write-value-proposition

Write Value Proposition

Articulate exactly what a product does, for whom, and why it beats the alternative — in one scannable statement.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Strategyzer methodology used by Mastercard, Microsoft, and 3M for product positioning; Geoffrey Moore's positioning template is standard at B2B SaaS companies globally

Impact: Companies with clearly articulated value propositions convert prospects at 2-3x the rate of those without (MarketingExperiments, 2014); Strategyzer reports that teams using the Value Proposition Canvas cut product-market fit cycles by 30%

Why best: A value proposition is not a slogan. It is a falsifiable claim that a specific customer segment has a specific problem, your product solves it better than the named alternative, and here is the proof. Vague claims ("best in class," "all-in-one") are invisible to buyers conditioned to ignore marketing noise.

Steps

1. Identify the customer segment — be specific: not "developers" but "backend engineers deploying to Kubernetes who manage 10+ microservices"
2. Name the job-to-be-done — what is the customer trying to accomplish? Separate functional jobs (deploy code) from emotional jobs (feel confident on-call)
3. List pains and gains — pains are frustrations, risks, and obstacles; gains are desired outcomes and benefits; rank both by severity
4. Apply Moore's template — "For [segment] who [statement of need], [product name] is a [category] that [key benefit]. Unlike [alternative], our product [key differentiator]."
5. Validate against the Value Proposition Canvas — confirm your pain relievers map to real pains and your gain creators map to stated gains, not assumed ones
6. Cut to the shortest defensible claim — remove adjectives that cannot be proven; every word must earn its place
7. Test with target customers — read the statement to five people in the segment; if they do not immediately say "yes, that is my problem," revise

Rules

• Name the alternative explicitly or implicitly — "better than spreadsheets" beats "the modern solution"
• Do not use the word "solution" — it signals nothing; name the actual mechanism
• The segment must be narrow enough that someone outside it would say "this is not for me"
• Every claimed benefit must be verifiable by the customer before purchase

Examples

Weak: "The all-in-one platform for teams." Strong: "For engineering managers at Series B startups who waste 4 hours a week in incident postmortems, Incident.io is an on-call management tool that cuts mean time to resolution by 40%. Unlike PagerDuty, it integrates directly with your existing Slack workflow without a new interface to learn."

Common Mistakes

• Writing for everyone: a value proposition aimed at all buyers persuades none
• Leading with features instead of outcomes: buyers buy outcomes, not feature lists
• Omitting the alternative: without contrast, the claim has no meaning

When NOT to Use

• Do not apply this skill to internal product documentation or engineering specs where the audience already knows what the product does and needs implementation detail, not positioning language.
• Do not use this skill for brand storytelling campaigns focused on emotional identity and long-term affinity rather than purchase conversion, where a crisp rational value claim would undercut the campaign's atmospheric intent.
• Do not apply this skill when the product is still in discovery and the target segment has not been validated through customer interviews; writing a value proposition before confirming real pains produces confident-sounding fiction that misleads product decisions.