The 10 Steps of a Full Life Cycle Use Case

In previous articles you’ve researched who your customer is, identified their pain points and sense of urgency, and selected your beachhead market. You’ve defined your End User and Persona.  Now we move on from “Who is your customer?” to “What can you do for your customer?” and begin a process of clarifying value creation through the eyes of the customer.

Typically at this point, you would want to explore how your customer would buy, install, and use your product. But for our model, we want to dig much deeper than a typical “use case” by conducting a “full life cycle use case”.  Your goal of this exercise is to know your customer better than anyone else and to develop customer intimacy leading to product-market fit.

The 10 Steps of a Full Life Cycle Use Case

Let’s walk through the ten steps of a full life cycle use case to identify what you need to learn when talking with your customer and how you can use this information.

1. Customer awareness and the need to do something

• How does your customer know they have a problem?
• What activates your customer’s acquisition process?
• What do they focus on and what do they value?
• This information can be used to develop your solution and value proposition.

2. Find your product or service (solution)

• How does your customer search for and find your solution?
• Where do they hang out?
• This information can be used to develop your go-to-market strategy and calculate cost of customer acquisition

3. Analyze your product or service (solution)

• How does the customer assess the value your solution provides?
• How does your customer analyze the competition to make a purchasing decision?
• This information can be used to develop your minimum viable business product, your value proposition, competitive positioning, go-to-market strategy, and calculate cost of customer acquisition.

4. Acquire and pay for you product or service (solution)

• How does the customer buy and pay for a product or service?
• This information can be used to develop your business model, pricing framework and calculate cost of customer acquisition.

5. Install your product or service (solution)

• How does the customer install your solution? How hard is it to install and train their staff?
• This information can be used to develop of your solution, your value proposition, and competitive positioning.

6. Use your product or service (solution)

• How does the customer integrate the use of your solution into their operations?
• This information can be used to develop your solution, your value proposition, and competitive positioning.

7. Determine value gained from your product or service (solution)

• How does customer measure the value they gained from your solution?
• This information can be used to develop your value proposition, competitive positioning, assess customer satisfaction, and iterate your solution.

8. Receive support for your product or service (solution)

• How does your customer receive support? Is your system automated or personal?
• This information can be used to develop your customer service and management program, business model, pricing framework, and calculate cost of customer acquisition.

9. Buy more product or service (solution)

• How do you engage your customer to buy more of your solution? Remember – the best customer is the one you already have!!!
• This information can be used to develop your go-to-market strategy, business model, pricing framework, product expansion plan, and to calculate customer lifetime value.

10. Spread awareness about your product or service (solution)

• How does your customer tell others about your product?
• This information can be used to develop your tools for capturing customer satisfaction and testimonials, and to develop your go-to-marking strategy with word of mouth incentives.