Most products don’t fail when you build them. They fail earlier, in the decision about what to build. This book puts some structure around that decision.

The Value Proposition Canvas looks almost too simple at first. Customer jobs, pains and gains on one side, what you offer on the other. In practice it’s a discipline that stops a team falling in love with a feature before anyone has checked it relieves a real pain.

I reach for it whenever the two sides of a project start to drift. A stakeholder wants “an AI assistant”, an engineer wants to talk vector databases, and the canvas is where I get everyone to agree on whose work we’re actually making easier, and how we’ll know it worked. Fit first, features later. It pairs well with its older sibling, Business Model Generation.