Five updates to the canvas we have been using for years.
For years we taught the Value Proposition Canvas. We ran workshops with it. We printed it on walls. We swore by it. It was the tool we reached for when a team needed to understand its customer, and it deserves the affection it has earned in our industry.
But for the last year, the more we used it, the more uncomfortable a feeling kept showing up. The canvas was the wrong way around.
The original places the customer on the right and the value proposition on the left. Western readers scan left to right. So every team, in every workshop, began with the product and worked their way back toward the customer. A canvas designed to put the customer first. A layout doing the opposite.
That was just the first thing we changed.
When we sat down with our 250+ co-creators in November to rebuild the canvas, we made five specific updates. Each one closes a gap that the original left wide open. Together they became the Value Proposition XL, and together they change what the canvas does in a workshop room.
We flipped the order
Persona is now box 1. The customer comes first, not last.
This is not just a layout decision. It is a thinking decision. Where the eye starts, the team starts. By putting the persona in box 1, we forced the conversation to begin with who, before it moves to what. The team can no longer drift into the solution before they have understood the person.
The flip is also a signal. It tells the team that the Value Proposition XL is a canvas about customers, not a canvas about products. The original layout sent the opposite signal, even though it was supposed to mean the same thing.
We made persona explicit
The original canvas assumed you had a persona. It did not give the persona a box. So the persona ended up implied, hidden in a different deck, or never properly defined at all.
Most teams we work with do not have a clear persona before they fill in the canvas. They are filling in jobs-to-be-done for a customer they have never properly defined. The same job means a different thing for a different person. A senior leader rehearsing a board presentation is doing a different job from a graduate rehearsing one, even if the surface task looks identical. Without a defined persona, the rest of the canvas inherits the fuzziness.
So we made persona explicit. Box 1 of the Value Proposition XL. Filled in before any other field. The canvas now begins where the work begins.
We added a Customer Problem Statement
This is the most consequential update. We added a new field, box 5, that did not exist on the original canvas. We call it the Customer Problem Statement, and it sits between the Pains and Gains on the left side of the Value Proposition XL and the Value Proposition on the right.
The Customer Problem Statement is the bridge between understanding the customer and designing the solution. Teams could fill in jobs, pains, and gains all day and still not be able to write one clear sentence about the problem they were solving. That sentence is where strategy lives. Without it, the team has data but no target.
The rule we use in workshops is simple. If the five people in the room cannot all write the same sentence in box 5, the team is not ready for the right side of the canvas. The Customer Problem Statement forces alignment before design begins. It is the field most teams thank us for once they have used it.
We added a Benefits box
The original canvas jumps straight from pain relievers and gain creators to products and services. That gap is where teams quietly slip from value into features. They end up describing what their product does instead of what the customer actually experiences.
So we added a Benefits box to the Value Proposition XL. It sits between the mechanisms (pain relievers and gain creators) and the deliverables (products and services). The pain reliever is the mechanism. The benefit is what the customer actually feels. Teams that sell mechanisms lose to teams that sell the experience those mechanisms create.
The Benefits box keeps the team honest. If you cannot name a benefit, you do not yet have a value proposition. You only have a product description.
We numbered every box
The original canvas was a poster. Teams filled it in randomly, jumping between fields, populating whichever box felt easiest at that moment. The output was a poster full of words with no necessary connection between them.
The Value Proposition XL is numbered, one through nine. The numbers are the order of work. Persona comes first because everything downstream depends on it. Products and services come last because they exist to enable benefits, not to define them. The numbers tell the team where to start and where to finish, and the canvas now reads like an instruction manual instead of a free-form template.
What changes in a workshop
These five updates together do more than redesign a tool. They redesign the conversation that happens around the tool.
Teams no longer ask, "What goes in this box?" They ask, "How does this lead to that?" They fill the Value Proposition XL top to bottom, in the order the numbers require. They cannot skip the Customer Problem Statement. They cannot describe products without first defining benefits. They cannot define jobs without first defining who is doing them.
The canvas becomes a thinking tool instead of a templating tool. The output is no longer a filled-in poster. The output is alignment on a chain of reasoning the entire team can defend, end to end.
Where to find the Value Proposition XL
The Value Proposition Canvas was a gift to our field. We owe it a lot. But every framework deserves its own #badversion, the harder, sharper, more honest update. The Value Proposition XL is ours.
Grab your copy of the #badversion of Augmented Collaboration, available now as a softcover and as a digital edition. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, arrives on 1 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered today.
The canvas was the wrong way around. The Value Proposition XL puts it the right way around.
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