📖 Value Proposition Design

How to create products and services customers want

2014. Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, Alan Smith

This book is a sequel to Osterwalder & Pigneur’s 2010 hit Business Model Generation. In the business model canvas at the center of that book, they lay out the nine building blocks of a business model. In this book, they take two of those building blocks and zoom in for special attention.

The Value Proposition box in the center, and the Customer Segments box on the far right are highlighted for more rigor, and given their own canvas; The Value Proposition Canvas.

The goal with this book was to switch the focus away from the business and to the customer. It aims to “make explicit” the value you are creating for your customers before looking at costs and revenue. Or in Steve Blank’s words “Product/Market fit now has its own book”.

Building on the success of the business model canvas, the authors again try to utilise a canvas for capturing customer problems and points of satisfaction (pains and gains) so that you can design and validate potential solutions.

Similar to Business Model Generation, I didn’t find the book very interesting. The canvas is excellent, and a great way to think about solving customer problems. However the beauty of it is how simple it is to pick-up, which is a shame for the rest of the book. The book’s opening chapter explains in detail each section of the canvas and how to use it. There is still 200 pages to go after that however, which I really struggled to try and get through. So in short it’s a great concept, well articulated with the canvas, and thus probably doesn’t require a whole book.

You can download the value proposition canvas for free from their website here.