria in existing ones
- Assessing the current fitness level of products and services, turning insights into action
- Integrations: when not to use F4P, contrasts with NPS and JTBD, combinations of F4P with Lean Startup, OKR, Mission Command, Personas and Balanced Scorecard
What You Get In The End
You know how to be closer to your customers, understand their purpose, and align your organization's efforts to help customers achieve that purpose. You can switch the development focus from product to customer and use the latest concepts in strategic marketing, product management, service design and market research. You will also try a unique approach to market segmentation, based on customer purpose, using your company as an example.
At the end of the workshop, all participants will receive electronic certificates of completion. You'll also get the following valuable materials: a copy of the F4P class PowerPoint presentation, a copy of the 2nd edition of the book Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers (in English), and a Fit-for-Purpose Framework infographic poster (in the local language, if available; in English otherwise)
Who Is Teaching?
Alexei Zheglov, creator of the Fit-for-Purpose (F4P) Framework, one of the leaders of the global Kanban community, consultant, trainer and coach with many years of experience
Alexei has made significant contributions to the Kanban method due to his unique insights about delivery time and its predictability, the Fit-for-Puprose Framework, and Enterprise Services Planning (ESP). It is at Alexei's workshops that you can ask most difficult questions and be sure to get good answers to them, as well as practical advice on how to solve difficult problems in your work. This is possible due to Alexei's diverse experiences in various companies and industries around the world.
What Participants Are Saying
"This workshop links each learning objective with a real-life scenario, putting attendees in the shoes of companies that took some wrong approach to their problems. Understanding the Fit-For-Purpose (F4P) Framework and improving your design, implementation, and service delivery accordingly has a great impact on customer experience and, consequently, growth. The workshop let's you apply the concepts using various companies, with their successes and failures, as examples. If you need to find ideas for developing your product or service strategy and increasing your customer satisfaction, this training is ideal for you!" ~ Sonya Siderova (Belgium), independent consultant, business owner, founder of Nave