You read the agile manifesto, you checked out the Wikipedia article on Scrum and now you’re wondering “sure but what about the details? how do I go about that?”, well here are a few pointers to consider when creating an application plan for your mobile or web development.

Find Out How to Add Value

You may be an independent developer or part of a company team that has a general idea about what sort of solution but it is always important to make sure that you have a clear idea of what your end user or customer really needs.

One solid tool to figure out which features should your project have is by doing the jobs, pains & gains trick.

This can be done either on your own, with your team or even (ideally) with your end users / target audience, here’s how to do it.

Jobs, Pains & Gains

Either by using an online tool such as Miro or in the physical world with post-it notes, create 3 columns to represent your customer job, pains & gains.

Customer job: It’s the task you your end user needs to achieve without or before the app, assuming your tool is a solution, then there is a problem you are trying to solve right?. You probably have a general idea of a problem like “import goods from other country” or “stay in a different country safely”, if that’s the case you will need to break your general problem into the steps that your customer takes to solve that problem.

For a problem such as “import goods from another country”, some examples of customer jobs would be “find a supplier”, “get a quotation” or “pay to the supplier”.

Pains: The pains are the overall inconveniences or emotional barriers that currently exist to perform the customer jobs, for our examples of importing products, some pains would be “risk of being scammed”, “current platforms only accept credit card”, or “shipping time for samples is too long”.

Gains: There are hidden potential savings in time, money or emotional endurance that would make your customers very happy, try not to think about your product yet! ask yourself “what would be a nice perk in this process?”, gains are not the consequence of solving pains (that’s something that we will do later), think of gains as that free candy that you were not expecting when you went to the restaurant, you found food (job) because you were hungry (pain), you got your meal and the cashier told you “today you get a free marshmallow with your meal”, that’s the gain.

Examples of gains for the problem of importing would be “get a reimbursement if the sample is damaged”, “compare suppliers easily”, or “find out which suppliers have available stock without having to contact them”.

Once you have that, the next step is to sort your jobs, pains & gains in order of importance/relevance to your customer.

Now it’s time to create the foundation of your application plan with the services, gain creators and pain relievers.

Services, Gain Creators & Pain Relievers

The jobs, pains & gains represent the value that your customer or end user is looking for. The services, gain creators & pain relievers represent the value that you will add to satisfy the needs of your target audience.

Services: for every job create a service, that is, a task that should be performed by an app or person that will allow the customer to have his/her job done, an example of a job for our chosen problem would be “Escrow service” to solve the need to pay a supplier by a procurer that is afraid of being scammed. This is where your app ideas start to play out and it will become the outline of your features down the road. This step will also help you to make sure that those cool ideas your team had are going to address an actual need instead of becoming a sink of time & budget since services must match jobs.

Pain Relievers: By now, you probably have an idea where things are heading, you must design pain relievers that will address the pains of your customers, in a similar way as you did with jobs & services, you must now define what features, automations or technology processes are going to solve those problems. As an example, if one of the pains for a customer is the “risk of being a victim of a scam” then a pain reliever could be a “dispute system”, there may be more than one possible pain reliever per pain, just put it in there, later you will decide which one stays and which one goes away.

Gain creators: For every chance to improve the experience for your customer you should have a way or mechanism to deliver it, that’s what gain creators are, they answer the question “how do we deliver gains?”.

Back to our gains we decided to offer a reimbursement if the sample was damaged, so maybe a way to surprise our customer is to offer “1 click reimbursement apply” with little friction or hassle.

Since your jobs, pains & gains were prioritized then your services, relievers & creators should be pre-sorted in order of relevance, but there is one last step you must follow to finish this stage of value planning: separate the must have from the nice to have.

Add a few sticky notes if needed (see picture below) and then ask yourself or your team:

• What are the bare minimum things that are absolutely necessary?
• What are the things that would be really nice to have but that if you don’t do them, the end-user would still use your application over the alternatives?

Your final result could look more or less like this:

With this step done, you’re ready to move to the next stage of your application plan, I will be addressing future stages and linking them in this article for your convenience.

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