Value Proposition

1. Customer jobs and pains

   What the customer is trying to get done, and what makes it hard. This comes first because a proposition written before it is a guess dressed as a decision.

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2. The offer

   The products and services, and specifically how each relieves a pain or creates a gain. The connection is the content; the list on its own is a catalogue.

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3. Differentiation

   Why this offer rather than the alternatives, including doing nothing. A proposition that would read identically over a competitor’s logo has not differentiated anything.

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4. Proof

   What makes the claim believable to someone who has not bought yet. Evidence, references, guarantees and demonstrations do more work here than adjectives.

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1. Jobs to be done

   Clayton M. Christensen and others · 2005

   People do not buy products; they hire something to make progress in a situation.

   The unit of analysis is the job and the circumstance, not the customer and their demographics. It reframes competition too: whatever else someone could hire for the same job is a competitor, however different it looks. The famous milkshake study is not the theory — it is an illustration of asking what someone was trying to get done at seven in the morning.

   Reach for it when

   When a value proposition is written as a list of features, or when segmentation by who people are has stopped explaining who buys.

   Where it stops

   Jobs are inferred from interviews and are easy to write to fit the product you already have. Nothing in the method stops you from discovering the job you hoped for.

   Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook & Taddy Hall, “Marketing Malpractice”, Harvard Business Review, 2005; Competing Against Luck, HarperBusiness, 2016.

2. The Kano model

   Noriaki Kano · 1984

   Some features delight, some merely satisfy in proportion, and some are only noticed when they are missing.

   It sorts what a product offers into categories with different relationships to satisfaction — the expected, where more brings no credit and absence brings anger; the linear, where more is straightforwardly better; and the unexpected, which delights precisely because nobody asked. Its sharpest observation is that categories decay: today’s delight becomes tomorrow’s expectation.

   Reach for it when

   When deciding what to build next and every candidate feature is being argued as equally important.

   Where it stops

   Placing a feature in a category depends on a survey with a particular question format, and the answers move with market and segment. It is a snapshot, not a property of the feature.

   Noriaki Kano et al., “Attractive Quality and Must-Be Quality”, Journal of the Japanese Society for Quality Control, 1984.

3. The value proposition canvas

   Alexander Osterwalder and colleagues · 2014

   A structured way of checking that what you offer answers something the customer actually struggles with.

   It sets what customers are trying to do, what gets in the way and what they hope for on one side, and what the product does about each on the other, then asks where the two sides genuinely meet. Its work is in the honesty of the gaps — the pains nothing addresses, and the features nobody was in pain about.

   Reach for it when

   When a proposition has been written from the inside out and needs testing against a real customer situation.

   Where it stops

   It organises what you believe about the customer. Filled in from a meeting room it will feel rigorous and be entirely wrong.

   Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda & Alan Smith, Value Proposition Design, Wiley, 2014.

4. The Lean Startup

   Eric Ries · 2011

   Also known as Build–measure–learn, Minimum viable product

   Treat a new offer as a set of assumptions to be tested cheaply, rather than a plan to be executed.

   Build the smallest thing that tests the riskiest assumption, measure what people actually do with it, learn, and either persevere or change direction. Its contribution was to name what was being risked: not money, but the time spent building something carefully before finding out whether anyone wanted it.

   Reach for it when

   Whenever a value proposition is being built out before anyone has paid for a version of it.

   Where it stops

   It suits things that can be released in pieces and measured quickly. Applied to work with long cycles, safety consequences or heavy fixed costs, minimum and viable start to fight each other.

   Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, Crown Business, 2011; building on Steve Blank’s customer development.

5. Design thinking

   Developed at IDEO and Stanford’s d.school · 2008

   Understand the person’s situation before defining the problem, and prototype the answer before committing to it.

   Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test — with the loop run more than once. What separates it from ordinary product work is the insistence that the problem statement is itself an output, arrived at after watching people rather than before. Most of its value shows up in the first two steps, which are the ones under pressure to be skipped.

   Reach for it when

   When a proposition is being designed from a solution someone already has in mind.

   Where it stops

   Widely taught and loosely practised — running a workshop with sticky notes is not the method. It also says nothing about whether the resulting idea is commercially viable.

   Tim Brown, “Design Thinking”, Harvard Business Review, 2008; developed at IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

Substitute a competitor’s name into your value proposition. If it still reads as true, the statement is describing a category rather than a company.