Proposition

To force the sentence that says what somebody gets, in their words, rather than what you built, in yours. Most products can describe themselves. Far fewer can describe the change they make to somebody’s day.

It is most useful just before you write anything public. A team that cannot fill this in will produce a home page, a pitch deck and a sales script that each say something slightly different, and nobody outside the room will be able to tell what the product is for.

Start on the customer side, not the product side. Write the job they are trying to do, then what makes it annoying today, then what a good day looks like. Only then move to what you offer.

The test is the join. Each thing you offer should point at a specific annoyance you wrote down, and anything that does not point at one is a feature looking for a reason. If several offerings point at the same annoyance, you have found what the product is actually for.

Teams fill the customer side with the product side in disguise. "Wants a unified dashboard" is not a job somebody is trying to do, it is your roadmap wearing their clothes. The job underneath is usually duller and more useful.

The other failure is filling it in from memory. The room genuinely believes it knows what customers find painful, and it is right about roughly half of it. Six conversations will move more lines on this canvas than six hours of discussion. If a pain cannot be traced back to somebody who said it, mark it as a guess and leave the mark visible.