Moving from Fuzzy to Feasible™: Phase 3 – Value Creation
- Matt Arnold
- May 5
- 3 min read
The vast majority of product innovations fail to meet their business objectives. The primary culprit? Not a lack of technical capability, but a fundamental misalignment with what customers truly value.
After Sensemaking and Experimentation, the next critical phase in the Fuzzy to Feasible™ framework is Value Creation. This phase addresses the desirability component of innovation's desirability-feasibility-viability trinity and answers the pivotal question: Do they actually want it?
The Fuzzy to Feasible™ framework is a practical guide to moving from uncertainty to action.In this phase, we turn learning into leverage — creating offerings that resonate deeply with customers and stakeholders, not just building features for their own sake.
As Peter Drucker famously observed, the role of a business is to create and keep a customer. That journey begins by understanding what people truly value. To that end, understanding value creation will help you attract your customers.
What is Value Creation?
Value Creation is the work of designing offerings that stakeholders actually want — solutions that help them achieve their goals, ease their pains, and create real progress.
It’s about desirability first:
What matters to customers and stakeholders?
What positive change are they seeking?
What emotional and functional needs are we truly addressing?
Here, we move from insight to action — designing solutions that address root causes, not just surface symptoms. We prioritize insights over ideas, grounding creativity in evidence rather than assumptions.
Design isn’t just about how something looks. Design is how the whole system works to create meaningful change for people.
By focusing on stakeholder-defined value, teams build smarter, faster — and avoid the costly missteps that come from self-referential or assumption-based design.
Why Value Creation Matters
Moving too quickly past Value Creation risks major pitfalls:
Wasted resources: Refining or scaling products that were never truly wanted.
Missed opportunities for differentiation:Skipping deep understanding leads to "copycat products" that fail to stand out in the marketplace.
Escalating commitment to bad ideas: Without early confirmation of desirability, teams are more likely to double down emotionally or politically later — making it harder to pivot when needed.
As Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done theory teaches us, customers “hire” products to accomplish real jobs in their lives — functional, emotional, and social. Without uncovering these deeper motivations, innovation efforts often miss the mark entirely.
You cannot engineer your way out of a desirability miss later through better marketing, technology, or operations. Desirability isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s foundational.
Common Misconceptions About Value Creation
Many teams misunderstand what it really means to create value:
“Adding more features creates more value.” Often, real value comes from simplicity, focus, and solving the right problem — not adding more.
“We already know what the customer wants.”Without fresh insight, teams risk designing for themselves, not for the market. You are not your customer, so don’t risk self-referential design.
“If we build it well enough, they’ll come.” Execution matters — but only if you’re solving a problem people actually care about.
“Value is purely functional.”Humans make decisions based on emotional and social drivers. Humans aren’t rational decision-makers, we’re rationalizing beings. That’s why it’s imperative to understand what creates value in the mind of your customers.
Building with true Value Creation in mind requires humility, curiosity, and deep empathy.
Value Creation and the Human Side of Innovation
At its heart, Value Creation is human-centered.
It requires:
Understanding real human needs (emotional, functional, social)
Designing for the way people think, feel, and make decisions
Communicating clearly, with stories that frame the value in relatable, meaningful ways
Acknowledging cognitive biases and emotional drivers, not pretending humans are purely rational actors
By focusing on the human side, teams not only build better offerings — they build stronger trust, loyalty, and momentum.
A First Step: A Reflection
If you want to strengthen your focus on Value Creation, start by taking this small but powerful action:
Reframe every project, feature, or deliverable in terms of the customer’s progress — not just the company's internal milestones.
Instead of asking, "What are we delivering?" Start asking, "What positive change are we creating for the customer?"
Value isn't measured in feature lists or roadmaps — It’s measured in the real-world impact you help create.
If you’d like help turning customer insights into real-world value — or designing offerings that truly resonate — let's connect. Moving from Fuzzy to Feasible™ means building what matters, not just what’s possible.