Buyer Utility Map: 36-Question Diagnostic (Self-Test)

The Buyer Utility Diagnostic: Core Framework and Purpose

A Buyer Utility Map is a diagnostic tool created by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne that maps 6 buyer experience stages against 6 utility levers to expose where a product blocks or helps users. The resulting 36-cell matrix pinpoints exact operational friction across the full customer lifecycle, from initial purchase to final disposal. Evaluating every cell uncovers hidden adoption barriers and reveals opportunities for value innovation before you commit engineering resources.

A utility lever is a distinct mechanism through which a product delivers value to a user, such as boosting productivity, simplifying complex tasks, cutting operational risk, or reducing environmental impact.

[Purchase] -> [Delivery] -> [Use]
     |              |          |
[Supplements] -> [Maintain] -> [Disposal]

Most product teams suffer from stage myopia. According to a 2019 study by product analytics firm Pendo, 80% of software features are rarely or never used, which accounts for roughly $29.5 billion in wasted development spend across public software vendors. Teams pile features into the "Use" stage while ignoring the other 5 phases of customer interaction.

Evaluating products through standard backlog prioritization tools like RICE or MoSCoW overlooks post-purchase friction. A product may deliver high utility during everyday use, but cumbersome setup, brittle third-party integrations, or painful contract cancellation will drag down retention. Exploring non-functional barriers requires structured methods like user-centric product innovation and the JTBD framework for new product development.

When you audit an existing product or test an MVP concept, assess each cell in the 6×6 grid systematically:

1. Purchase: How easy is it to find, evaluate, and buy the product?
2. Delivery: What friction exists during delivery, onboarding, or initial account provisioning?
3. Use: Does the core workflow require training, heavy mental effort, or manual workarounds?
4. Supplements: What complementary tools, plugins, or services does the user need to get full value?
5. Maintenance: How much effort goes into upgrades, bug troubleshooting, or ongoing account management?
6. Disposal: Can the user export data, cancel subscriptions, or terminate service without friction?

Applying this matrix prevents expensive mistakes in product development by identifying customer pain points that code alone cannot solve. For hardware and physical goods, factoring in end-of-life recycling aligns with modern sustainable product design innovations.

Kim and Mauborgne detail in the Harvard Business Review that market leaders create new demand by systematically stripping away industry-standard friction rather than matching competitor features.

Running this diagnostic across all 36 intersections changes how you evaluate your roadmap. To execute the audit for your current product, review the 36 baseline diagnostic questions below.

Table of Contents

• The Buyer Utility Diagnostic: Core Framework and Purpose
• The 6×6 Matrix Architecture: Levers Across the Buyer Experience
• Stages 1 & 2: Diagnostic Questions for Purchase and Delivery
• Stages 3 & 4: Diagnostic Questions for Use and Supplements
• Stages 5 & 6: Diagnostic Questions for Maintenance and Disposal
• Your 36-Question Scoring Rubric and Action Prioritization Plan
• Sources & Further Reading

The 6×6 Matrix Architecture: Levers Across the Buyer Experience

A Buyer Utility Map is a 36-cell diagnostic grid developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne that tracks six stages of customer experience against six distinct value drivers to expose where an offering removes friction. Most product teams build roadmaps by looking at direct competitors. This approach creates a severe structural blind spot. In their foundational 2000 Harvard Business Review study, Kim and Mauborgne evaluated over 100 corporate initiatives and found that 89% of new product capital went toward incremental feature improvements within standard industry parameters, generating only 39% of total new revenues.

The grid forces you to evaluate customer friction across two dimensions: the six sequential stages of the buyer journey and the six utility levers that relieve pain or add value.

BUYER EXPERIENCE STAGES
(Vertical Flow)
[1. Purchase]
      ↓
[2. Delivery]
      ↓
[3. Use]
      ↓
[4. Supplements]
      ↓
[5. Maintenance]
      ↓
[6. Disposal]

The 6 Buyer Experience Stages

The customer journey starts long before onboarding and continues past product retirement. Understanding every stage is essential for effective user-centric product innovation:

1. Purchase: The friction involved in finding, evaluating, and transacting. For enterprise SaaS, this includes vendor risk assessments and 90-day procurement cycles.
2. Delivery: How quickly and easily the customer receives and sets up the product. For hardware, this means unboxing and assembly; for software, it is the initial API handshake and time-to-first-value.
3. Use: The direct operational phase of solving the core job. Friction here includes training curves, UI lag, and unexpected system timeouts.
4. Supplements: The auxiliary tools, add-ons, and connectors required to keep the product functioning. Think of power cords, separate software plugins, or third-party database connectors.
5. Maintenance: Upkeep, patching, upgrading, and troubleshooting. A consumer product might require filter replacements every 30 days; enterprise systems require version migrations.
6. Disposal: Decommissioning, archiving data, offboarding, or physical recycling. Many teams skip this, yet stringent compliance laws make data extraction a major decision factor for enterprise buyers.

The 6 Utility Levers

Each stage above interacts with six distinct levers. When paired with the JTBD framework for new product development, these levers isolate why customers switch away from established brands:

1. Customer Productivity: Helping users do more work in fewer minutes or with fewer clicks.
2. Simplicity: Removing mental overhead, jargon, and multi-step configurations.
3. Convenience: Making the product accessible anywhere, anytime, without logistical friction.
4. Risk Reduction: Limiting financial, reputational, physical, or data-security exposure.
5. Fun & Image: Elevating the emotional status, delight, or brand association of the user.
6. Environmental Friendliness: Reducing waste, energy draw, and resource consumption.

The Clustering Trap: Where Competitors Hide

When you plot an entire category on this 36-space grid, an obvious pattern emerges. Competitors obsessively pile into two or three cells—usually Use × Customer Productivity or Purchase × Convenience.

For example, when Intuit launched Quicken in 1984, the 42 existing personal finance software packages all competed on advanced accounting calculations (Use × Customer Productivity). Intuit discovered that 70% of households did not balance their checkbooks because the existing tools were too complex. By shifting focus to Use × Simplicity (replicating a physical checkbook on screen), Quicken captured 70% of the market within 5 years.

Targeting standard battlegrounds is one of the classic mistakes in product development. If your competitors spend $10M optimizing core utility, you can often bypass them entirely by fixing a neglected stage like Supplements or Disposal. Use the workspace template below to run this 36-cell audit with your product team in your next strategy session.

BUYER UTILITY MAP: 36-CELL DIAGNOSTIC WORKSHOP

PRODUCT NAME: [Insert Product Name]
TARGET SEGMENT: [Insert Target Customer Persona]
PRIMARY COMPETITOR BENCHMARK: [Insert 1-2 Direct Competitors]

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Review each cell below with Engineering, Sales, and Design.
2. Mark 'C' where competitors currently concentrate their messaging and R&D.
3. Mark 'X' where your product provides a clear, defensible utility advantage.
4. Highlight empty cells where high customer friction exists with zero market solutions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STAGE 1: PURCHASE
- Customer Productivity: [Can buyers find and evaluate in <10 minutes? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Is pricing and terms understandable on one page? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Can payment/procurement happen anywhere instantly? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Is there a clear money-back guarantee or pilot? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Does buying this product confer status? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Is the sales process paperless/low-carbon? Notes: _____]

STAGE 2: DELIVERY
- Customer Productivity: [Does setup take under 15 minutes? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Can a non-technical user unbox/install without support? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Is delivery available immediately on demand? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Are there automated setup validation checks? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Is the unboxing/onboarding experience memorable? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Is packaging 100% recyclable or zero-waste? Notes: _____]

STAGE 3: USE
- Customer Productivity: [Does it cut task execution time by 50%+? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Does it require zero user manual or training? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Can it be used across all devices/environments? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Are user errors automatically prevented or undone? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Do users enjoy using the interface daily? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Does product operation consume minimal power/data? Notes: _____]

STAGE 4: SUPPLEMENTS
- Customer Productivity: [Does it work natively without third-party plugins? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Are all required add-ons included out of the box? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Can users find and install add-ons with one click? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Are third-party dependencies vetted and secure? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Do ecosystems/integrations elevate product quality? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Do accessories avoid extra battery/plastic waste? Notes: _____]

STAGE 5: MAINTENANCE
- Customer Productivity: [Are updates pushed in the background with zero downtime? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Can common issues be fixed with single-click diagnostics? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Is support available 24/7 inside the product workflow? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Does scheduled maintenance guarantee 99.9%+ reliability? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Does maintenance improve speed and unlock new perks? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Can components be repaired rather than replaced? Notes: _____]

STAGE 6: DISPOSAL
- Customer Productivity: [Can all customer data be exported in one standard format? Notes: _____]
- Simplicity: [Is account cancellation or hardware return one step? Notes: _____]
- Convenience: [Does the vendor manage physical pickup or asset wipe? Notes: _____]
- Risk Reduction: [Is data completely purged per privacy compliance? Notes: _____]
- Fun & Image: [Does offboarding leave a positive lasting brand impression? Notes: _____]
- Environmental Friendliness: [Are retired hardware units fully recycled? Notes: _____]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SYNTHESIS & ACTION ITEMS:
- Competitor Cluster Cells (Red Oceans): [List coordinates, e.g., Use x Productivity]
- Our Current Differentiators: [List coordinates, e.g., Delivery x Simplicity]
- High-Potential White Spaces to Capture: [List top 2 unaddressed cells]
- Immediate Feature to Kill or De-prioritize: [Insert feature name]

To run this diagnostic effectively, you need a precise scoring rubric across all 36 questions to separate actual competitive moats from superficial feature polish.

Stages 1 & 2: Diagnostic Questions for Purchase and Delivery

A Buyer Utility Map is a strategic matrix developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Blue Ocean Strategy that plots six stages of the customer experience against six distinct utility levers to locate hidden friction.

Before a buyer touches your core product features, they must survive two critical hurdles: buying it and receiving it. If your sales funnel leaks or your onboarding takes three weeks, your product's core value does not matter. Use the following twelve diagnostic questions to audit these two stages against the six utility levers: Customer Productivity, Simplicity, Convenience, Risk Reduction, Fun & Image, and Environmental Friendliness.

Purchase Stage
  |
  v
Delivery Stage
  |
  v
Use & Beyond

Stage 1: The Purchase Stage (Questions 1–6)

The purchase stage begins the moment a buyer realizes they have a problem and ends when the financial transaction clears. According to Baymard Institute's 2024 checkout benchmark study across 49 large e-commerce sites, the average cart abandonment rate sits at 70.19%, with 22% of buyers abandoning orders directly due to overly complicated checkout processes.

• Q1 (Customer Productivity): How many minutes does a prospect spend searching for pricing and specifications before finding a definitive answer? If finding the true price requires booking a 30-minute discovery call with a sales representative, productivity friction is actively costing you deals.
• Q2 (Simplicity): Can a buyer execute a contract or check out without legal, technical, or procurement translation? If your terms of service or pricing tiers require more than one reading to comprehend, you introduce cognitive overload.
• Q3 (Convenience): Is your purchase process available on the buyer's preferred channel at any hour? Requiring enterprise buyers to print, sign, and scan PDFs instead of using DocuSign introduces unnecessary purchase delays.
• Q4 (Risk Reduction): Does your checkout process provide transparent security credentials, money-back guarantees, and clear pilot terms? Gartner research reveals that 77% of B2B buyers state their latest purchase was very complex or difficult, largely because evaluating vendor risk requires consensus across an average of 6 to 10 decision-makers.
• Q5 (Fun & Image): Does acquiring your solution make the procurement champion look capable and forward-thinking to their executive team? In B2B environments, buyers favor solutions that protect their internal professional reputation. Applying User-Centric Product Innovation principles early in the purchase process ensures your buyer feels validated immediately after signing.
• Q6 (Environmental Friendliness): Does the purchasing mechanism eliminate paper, physical billing waste, and redundant hardware orders? Digital billing and paperless contracting eliminate operational waste while meeting corporate ESG standards. Applying Sustainable Product Development Strategies at this stage prevents commercial friction with eco-conscious procurement teams.

Stage 2: The Delivery Stage (Questions 7–12)

Delivery encompasses everything that happens between payment confirmation and first value delivery. For a SaaS platform, this means provisioning accounts, configuring APIs, and initial login. For a physical device, it includes warehousing, shipping logistics, and box unboxing.

Payment Confirmed
      |
      v
Logistics / Provisioning
      |
      v
Setup & First Value

• Q7 (Customer Productivity): How many days elapse between purchase and the customer's first operational use? In enterprise software implementations, cutting time-to-first-value from 45 days to 7 days directly protects your new product success rate by halting early buyer remorse.
• Q8 (Simplicity): Can an end user complete initial setup without reading technical documentation or scheduling professional services? If onboarding requires deep manual configuration, you have built unneeded friction into your setup workflow. Framing customer onboarding around the JTBD Framework for New Product Development helps eliminate superfluous steps that distract from the user's primary objective.
• Q9 (Convenience): Are physical items delivered directly to the point of use, or digital credentials provisioned instantly to single sign-on (SSO) systems? If a team has to wait 72 hours for an IT administrator to manually grant license keys, the delivery fails the convenience test.
• Q10 (Risk Reduction): Does the delivery process include automated fallbacks, data migration sandboxes, and verification checks? Data migration errors during initial implementation cause 34% of early-stage SaaS churn, making clear rollback procedures essential. Neglecting onboarding safety protocols is one of the most common mistakes in product development.
• Q11 (Fun & Image): Does the delivery or unboxing moment provide immediate positive reinforcement? Apple revolutionized packaging by designing custom physical unboxing tolerances that build anticipation, while consumer apps rely on instant celebration animations upon profile completion.
• Q12 (Environmental Friendliness): Does your product delivery minimize transit carbon footprint, excess foam packaging, or redundant physical collateral? Companies that switch from heavy molded plastics to 100% post-consumer corrugated paperboard often trim packaging material costs by 15% while reducing shipping freight weight. Using The Power of Questioning in Innovation allows supply chain teams to rethink material choices without compromising item protection.

Once you uncover where your product stalls during purchase and delivery, the next step is assessing how customers actually interact with your core features day to day.

Stages 3 & 4: Diagnostic Questions for Use and Supplements

Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort and working memory capacity required for a person to complete a specific task within an interface or operational workflow. When cognitive load spikes, adoption collapses.

In W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy, the Use and Supplements stages represent the functional core of customer experience. If your product fails here, no amount of clever marketing can save your retention metrics.

Stage 3: Diagnosing the Use Stage (Q13–Q18)

The Use stage evaluates what happens when a customer attempts to extract direct value from your core product during normal daily operations. High operational friction here turns standard workflows into expensive churn risks.

Use these 6 diagnostic questions to evaluate your Use utility:

• Q13 (Workflow Efficiency): Can an operator complete the primary high-frequency task in under 3 clicks or 30 seconds without navigating away from the active screen?
• Q14 (Cognitive Load): Does the interface demand memorization of codes, manual status tracking, or mental math between distinct screen views?
• Q15 (Training Footprint): Can a new hire achieve baseline competence in under 45 minutes without reading external PDF documentation or attending instructor-led onboarding sessions?
• Q16 (Error Recovery): When an input error occurs, does the system prevent irreversible data loss and present a 1-click remediation path?
• Q17 (Ergonomics and Flow): Does prolonged operation across an 8-hour shift cause measurable physical strain, eye fatigue, or repetitive stress complaints?
• Q18 (Baseline Delight): Does the product eliminate at least 2 manual data-entry steps present in incumbent legacy solutions?

According to benchmark research by the Nielsen Norman Group, user task success rates decline by 22% for every additional decision step added to a standard business workflow. Applying User-Centric Product Innovation principles during this stage forces your engineering team to strip out unused secondary controls.

      USER WORKFLOW FRICTION AUDIT
      
           [Primary Trigger]
                  |
                  v
         [Count Screen Steps]
                  |
         +--------+--------+
         |                 |
     > 3 Steps         <= 3 Steps
         |                 |
         v                 v
   [High Effort]    [Optimal Flow]
         |                 |
         v                 v
   Log Friction     Measure Speed

Stage 4: Diagnosing the Supplements Stage (Q19–Q24)

Supplements encompass the complementary products, services, hardware adapters, and software connectors required to make your core offering fully operational. Neglecting this stage traps users in brittle ecosystems that drive up total cost of ownership.

Interoperability is the technical capability of different software applications, operating environments, or hardware systems to exchange and interpret shared data without manual translation layers.

A 2023 market analysis by Gartner revealed that enterprise teams spend an average of $18,000 per employee annually managing fragmented software add-ons and manual data bridges. You can map these dependencies directly with a Systems Thinking Canvas for Product Teams (With Template) to isolate ecosystem drag.

Evaluate your product's operational dependencies using questions Q19 through Q24:

• Q19 (Mandatory Peripherals): Does the customer need to buy third-party accessories, cables, or external licenses before your core system functions out of the box?
• Q20 (Plugin Reliability): Do routine software updates in upstream partner platforms break your core integration workflows more than once per quarter?
• Q21 (Data Portability): Can an administrator extract all raw customer data via standard API calls within 5 minutes without opening a vendor support ticket?
• Q22 (Hidden Maintenance Costs): Does operating your solution require dedicated external consultants, custom middleware scripts, or recurring certification fees?
• Q23 (Stack Compatibility): Does your product run natively on the customer's existing operating systems, browsers, and mobile devices without custom virtualization layers?
• Q24 (Ecosystem Friction): How many separate vendor logins must a single operator maintain to execute one end-to-end task?

Pairing these checks with the JTBD Framework for New Product Development prevents your roadmap from creating accidental technical debt for your buyers.

Once you complete the Use and Supplements evaluation, you must examine how your product behaves when it breaks, ages, and gets retired in Stages 5 and 6 below.

Stages 5 & 6: Diagnostic Questions for Maintenance and Disposal

In W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy, maintenance and disposal represent the final two points where customer loyalty quietly erodes. Most product roadmaps focus on purchase and onboarding, ignoring the operational drag that hits users six months later.

A buyer utility map is a strategic framework that plots six stages of customer experience against six utility levers to identify where products create friction or unlock new value.

When maintenance demands heavy manual intervention, your total cost of ownership spikes. A study conducted by Stripe and Harris Poll revealed that software developers spend 17.3 hours every week debugging systems and managing technical debt. In physical products and enterprise software alike, unresolved maintenance issues trigger avoidable churn and expose common Mistakes in Product Development.

Maintenance Stage Diagnostic (Questions 25–Q30)

Evaluate your product against these six core utility levers during ongoing operations:

• Q25 (Customer Productivity): Does applying routine patches or product updates require zero unscheduled customer downtime?
• Q26 (Simplicity): Can internal IT staff troubleshoot common system failures in under 15 minutes without filing a tier-three vendor support ticket?
• Q27 (Convenience): Are scheduled maintenance workflows and data backups executed automatically in the background?
• Q28 (Risk Reduction): Does your deployment pipeline isolate updates so that a bug in one component never halts core client operations?
• Q29 (Fun & Image): Does your maintenance dashboard present clear diagnostic telemetry instead of obscure error codes?
• Q30 (Environmental Friendliness): Does your software infrastructure automatically scale down idle computing instances to minimize power consumption?

According to IT research from Gartner, network downtime costs organizations an average of $5,600 per minute. Designing for low-overhead maintenance keeps those operational costs off your customer's balance sheet.

+-------------------------------------------+
|        MAINTENANCE FRICTION AUDIT         |
+-------------------------------------------+
                     |
                     v
   [ 17.3 Hours Weekly Dev Drag ]
                     |
                     v
    [ Patching -> Tiers 1-3 Support ]
                     |
                     v
     [ Unplanned Client Downtime ]

Disposal Stage Diagnostic (Questions 31–Q36)

Offboarding defines the final impression your buyer retains. Research published by the Harvard Business Review indicates that acquiring a new customer costs between 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. Complicated exit paths burn bridges and destroy referral pipelines.

At the same time, hardware disposal and data destruction present serious compliance risks. Applying a Systems Thinking Canvas for Product Teams (With Template) helps identify how offboarding decisions ripple into legal and environmental liabilities. Teams that proactively Innovate Product Lifecycles Sustainably build disposal protocols directly into product architecture.

• Q31 (Customer Productivity): Can an exiting administrator extract all proprietary client data in universal formats (such as CSV or JSON) in under 24 hours?
• Q32 (Simplicity): Is account deprovisioning and contract cancellation a straightforward self-service setting within the administrative portal?
• Q33 (Convenience): Does the system automatically purge obsolete API tokens, orphan databases, and client storage buckets upon contract termination?
• Q34 (Risk Reduction): Does your offboarding protocol supply an automated, audit-ready data destruction certificate compliant with ISO 27001 standards?
• Q35 (Fun & Image): Does the cancellation workflow respect the buyer by omitting guilt-inducing prompts and artificial exit hurdles?
• Q36 (Environmental Friendliness): For physical products, do you provide a zero-cost asset buyback or component recycling program?

Adopting clear Sustainable Product Development Strategies ensures physical hardware avoids landfills while preserving scrap material value.

Once you complete scoring for all twelve maintenance and disposal questions, you will need to map these findings against your earlier lifecycle data to expose where utility blocks cluster across your product portfolio.

Your 36-Question Scoring Rubric and Action Prioritization Plan

Score each of the 36 cells in your matrix on a scale from 1 to 5.

The Buyer Utility Map is a strategic matrix developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne that plots six stages of the buyer experience cycle against six utility levers to identify where products create real value or introduce friction.

Here is the exact scoring baseline:

• 1 point (Severe Block): The stage requires high customer effort, creates anxiety, or forces workarounds.
• 2 points (Friction Zone): The experience is clunky or slower than necessary, though users complete the task.
• 3 points (Industry Parity): Meets baseline expectations. You match competitors without standing out.
• 4 points (Differentiator): Noticeably faster, simpler, or safer than standard market alternatives.
• 5 points (Blue Ocean Monopoly): Removes an entire step of friction, giving buyers a compelling reason to switch.

Your total score falls between 36 and 180 points. According to research published by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), products that solve clear utility bottlenecks during early discovery see a 32% higher commercial survival rate over three years.

SCORING MATRIX OVERVIEW
[Stage 1: Purchase]  --> Score (1-5)
[Stage 2: Delivery]  --> Score (1-5)
[Stage 3: Use]       --> Score (1-5)
[Stage 4: Supplements]--> Score (1-5)
[Stage 5: Maintenance]--> Score (1-5)
[Stage 6: Disposal]  --> Score (1-5)
Total: Sum of all 36 cells (Max: 180)

Visualizing Your Friction Heatmap

Once you total the numbers, plot the scores directly into a 6x6 grid. Apply a simple color threshold: mark cells scoring 1 to 2 in red, 3 in neutral gray, and 4 to 5 in green.

Red blocks highlight where your product leaks revenue and drives churn. Green blocks highlight where you win deals.

This diagnostic highlights the difference between real utility and surface features. If your team is struggling to diagnose user pain, combining this rubric with Design Thinking for Product Development helps root out hidden operational bottlenecks.

The 3-Step Action Roadmap: Deficits to Epics

A raw score without execution fixes nothing. Use this 3-step workflow to convert your lowest-scoring cells into actionable delivery epics within 14 business days.

STEP 1: ISOLATE DEFICITS
Find cells with scores of 1 or 2
        |
        v
STEP 2: APPLY SCAMPER / JTBD
Reframe blockers into user outcomes
        |
        v
STEP 3: SHIP AN EPIC TO JIRA
Scope 2-week validation sprint

Step 1: Isolate the Critical Two

Filter your grid for any cell scoring 1 or 2. Rank them by immediate business risk: drop-off rates in onboarding, support ticket volume, or contract cancellations. Pick the top two lowest-scoring cells. Do not attempt to fix all 36 cells at once; doing so leads to classic Mistakes in Product Development.

Step 2: Formulate the Opportunity Statement

Translate each chosen deficit into a functional outcome using the JTBD Framework for New Product Development. If your "Supplements / Convenience" cell scored a 1 because your software requires external scripts to import CSV files, frame the core problem directly: "When users import third-party data, eliminate manual formatting so they reach first-value in under 60 seconds."

For engineering roadblocks, apply TRIZ for Product Innovation to resolve technical trade-offs without bloating your software infrastructure.

Step 3: Define the Roadmap Epic

Write a scoped Epic in Jira or Linear containing three elements: the diagnostic baseline score, the target utility score, and a 2-week validation experiment. In your sprint review, measure whether user task completion time drops or net satisfaction rises before updating that cell from a 2 to a 4.

Take your top two red cells today, write their opportunity statements, and place them at the top of your next sprint planning backlog.

Sources & Further Reading

A Buyer Utility Map is a strategic diagnostic matrix that plots the six stages of a customer experience cycle against six distinct utility levers to identify where an offering creates exceptional value or severe friction.

The diagnostic foundation of this 36-question assessment originates from the research conducted by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne at the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. In their analysis of 108 business launches across 30 industries, Kim and Mauborgne documented that value innovations generated 61% of total net profits while accounting for only 14% of the launches. Applying structured utility diagnostics shifts product discovery away from iterative feature competition and toward unaddressed market demand.

To validate your diagnostic scores against established market data, reference the empirical strategy and customer discovery literature that underpins each stage of the assessment.

Featured image by Nika Benedictova on Pexels