The Value Proposition Problem

Leonie von Elverfeldt for Fathm (June 2026)

Ask most product teams to describe their value proposition for a new product and they will hand you an elaborate slide. It will have three columns, or five bullet points, or a matrix. It will be thorough and considered, but also almost useless.

The thinking is often right, but it is a list instead of a value proposition. Often teams aren’t willing to make hard decisions about what the product really is. And the fear of commitment gets dressed up as strategy. There is often a pressure to broaden the value proposition, to make the case that this product serves multiple divisions, multiple use cases, multiple stakeholders. And so the value proposition gets written for internal approval, not for actual customers.

Value propositions have to exclude things. 

You do not find a strong value proposition by adding more. The moment you add a second thing, a third benefit, a broader audience. You will have weakened the value proposition instead of strengthening it. You find a strong value proposition by removing things until only the core remains. And it should always involve a lengthy and difficult conversation while ‘over-engineering’ every single word.

A sharp value proposition is (unfortunately) not the end of the work. It is the beginning of it. But everything that comes after, how you test it, how you price it, how you take it to different buyers, depends entirely on whether the foundation is solid. 

The next challenge of a value proposition, once created, to hold it still. You learn most efficiently when you have held something constant.

Test the value proposition across multiple buyer types, multiple contexts, multiple commercial structures. If none of them work then you have genuine evidence of a customer value problem. A real reason to go back and reconsider the core of the value proposition (and therefore possibly even the product) and try pivoting.

Change it after every difficult conversation and you will waste time confusing a bad pitch for a bad product and rebuilding something that did not need rebuilding. Every time the core shifts to chase a new customer or make a shareholder happy, you introduce a new variable and you can never be sure if the product you are creating is actually successful. You are not learning, you are just changing.

A value proposition is not a marketing exercise. It is a decision about what you are building and who it is for. Every pricing call, every sales conversation, every product trade-off eventually traces back to it. 

Say it precisely. Test it fully. Then, and only then, decide if it needs to change.