What your buyer needs on one side, what you offer on the other, and where the two meet
In Week 2 you found a real problem and the person who pays to solve it. Now we turn that into an offer. Today you'll fill in the value proposition canvas, the tool businesses use to check that what they sell answers what the customer actually needs. You'll fill it with what your interviewees told you, and by the end of the lesson you'll have your canvas and one value proposition sentence that goes straight into your one-pager in Lesson 3.2.
Learning outcomes
Rate yourself now, and again at the end of the lesson.
Guess first
You're filling in the canvas for a deputy head who buys maths training for the school. Which of these three goes into the "pains" part of the customer profile?
Watch
Read · about 5 minutes
The value proposition canvas comes from the book Value Proposition Design by Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda and Smith (2014). On the right is the customer profile, with three parts. Jobs are what your buyer has to get done. Pains are what gets in the way, and what it costs them. Gains are the results they hope for. On the left is your value map, also with three parts: your products and services, the pain relievers (how your offer removes a specific pain) and the gain creators (how it produces a specific gain).
You already know who your buyer is from Lesson 2.3 and your Gate 1 problem statement, so fill the canvas for that person. Everything on the right should come from your interview log, with the initials of the person who said it. If nobody said it, write guess next to it. The authors call it fit when the left side answers the pains and gains that matter most on the right. Strategyzer, the company behind the canvas, adds that fit stays a claim until customers confirm it, which is exactly why your field quest this week is to show your offer to real buyers.
When a school leader buys, it's not because they care about pupils freezing in tests. They need a specific score, and frozen pupils don't deliver it. It's all about the results, and about teachers who'll be less overloaded and happier.
A real example
Twinkl was started in 2010 by Susie Seaton, a teacher, and her husband Jonathan, in the back bedroom of their home in Sheffield. Today it offers more than 1.5 million teacher-made and teacher-checked resources and has more than six million customers. Teachers can sign up for free and try the downloads for 30 days, and schools buy plans for their whole staff. This is how I read their offer on the canvas. It's my reading of what they show publicly, not Twinkl's own canvas.
| Canvas part | Twinkl, for a primary school teacher |
|---|---|
| Jobs | Plan and prepare lessons every week, for every subject and every level in the class |
| Pains | Evenings spent making worksheets from scratch, and material found online that isn't reliable or doesn't fit the curriculum |
| Gains | Checked material ready for tomorrow's lesson, and evenings back |
| Products and services | An online library of over 1.5 million resources, plans for whole schools |
| Pain relievers | Every resource is made and checked by teachers, so you don't have to check it yourself |
| Gain creators | Ready-to-use material for almost any topic, found in minutes |
Look at what they put forward when they describe their resources: "teacher-created and teacher-checked". That answers the reliability pain directly, in words a teacher uses. Now take a look at your own notes. What are the two biggest pains your buyers mentioned?
Choose your promises
Anderson, Narus and van Rossum (2006) looked at how companies that sell to other businesses write their value propositions, and they found three habits. Some list every benefit they can think of. Some list everything that makes them different. And the ones the authors recommend pick the one or two things that matter most to this particular customer and prove them. They call this a resonating focus.
For your canvas this means: three pains and three gains at most, and you mark the most important ones. Then you choose no more than two promises from your value map, and each promise has to answer one of the pains or gains you marked.
Your template · 15 minutes
Open your Week 2 interview notes and your Gate 1 problem statement next to this page. Start on the right with your buyer: their jobs, pains and gains, each with the initials of the person who said it, or the word guess. Mark the most important ones with the star. Then go to the left and write what you offer and how it answers those pains and gains. Choose which pain or gain each reliever and creator answers, and tick no more than two as your promises. The canvas below draws itself as you type, and everything is saved on this device for Lesson 3.2.
How to fill it in
Concentrate on three things: the job your buyer is judged on, the pains they mentioned with real emotion or real numbers, and two promises you can actually prove.
Write it as an action from their working week, the way they would put it in a meeting: "raise the maths results this year", "cut the time teachers spend preparing". Think about what they're judged on, because that's the job they'll pay for. There are also social jobs (look competent in front of the board) and emotional ones (stop worrying about exam season), so add one if somebody hinted at it.
Weak: "improve education". Strong: "get more Year 10 pupils to pass the maths exam".
Look for what costs them time, money, results or sleep. Use their words and their numbers: "half the class leaves question 6 blank" is worth more than "pupils struggle". The most common mistake is writing your product as a missing thing, like "they don't have access to a good course". That's your solution talking, so ask yourself what actually happens to them today.
Ask yourself how your buyer would tell their boss that it worked. That sentence is the gain: "the scores went up 10%", "teachers stopped complaining about preparation". Make it measurable where you can, because it'll become the outcome line on your one-pager.
Star the pains and gains that more than one person mentioned, that came with emotion ("I'm exhausted by this"), or that came with money or a deadline attached. Two or three stars in total is enough, because the stars decide which promises you choose.
Only what the buyer receives: the workshop, the number of sessions, the materials, the follow-up call. Your qualifications and your years of experience don't go here. They're proof, and you'll use them in Lesson 3.2.
Every reliever has to point to one pain, and every creator to one gain. That's why the template asks you to choose which one it answers. If something on your side doesn't point to anything on the buyer's side, take it out, however much you love it.
Choose the two that answer a starred pain or gain and that you can prove. Then ask yourself: could my competitor say exactly the same? If yes, make it more specific, with a number, a time frame or a detail only you can offer.
Before you finish, check: every note on the buyer's side has initials or "guess" · every star has something on your side answering it · your value proposition sentence is something your buyer would say out loud.
Products and services what they actually get
Pain relievers which pain it answers · ✓ promise
Gain creators which gain it creates · ✓ promise
Jobs what they have to get done
Pains what gets in the way · who said it · ★ most important
Gains the results they hope for · who said it · ★ most important
The Twinkl example is my reading of their public offer, so its notes are marked as guesses. On your own canvas, try to have initials next to most of the notes on the right.
Your checklist
Emilia's tips
Check yourself
Go deeper, only if you want to
You don't need any of this to finish the lesson. Open whatever you're curious about, or come back to it later.
Osterwalder and colleagues (2014) separate functional jobs (raise the maths results), social jobs (look competent in front of the board or the inspectors) and emotional jobs (stop worrying about the next exam season). Buyers rarely say the social and emotional ones out loud, but they often decide the purchase.
Woodruff (1997) defined customer value as the customer's own judgement of what a product does for their goals in their situation. So the value is what changes for the buyer after they use your offer, and your qualifications are only one reason they might believe it.
The canvas is a practitioner tool. It helps you organise your thinking, and it hasn't been tested the way a research instrument is tested. In a review, Payne, Frow and Eggert (2017) concluded that managers use value propositions a lot and still often get them wrong in practice. So the canvas won't tell you whether your offer will sell, but it does help you keep what people actually said apart from what you hope they'd say.
Your library
The full canvas, with exercises and many examples.
See the canvas →Where the idea of picking one or two promises comes from.
Read on hbr.org →The original canvas as a free download, if you want a big paper version for your wall.
Download it →Hover over a book to see what it is. On your phone, tap it.
Sources
Your garden
Week 3 has only three plants, so after this one you're already a third of the way through. Before you water it, scroll up and rate yourself again on the two outcomes.