Value proposition canvas: fill the customer side from interviews before the product side

A value proposition canvas is a one-page map with two halves: a customer profile (the jobs a customer is trying to get done, their pains and their gains) and a value map (your products and services, the pain relievers and the gain creators). You use it to check whether what you plan to offer matches what one specific customer group cares about. The way to make it useful is to fill the customer profile from real interviews before you write a word about your product, then rank the pains by how bad they are and design only for the top few.

Most canvases go wrong in the opposite order. The team starts with the product, then writes customer pains that the product happens to fix. (The fit is perfect. It is also fiction.)

1. Learn what goes in each of the six boxes before you write anything

Alexander Osterwalder designed the canvas at Strategyzer as a plug-in to the Business Model Canvas. In a 2012 post, when it was still called the Customer Value Map, he wrote that he set out to make a simple visual map for the jobs to be done idea. It later grew into a mix of several thinkers' approaches.

On the canvas the customer profile sits on the right and the value map on the left. Strategyzer's summary of Value Proposition Design, the book by Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos, defines the boxes this way:

Strategyzer's instruction manual adds that pains can come before, during or after the job, and that gains include anything the customer expects, wants or would be surprised by. It also asks for one idea per sticky note, so you can move things around as you learn.

Do not skip the social and emotional jobs. Benson Garner's Strategyzer post on common canvas mistakes (February 2015) says teams list mostly functional jobs because they are the easiest to see, while social and emotional pains and gains are often felt more deeply.

2. Fill the customer profile from interviews before you touch the value map

Talk to people first, then write the customer profile from what they told you about real events. Leave the value map empty until you have done at least one round.

The reason is a trap Garner describes in the same post: teams step into the exercise thinking about their offer and list only the jobs, pains and gains their product already solves. A customer profile written that way cannot surprise you, which defeats the point of drawing it.

Here is a made-up example used through the rest of this post. Dana is building ordering software for wholesale bakeries with 10 to 40 staff that supply cafes every morning. She interviews 8 production managers and asks each one about the last week that went badly. Customer interview questions covers how to ask about past events without leading. Her customer profile, written only from those notes, looks like this:

• Jobs: get tomorrow's order list final by the 2pm cutoff; plan flour and butter for the week; look reliable to cafe owners (social); stop lying awake wondering if an order was missed (emotional).
• Pains: cafes change orders by text after the cutoff; a missing line is found at the 6am delivery; orders arrive by text, voicemail and paper and get retyped into a spreadsheet; invoice disputes at month end.
• Gains: standing orders that repeat without anyone calling; knowing ingredient needs a week ahead; cafes ordering more without extra admin.

You can sketch a draft profile before interviewing. Strategyzer's manual says using the canvas early highlights what you need to learn. The tradeoff is that guesses look exactly like facts on a sticky note, so mark them. The manual suggests color coding to keep existing ideas apart from future ones, and the same trick works for guessed versus heard.

Draw one canvas per customer group. The manual says to put one value proposition and one customer segment on each map, and Garner warns that mixing payers and users in one profile hides whose needs you are looking at. If cafe owners also matter to Dana, they get their own canvas.

3. Rank the pains by how bad they are, then use frequency to break ties

Order every list in the customer profile, starting with pains, by how much each one hurts. University of Michigan course slides that walk through Osterwalder's canvas put it as ranking each pain by its intensity (very intense or very light), each job by its significance and each gain by its relevance, and noting how often each one occurs.

Rank by severity first because the pain people mention most can be the one they have learned to live with. Dana's notes, ranked:

Retyping came up in all 8 interviews, and nobody described it as more than tedious. The late changes came up in 7 and came with a story about a ruined night. If Dana ranked by count alone, she would build a better spreadsheet. (A noble product. Nobody would switch for it.)

Use the "what it cost" column to judge severity. A pain with a concrete recent cost (money, a lost customer, a 3am alarm) outranks a pain people describe in general terms. Frequency decides between two pains that hurt about the same.

4. Build the value map only for the top two or three pains and gains

Once the customer profile is ranked, fill the value map for the top of each list and stop. Strategyzer's manual says mediocre value propositions try to address every pain and gain and then often fail to deliver, while great ones focus on a limited number of pain relievers and gain creators and deliver on those exceptionally well. Garner makes the same point: the best ones focus on the jobs, pains and gains that matter most to customers.

Dana's value map, written only against her top two pains and top gain:

• Products and services: an order page for cafes; a daily packing list for the morning shift.
• Pain relievers: the order page locks at 2pm and shows each cafe the cutoff; any change after 2pm becomes a request the manager approves, so nothing changes by text; the packing list is printed from the same orders, so every line is checked before the van leaves.
• Gain creators: standing orders repeat each week until the cafe edits them.

Retyping goes away as a side effect, which is fine. Invoice disputes get nothing, on purpose. The tradeoff is real: some interviewed managers will see their pain left off the map, and a few will not buy for that reason. A product that solves everything for everyone at once usually ships late.

Now draw a line from each pain reliever to the pain it addresses. Any reliever without a line is a feature looking for a problem. Any extreme pain without a line is a gap to fix before you build.

5. Treat fit as a guess and write the test that would prove it wrong

A filled canvas with every line connected is still a claim. Strategyzer's canvas page says fit is a claim until customers confirm it, and the manual calls a great fit on paper an untested fantasy.

Test the riskiest line first, using what Osterwalder calls a Test Card (March 2015). It forces you to write down four things: what must be true, how you will test it, what you will measure and what result counts as success. Write the threshold before you run the test, or you will move it afterward.

Dana's riskiest line is "cafes will accept a 2pm lock." Her card:

1. We believe that cafes will order through a page that locks at 2pm instead of texting.
2. To verify that, we will give 5 bakeries a plain order form with a 2pm cutoff for two weeks, with Dana handling exceptions by hand.
3. And measure the share of each bakery's orders that arrive through the form, and how many changes still arrive by text after 2pm.
4. We are right if at least 3 of the 5 bakeries get 70% or more of their orders through the form by the second week.

Strategyzer's guide to asking good customer questions (Kurt Bostelaar, November 2015) makes the same point from the other side: back interviews with quick, cheap experiments that show what customers do. If the test fails, change the canvas, not the threshold. How to find product-market fit covers what to do once a group starts to stick, and customer discovery covers testing the beliefs around the canvas, such as who pays.

Short version: a test card for the scariest line, with the pass mark written down first.

Your next step

Book five interviews with people in one customer group this week, and fill in their customer profile from your notes before you write anything in the value map. Instant Expert can find people matching a description such as "production managers at wholesale bakeries that supply cafes" and send them paid invitations for a short call, and you pay only if someone books. For help with the canvas itself, start with the directory pages for product management consultants, user research experts and startup advisors.