From vision to value

Products that solve real-world problems and deliver genuine benefits build loyalty, advocacy and long-term customer satisfaction. Over time, this translates into customers actively promoting the product themselves, building trust, amplifying brand impact and often achieving results that outperform even the most effective advertising campaigns. 

Designing for market fit

When designing a product, product teams aiming to achieve strong market fit face three key risks:

• Desirability – will users want to use it?
• Feasibility – can our engineering teams build it effectively?
• Viability – does it align with our business strategy and objectives?

Understanding these factors is essential. In practice, when assessing desirability, many product teams fall into a common trap by over-focusing on usability while overlooking a more critical factor - value. Without delivering genuine value, even the most usable, feasible and viable products will struggle to compete. They will simply fade into the background noise, which is how products fail.

A cautionary tale: Yolt

Backed by ING, Yolt was a personal financial management app designed to leverage open banking technology to enable customers to view their aggregated balances across various bank accounts, manage budgets, track spending and save smartly. Despite having 1.6 million users, ING shut down the consumer app in 2021, announcing a pivot toward a B2B open banking platform.¹ The following year, the bank announced that it would also phase out its B2B operations by 2023.

According to ING, Yolt fell short of its ambitions given the rapidly changing market and was not “likely to achieve the preferred scale in their market within a reasonable time frame”.¹

Further analysis points to a deeper issue. Yolt failed to entice its target audience with a compelling, differentiated value proposition in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. While offering some useful features, Yolt was not perceived as essential or must-have by users, limiting its ability to drive engagement, scale and monetize its open banking technology.

Going back to value, Yolt illustrates what happens when a product fails to bridge the gap between product capabilities and perceived value. To avoid similar pitfalls, it is critical for product teams to understand how value is identified, created, measured and sustained.

Defining value when building a product

A customer’s willingness to pay is ultimately a reflection on the perceived value of a product. For example, how much would you be willing to pay for a bottle of water while sitting at home versus while running a marathon on a hot day? The product is the same; the context is not; and context changes everything.

In product management terms, value is the bridge between the gain creation and the ‘pain relief’ to the end user. To use a banking example, when is an overdraft increase feature delivered via a mobile app more valuable – on payday, when financial pressure is low (low gain) or during a holiday, when spending surges or flexibility matters more (high gain and high pain relief)? Mathematically, the greater the gap between perceived benefit (gain) and pain avoided, the higher the value created for the user.

Defining value begins with a clear product vision and product strategy. The vision sets the destination - the future to be created for the customers while the strategy charts the path by outlining the milestones required to get there. For value definitions to be meaningful, they must be firmly anchored in perceived customer benefits, not internal assumptions. The questions to ask are:

• Does the product solve a real problem and how significant is the pain-gain gap?
• Is it worth the customer’s effort to change, adopt or enroll, and how much are they willing to invest to close that gap?
• Does it create a tangible outcome or positive change in their daily lives or habits?

Equally important is business value, specifically how the product contributes to broader organizational strategy and key business objectives. Finally, products must be positioned with clarity. It is essential to understand where the product stands in the market and, more importantly, how it stands out. Differentiators should be identified and turned into strengths, whether through cost, price, experience or unique features. 

How to create value

Value creation begins with a robust product discovery process, validating ideas before moving into build and delivery. The focus should be on outcomes, not outputs. 

Innovation is not a one-off event. It is a continuous cycle of delivery feedback and learning. For a product manager, the goal is to create solutions that serve users while aligning with the organization’s business strategy. This can be achieved by being user-focused, data-informed and outcome-driven.

User-focused. At its core, value creation starts with the user. Does the product meaningfully bridge the gain/pain gap? Will users pay for it, invest time and effort in adopting it, and choose it over alternatives? To understand this, there are various techniques that a product manager can use to test usability and validate demand both qualitatively (value tests using money, reputation, time and access) and quantitatively (landing page smoke tests, A/B testing).

Data-informed. Data and AI might sound like industry buzz words, but without them, product decisions risk being driven by opinion rather than evidence. Data and analytics help uncover where real value exists and how it can be amplified to unlock a product’s full potential. 

When used effectively, data enables teams to understand user behavior (what they do) versus attitudes (what they think or feel), run experiments, measure success and identify areas for optimization. It can be further used to segment users effectively and drive personalization, anchoring decisions in facts rather than opinions. This gives organizations the chance to prioritize with confidence and clarity. 

Outcome-driven. Being outcome-driven means clearly defining what success looks like and ensuring it aligns with the wider organizational and leadership goals. A commonly used framework product teams rely on is OKRs (objectives and key results), where objectives are set as qualitative goals and key results are set as quantitative targets. For example, an objective might be to enhance user satisfaction, with a corresponding key result to increase the net promoter score (NPS) by five points over a six-month period.  

This approach empowers product teams to be more creative in how they deliver, while remaining tightly focused on creating real value for users. Building on these principles, value should be delivered iteratively and continuously, with a constant pulse on market needs. This approach helps drive sustained value, while shortening both path-to-value and time-to-value.

How to measure value

As discussed earlier, data, analytics, outcomes and iterative delivery work together to create a robust feedback loop. This loop enables teams to build incrementally, test continuously, learn constantly from real user behavior and repeat iteratively, ensuring that value is validated at every stage. 

The right framework for measuring value depends on organizations’ intended outcomes, OKRs and the stage of their product lifecycle. A non-exhaustive list of key measures includes acquisition (cost of acquisition), conversion metrics (including funnel conversion, time to first value), engagement like daily or monthly active users, experience metrics such as NPS, customer satisfaction score, and revenue indicators including customer lifetime value and average revenue per user.

Conclusion

Value should never be a one-time conversation. The product vision serves as the starting point, helping align product teams and stakeholders around a shared purpose. Effective communication brings stakeholders along the journey, sharing progress, demonstrating impact and reinforcing clarity around outcomes. Regularly revisiting value ensures that the user’s perspective remains front and center, both internally and externally. 

Ultimately, building products that last is not about delivering faster or adding more features, but about making deliberate choices to create value that users genuinely care about. 

A value-first mindset forces product teams to look beyond what is possible to what is meaningful, anchoring decisions in real problems, measurable outcomes and clear differentiation. Products that consistently bridge the gap between user pain and tangible benefit earn trust, adoption and advocacy over time. 

How can Capco help

At Capco, we believe that well-designed products have the power to transform organizations and unlock meaningful value. We help financial institutions stay ahead by designing, launching and scaling products that deliver measurable impact. Our focus is on creating value, executing successfully and building for growth. 

This impact is demonstrated through Capco’s work with leading UK financial institutions. In partnership with a top-tier mortgage lender, Capco redesigned the end-to-end mortgage journey, enhanced broker and customer engagement and transformed the underwriting process.

For organizations seeking support across product innovation, growth, delivery, go-to-market strategy, or simply looking to explore product and user needs in greater depth, we offer extensive knowledge and experience to help.

References
¹ https://thefintechtimes.com/open-banking-tech-is-not-to-blame-for-yolts-demise-asserts-fintech-industry/