How to fill in the Value Proposition Canvas
Match what you build to the jobs, pains, and gains your customer actually has. This guide walks every block in the recommended order — what belongs there, the questions that unlock it, and patterns from real canvases.
The Value Proposition Canvas zooms into the two blocks of the Business Model Canvas that decide everything else: the customer segment and the value proposition. It splits each into three parts and asks you to line them up.
The layout here pairs them deliberately. Products sit beside jobs, pain relievers beside pains, gain creators beside gains — because the only question that matters is whether the right-hand column is genuinely answered by the left. Anything on the left with nothing opposite it is a feature you built for yourself.
Developed by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, and Alan Smith in Value Proposition Design (2014) as a companion to the Business Model Canvas. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
Customer Jobs
What is the customer trying to get done?
The tasks customers are trying to complete, the problems they are trying to solve, and the needs they are trying to satisfy. Include functional jobs (finish the quarterly report), social jobs (look competent to my boss), and emotional jobs (stop worrying about audit season). Most teams list only functional jobs, which is why their marketing sounds like a specification.
Ask yourself
- What task are they doing when they would use us?
- What social job — how do they want to be perceived?
- What emotional job — what feeling are they chasing or avoiding?
- Which job matters most to them, not to us?
Patterns that work
- Functional jobs — the practical task being performed
- Social jobs — how the customer wants to be seen by others
- Emotional jobs — the state of mind they want to reach or escape
- Supporting jobs — buying, co-creating, and disposing of value
Pains
What annoys, blocks, or scares them?
Bad outcomes, risks, and obstacles related to the job. Rank them: a pain the customer describes as 'mildly irritating' will not fund a purchase, and one they describe as 'the reason I could not sleep last night' will. Include the risks they fear, not only the problems they have — fear of choosing wrong is one of the strongest pains in any B2B purchase.
Ask yourself
- What makes the job take too long or cost too much?
- What goes wrong today, and how often?
- What are they afraid of if they choose badly?
- Which pain is severe rather than merely annoying?
Patterns that work
- Undesired outcomes — it does not work, it looks bad, it wastes time
- Obstacles — no budget, no skills, no time to get started
- Risks — what could go wrong and how badly it would land
Gains
What outcomes would delight them?
The benefits customers want — required, expected, desired, and unexpected. The distinction is useful because required and expected gains earn you no credit for delivering them and heavy punishment for missing them, while desired and unexpected gains are where preference actually comes from.
Ask yourself
- What would make them call this a success?
- What would exceed their expectations?
- What savings — time, money, effort — would they notice?
- What would make them recommend it to a peer?
Patterns that work
- Required gains — without these the solution does not function at all
- Expected gains — assumed, unremarked when present, fatal when absent
- Desired gains — asked for if prompted; genuine differentiators
- Unexpected gains — beyond what they would have thought to ask for
Products & Services
What do you actually offer?
The list of what you offer — physical, digital, service, or financial. This is a list, not a value proposition: nothing here creates value on its own. Its only purpose is to be checked against the jobs opposite. An item with no job beside it is something you built because you wanted to.
Ask yourself
- What exactly does the customer get?
- Which item supports which job?
- What are we offering that nobody asked for?
- Is anything essential missing?
Patterns that work
- Physical — goods you manufacture or resell
- Digital — software, downloads, subscriptions
- Service — work performed on the customer's behalf
- Financial — funding, insurance, payment terms
Pain Relievers
How exactly do you remove those pains?
State how your offer eliminates or reduces each specific pain listed opposite. Be concrete and quantified wherever possible — 'reduces reconciliation from two weeks to one afternoon' is a pain reliever, 'streamlines your workflow' is a slogan. You do not need to relieve every pain; you need to relieve the severe ones convincingly.
Ask yourself
- Which named pain does this address?
- By how much — what is the before and after?
- Does this remove the pain or merely reduce it?
- Are we relieving severe pains or only trivial ones?
Patterns that work
- Quantify the relief wherever a number exists
- Map one-to-one against the pains column — unmapped items are suspect
- Relieving one severe pain beats relieving five trivial ones
Gain Creators
How do you produce the outcomes they want?
How your offer creates the gains listed opposite. Same discipline as pain relievers: each entry should point at a specific gain. When you have finished, read the two columns across. Strong fit looks like a set of clear pairings; weak fit looks like two independent lists that happen to share a page.
Ask yourself
- Which named gain does this produce?
- Does it meet a required gain or create a desired one?
- Would the customer notice this without being told?
- What do we create that nobody wanted?
Patterns that work
- Required and expected gains earn no credit — but their absence is fatal
- Desired and unexpected gains are where preference is won
- Read the columns across at the end; that reading is the actual analysis
Ready to fill yours in?
The editor carries this whole guide with it — every block has these prompts and starter notes built in. Free, no signup, autosaves in your browser.
Open the Value Proposition editor