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Value Proposition Canvas

The two-sided canvas, with the fit between the customer profile and the value map made explicit.

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Start from a real example

Pick one and change it to fit. Everything stays on this device. Nothing is uploaded.

Customer jobs

0

What the customer is trying to get done, in their words. Functional, social and emotional.

    Pains

    0

    What annoys, blocks or costs them before, during and after the job.

      Gains

      0

      What a good outcome looks like to them, including what would delight rather than merely satisfy.

        Products and services

        0

        What you actually offer. The list a customer would see on a price sheet.

          Pain relievers

          0

          How your offer removes or reduces one specific pain. Pair each with the pain opposite it.

            Gain creators

            0

            How your offer produces one specific gain. Pair each with the gain opposite it.

              0 points written, 0 of them placed across 6 boxes.

              What this canvas is telling you

              • Nothing written down yet. Start with whatever you already know and sort it afterwards.

              Frequently asked questions

              The questions people actually ask about this document.

              What is the Value Proposition Canvas?
              A zoom into two blocks of the Business Model Canvas, from Alexander Osterwalder and Strategyzer. One side describes the customer: the jobs they are trying to do, the pains in the way, the gains they are after. The other describes your offer against each of those: what you sell, how it relieves a pain, how it creates a gain. The exercise is the pairing, not the six lists.
              Which side do I fill in first?
              The customer side, completely, before you write a word on the other. Done the other way round the offer silently shapes the customer profile, and you end up with jobs that your product happens to do and pains that it happens to relieve. The point of the canvas is to find out where those two do not line up, which is impossible if one was written from the other.
              What counts as a customer job?
              What they are trying to achieve, not the steps they take. Choosing a tool is a task; getting the team working the same way without a disruptive rollout is the job. Jobs are also social and emotional, and those often decide the purchase: nobody writes down that they do not want to be the person who picked the tool nobody used, and it is frequently the real constraint.
              Is a gain just the absence of a pain?
              No, and treating it as one is the most common way this canvas goes flat. A pain is friction in the job as it stands. A gain is an outcome they want, which often has nothing to do with any pain you removed. Removing six weeks of procurement is a pain reliever; a result they can show their manager is a gain. Both matter, and only one of them gets you recommended.
              When is this the wrong tool?
              When you do not have a specific customer segment. The canvas needs one profile per segment, and filling in one for users in general produces a document that is true of everyone and useful to no one. If you have three segments, you have three canvases, and the differences between them are usually the most valuable thing you find.
              How does it relate to the Business Model Canvas?
              It is the detail behind two of its nine blocks: customer segments and value propositions. The Business Model Canvas asks whether the whole model hangs together; this one asks whether the part that matters most is actually true. Most teams reach for it when the value proposition block on the larger canvas keeps coming out as a feature list.

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