Product Value Proposition Is About Helping Someone Recognize Pain
I’ve been thinking a lot about Product Value Proposition these days and it dawned on me that it is more about helping someone recognize value in a product by recognizing their own pain that they’ve been ignoring.
Let me explain with this running shoe analogy.
Most people wear running shoes that fit fine, but not well. I am certainly one of them. In fact, most runners run in shoes that fit fine, but not well, and most runners deal with a certain amount of discomfort at a certain level of effort. This has been going on for ages, because the pain is like a stress headache. You don’t notice it until it’s gone.
Creating a new product in a competitive space is exactly like that. It’s the daunting proposition of removing pain that everyone has but no one realizes they have it.
Sometimes it is hard to even acknowledge the existence of pain — it is so embedded in our (organizational) psyche that it’s considered normal. In fact, this lack of acknowledgement is exactly why new products face adoption challenges.
Entrepreneurs are like skilled therapists that recognize the pain through smart inquiry, but practitioners are like the skeptical patient who thinks the person sitting across them is a hack.
But magic happens as soon as the pain is plainly seen and acknowledged. But that’s for another post.
By the way, if you happen to have found the perfect running shoe — please let me know, I am in the market for a new pair.
