Value models are increasingly discussed today as a means to frontload conceptual design activities in engineering design, with the final goal of reducing cost and rework associated with sub-optimal decisions made from a system perspective. However, there is no shared agreement in the research community about what a value model exactly is, how many types of value models are there, their inputoutput relationships and their usage along the engineering design process timeline. Emerging from five case studies conducted in the aerospace and in the construction equipment industry, this paper describes how to tailor the development of value models in the engineering design process. The initial descriptive study findings are summarized in the form of seven lessons learned that shall be taken into account when designing valuemodels for design decision support. From these lessons, the paper proposes a six-step framework that considers the need to update the nature and definition of value models as far as new information becomes available,moving from initial estimations based on expert judgment to detailed quantitative analysis.