Alexander Osterwalder

The book follows the trend of business consultants that thrive on making risk seem irrelevant.
By following the Jobs-to-be-done approach, pains and gains you can shape the business model canvas from the customer's perspective, without taking a full classical "needs" approach.
Why the 3* then?

Well, for one, this book is clearly targeted at organisations, I mean the big ones. Alex sells high, he doesn't really care about some of the little folks that are just starting their own business, show more although to be fair, the book does have quite a few valuable pointers for entrepreneurs as well.

Second, the book is not linear, you have to go through it in order to understand the process, so you'll likely jump from stage to stage, trying to piece things together by following the recommendations.
Flow is what is lacking, structure-wise it's ok, although sometimes structure seems to lose to bloated graphics. As a reader, and mostly 'the how-to create products' reader, I'm mostly interested on the 'how-to', less than the graphics.

Third, just by following the prescriptions in the book, defining multiple jtbd, pains and gains for multiple contexts, with different solutions that will ultimately lead to different business models, it will take a lot of time. So this is to be done in the ideation phase, before settling on an implementation, but although it has a part of rapid prototyping, if you don't have users at hand or user-data from where to gather insights, this part is not "rapid" at all.

Overall, I recommend the book for a good system to follow when defining your persona and business models, it has good advice and a framework to follow, but don't follow the book by the letter if you want to go fast and find things along the way.
Also, not a book to be read from cover to cover, but something to come back to from time to time, for guidance and reflection. show less

My daughter gave this to me as a Birthday present (one of the books I'd suggested to her as possible presents). She has a background as a McKinsey consultant and I detected a note of reticence with the gift-giving. I suspect that she thought it lacked something. Now that I've read it I can kind-of see what she might have been thinking. This is a modestly large book devoted to a particular methodology that the authors have developed (or adopted parts of it from other work). The methodology is show more really about bringing some new product of procedure into a business in such a way that it is liable to be successful.....that is, provide value for the customer and create value for your business. Really, there are many similar models in circulation; there is not just ONE way of doing this but this methodology looks reasonable to me and can be applied fairly consistently across an organisation and with different products and services. So it's flexible. Basically, they have two elements that are re-used throughout: One the one side is the customer template with; pain relievers; gain creators and the product or service (value proposition). And on the other side is the Customer profile with: the jobs the customers are trying to get done; the pains or bad outcomes the customer currently has; and the gains that customers want to achieve. So you are trying to deliver an appropriate pain reliever to reduce the customer's pains, for example.
Pretty simple but they manage to apply this template over and over again....to different segments of customers, to use it as a refining tool when something doesn't work, etc., etc. I remain mildly impressed. But I was impressed with the design and artwork and presentation of the book. They have done it well. The layout is simple, easy to read and very logical in the way it flows. (Maybe a bit longer than it needs to be....maybe a bit repetitive). And I found myself wondering; "who, in a fast moving business world, is actually going to methodically carry out all these steps?" Probably nobody....it's just too long and too convoluted. But the principles are all there and some of the steps could be taken very rapidly. In fact, the authors are at pains to point out that one should do a lot of cheap, rapid, testing before committing to anything that is going to use a lot of resources and prove costly if it fails. So full marks for that.
I'm happy to recommend it as a useful methodology that could readily be adopted by a wide range of organisations...not just those seeking to make a profit. Four Stars from me. show less

This book is full of interesting ideas, mostly coming from creative design, on how to work on a business model, or revise it. Its greatest call to fame: it doesn't look like a business book at all, full of doodles, charts, exercices, concise real-life examples.
It only gets 3 stars from me, though, because I really didn't like the badly lit, blurry, camera-phone-like photographs shown in this book. Maybe it's done on purpose to convey "spontaneity", but it contrasts very badly with the show more otherwise rather aesthetic contents. And, well, despite looking less boring than conventional business books, it is still a book on business models, and business models is still a subject I personally find rather boring... show less

This is absolutely a must read for those starting their first business. The book is full of practical tools meant to equip the reader for success in whatever industry they choose.

I believe that the book’s introduction to validated learning, or better yet the exposure to the mindset of it all, can aid in shifting perspective from a fantasy adventure to more of a mission based approach to entrepreneurship.

Bottomline? If you want to and invent and improve value propositions this is the book show more to get.

Want to find out more? My entire review is posted here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/value-proposition-design-review-lucas-carlson/ show less