# Value Proposition Canvas The value proposition canvas matches a customer’s jobs, pains, and gains with the product’s pain relievers and gain creators. **The question.** Which of this one segment's jobs, pains, and gains does our offer address, and how do we know they matter to them? ## When to use it - An offer is not selling, the explanation is that customers do not get it, and nobody on the team can say what the customer was trying to do when they went looking. - Several features compete for the same roadmap slot and there is no shared basis for ranking them. - You are preparing customer interviews and need to know what to ask about. - A client wants to take an existing product into a new segment and needs to see which of its claims still apply. ## When to avoid it - The client has no access to customers and plans to fill the canvas from internal opinion. The page will record the team's beliefs with great confidence. Do the research first, or label every note a hypothesis. - The question is whether the whole business works. The canvas covers one proposition for one segment, so use the Business Model Canvas for the wider question. - The sale runs through a committee whose members want different things. One canvas per role is needed, and a stakeholder-mapping method such as Miller Heiman may serve better. - The decision is about price against near-identical competitors. The canvas will not help with that. ## Overview The canvas has two halves. The customer profile records what one segment is trying to get done, what gets in the way, and what would please them. The value map records what you offer and which pains and gains it addresses. The aim is to see where the two match and where they do not, before the client spends on building or marketing. The match is a hypothesis until customers behave as though it were true. A canvas filled in at a workshop mostly records what the team believes, while one built from interviews lets you rank pains and spot features that serve nothing a customer cares about. Run one canvas per segment, and one per role where buyers and users differ. ## The profile, the map, and fit ### Customer jobs What the customer is trying to get done. Include the functional task, the social and emotional jobs around it, and the jobs involved in buying and switching. Write them in the customer's words, at a level they would recognize, and rank them. ### Pains Anything that costs the customer something while they do the job: time, money, risk, a bad feeling, or a barrier to starting. Severity matters more than the count, so rank these as well. ### Gains The outcomes the customer needs, expects, or would be pleased by. Separate what is required from what is merely welcome, because only the first group can sink an offer. ### Products and services What you offer. List everything, then check each item against the profile. An item that touches no ranked job, pain, or gain is a candidate for cutting or for a different segment. ### Pain relievers The specific ways the offer reduces or removes a pain on the profile. Write only those that match a pain the customer ranked as serious. ### Gain creators The specific ways the offer produces an outcome the customer wants. As with relievers, a gain creator that matches no ranked gain is decoration. ### Fit The match between the two halves. It is real only when customers behave as though the match is true. A fit drawn on a wall is a hypothesis, and Strategyzer's own guidance says it stays one until customers confirm it. ## What it is not - A feature list with headings. If the pain relievers are product features copied across, the profile was not written from the customer. - Proof of product-market fit. It is a structured way of stating a fit hypothesis so that it can be tested. - The Business Model Canvas. It covers one block pair in depth and says nothing about cost, channels, or partners. ## The steps 1. **Choose one segment and one job to start.** Pick a segment narrow enough that its members would recognize the same description. If buyer and user differ, start with the one whose decision matters more and draw the other later. Output: a segment statement and a first job. 2. **Build the profile from conversations.** Interview people about the last time they did the job, not about what they would like. Write each job, pain, and gain in their words and note how many interviewees raised it. Starting from a workshop gives you the team's assumptions instead. 3. **Rank what you found.** Mark the jobs that matter most, the pains that are most severe, and the gains that are most valued. Use the interview counts and the intensity people showed. Output: a profile with a top few items in each column. 4. **Fill the map against the ranked items only.** List the products and services, then the relievers and creators, each linked to a ranked pain or gain. Leave unmatched pains visible, and mark any reliever that has no ranked pain behind it. 5. **Mark the fit as asserted, heard, or observed.** For each match, record whether it is your claim, something customers said, or something you saw them do. Choose the most important unproven match and design a test: a prototype, a price conversation, or a manual version of the service. ## In practice Fourteen interviews into a project on expense software for small manufacturers, the pattern on the wall disagreed with the product deck. The team's profile said the finance manager's job was to approve expenses faster. Nine of the fourteen described a different job: making sure that nothing they approved could be queried later by an auditor with no record of why. Speed came up, but as a minor irritation. The team's best pain reliever, mobile approval, matched a pain the interviewees ranked low. The audit trail, which sat deep in the product, matched the pain they ranked highest. The team rewrote the value map around the trail, put mobile approval in the products list without a claim attached, and chose a prototype of the audit report to put in front of five of the interviewees. ## What you leave with - A customer profile for one segment, with jobs, pains, and gains ranked, and the number of interviews behind each item. - A value map that shows which pains and gains the offer addresses and which it ignores. - A short list of mismatches: serious pains with no reliever, and features that serve nothing on the profile. - One or two fit assumptions, each with a test, an owner, and a date. ## Failure points ### A profile built in a workshop The team writes what it already believes, and the page reads like evidence. Interviews held afterward tend to confirm it, because the team now knows what it is listening for. ### Pains invented to justify features The team works backward from the product. The giveaway is a canvas where every pain has a feature opposite it and none has been left unmatched. ### Everything weighted equally With no ranking, a trivial pain takes the same space as a severe one, and the offer ends up addressing the easy ones. The ranking is where the information is. ### Jobs at the wrong level A job such as grow my business gives a designer nothing to work with. A job so narrow that it describes the current tool locks in the current solution. Write at the level where the customer would describe what they were doing. ### One canvas for several people Buyer, user, and administrator are combined into one profile that matches none of them. Draw a separate profile for each role, then see where the offer helps one at the expense of another. The failures above are usually [Framing](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/your-edge/#framing): the wrong problem was chosen before this framework was applied. ## Origin The canvas was developed at Strategyzer as a closer look at two blocks of the Business Model Canvas, customer segments and value propositions, and was set out in Value Proposition Design in 2014. It draws on the jobs-to-be-done line of thinking associated with Clayton Christensen and, separately, Anthony Ulwick, in which a customer is understood by the progress they are trying to make and not by their demographics. Unlike the Business Model Canvas, which Strategyzer releases under a Creative Commons license, the Value Proposition Canvas is covered by a copyright notice. Strategyzer says you can use it freely in your own work and in client work with credit, but that putting it into software, adapting it for sale, or selling copies needs the company's permission. This note describes the parts in its own words and does not reproduce the template. ## Further reading - [The Value Proposition Canvas, official page](https://www.strategyzer.com/library/the-value-proposition-canvas). Strategyzer's page for the canvas, with the template and its current guidance on fit. The source book is Value Proposition Design (Wiley, 2014), which is paid. - [Value Proposition Design, chapter 1, Canvas](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/value-proposition-design/9781118968062/canvas.xhtml). The book's own chapter on the profile, the map, and fit, as listed on O'Reilly. Reading past the preview needs a subscription. - [Know Your Customers' Jobs to Be Done](https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done). Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan, Harvard Business Review, September 2016. The clearest short statement of the jobs idea the canvas builds on. Some access is metered. ## Related frameworks - [Business Model Canvas](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/business-model-canvas/): Covers the whole model, including channels, costs, and partners. Pick it when the question is whether the business works, not whether this offer fits this customer. - [Lean Startup](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/lean-startup/): Supplies the experiments for testing a fit hypothesis. Pick it when the canvas is drawn and the matches are still claims. - [Design Thinking](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/design-thinking/): Gives you methods for observing and prototyping with the people affected. Pick it when you need to find the profile before you can fill it in. - [Jobs to Be Done](https://usefulconsultingframeworks.com/frameworks/jobs-to-be-done/): Asks what progress the customer is hiring a product to make. Pick it when the jobs on the canvas are still shallow, and you need the circumstance and the competing solutions. Last updated October 19, 2026.