A framework you can operate, not just admire.
This is for people who have to deliver the maximum amount of value to a market with the least amount of risk. It is not for anyone looking for a canvas to fill in on a slow afternoon and call it a strategy.
The Value Proposition Formula
Every strategy deck, every innovation project, every pitch has a hollow spot in the middle where the value is supposed to be. This is the piece that fills it, the part almost every other framework quietly leaves out.
Miss it, and a brilliant product can still add up to nothing. Get it right, and everything downstream finally has a center to point at.
Not one thing. A system of building blocks.
Tap through the pieces a full value strategy has to tackle, and watch how each one depends on the others.
Interactive · The building blocks
1/10 explored
Who it is for, and who it is not
Premise
The declaration of validity. Without it you are irrelevant, speaking to everyone and landing with no one.
A value proposition is not one decision. It is all of these, locked together, and any single block left at zero puts the rest at risk.
Premise · Promise · Proof
The 3P of Value
The three Ps missing from the marketing alphabet, arranged as a contract.
Marketing has a jungle of Ps, from Kotler's four to every consultant's later additions, all of them centered on the product. In all that abundance, nobody takes care of the most important thing: the promise.
The thirty-second diagnostic, one failure mode per missing P: no premise and you are irrelevant; no promise and you are weak; no proof and you are not trusted.
Interactive · The 30-second diagnostic
A contract with three clauses. Miss one, and it names how you fail.
You are irrelevant, weak and not trusted. Every broken value proposition fails in at least one of these three ways. Naming which is the fastest diagnosis in the book.
Source · The 3P of Value · Hoang Huynh, Value Proposition Design
Choose your arsenal by the playfield
The Three Oceans
Red needs a USP. Blue needs the whole formula. New needs the full 3P plus category design.
The most widespread strategic error is bringing blue-ocean weapons to a red-ocean war, or the reverse. The same value proposition does not work in every market, and the diagnosis is done per line of business, not per company.
The costliest mistake is misreading the ocean out of flattery. "We have no real competitors" is the most dangerous and exciting sentence in business.
Interactive · Which ocean?
0/6
1. When you lose a customer, where do they go?
2. Does the customer know how to evaluate you?
3. Is there already a budget line for what you sell?
4. How much explaining do you have to do?
5. Who names your category?
6. What is your price compared against?
Answer all six to read your ocean. Remember the most dangerous sentence in business: we have no real competitors.
Source · The Three Oceans · Hoang Huynh, extending Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne)
The shortest path to value
Value to Market
Delivering benefits by prioritizing immediate value, minimizing delays, focusing on the smartest wins.
Where the 6% goes
Value to Market is about 6% of a project, spent upstream, where every euro conditions the rest. Set how long yours takes and see what that 6% really is.
No project ships in under 3 months, and a year is the median.
Written in the discipline: principles you can reuse, test, and hand on.
Better is not different. Within a given frame, improvement produces increments; only a new frame produces leaps.
Source · Hoang's Principles, in the discipline of Ray Dalio
The four values
How the work gets done, not just what gets decided.
These are not the Core Values in the formula, which belong to your proposition. These are the ones behind the desk: the values the method itself is run with.
- 01
Defendability
Every choice has to survive the question why.
A strategy you cannot explain and defend is not a decision, it is a guess in a good suit. Defendability is what turns an opinion into a position, and it is the only thing still standing when the room turns hostile.
- 02
Attitude
Discipline is a posture before it is a process.
Being a strategist is a way of standing in front of a problem, not a list of steps. Do the work in the right way and in the right order, and strategic thinking is forced on you. The discipline comes first, and the insight follows it.
- 03
Taste for Quality
Be proud of what is well made, and keep the horror for what is not.
Taste is not decoration, it is the fastest quality check you own. Cultivating pride in things done properly, and refusing to lose the flinch at things done badly, is what stops a standard from quietly sliding.
- 04
Benefit of the Doubt
You do not have to be right. You have to decide well, and be able to defend it.
Nobody has all the information. Allies and rivals are rarely scheming against you; far more often they do not know what to do, or it is a bad day, or it is plain luck. Reading the board with curiosity instead of suspicion is how you reach the decision that is best for the whole system, not just for your corner of it.